《书目》(Booklist)书评

Although today epic is often used to suggest the expansive, exhaustive, and possibly overblown, Tolstoy was so impressed by the economy of the father of the form that it caused him to look critically at his own vast works. The greatest strength of Fagles' Homeric translations is that they do nothing to slow the narrative. If anything, they argue that, used well, verse can move faster than prose. Musically, though, they strike the ear as a little ugly. They do not have the strange, hieratic quality (so perfect for the Iliad) of Richmond Lattimore's translation, the strange, off-center power of Alan Mandlebaum's, or the Shakespearean resonance of Robert Fitzgerald's. And some of Fagles' strategies (his italicized pronouns and very modern colloquialisms) seem obvious and contrived. Still, Fagles' Odyssey is the one to put into the hands of younger, first-time readers, not least because of its paucity of notes, which, though sometimes frustrating, is a sign that translation has been used to do the work of explanation. Altogether, an outstanding piece of work. --Stuart Whitwell