Customer Reviews:
 It's Free, Folks February 2, 2010
Terri J. Rice (WA United States)
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
This Kindle download is difficult to figure out. It begins with a very lengthy introduction by Theodore Alois Buckley, which might cause you to think you had downloaded a critique of the Odyssey and not the actual story. That is not so.
The actual translation of the Odyssey begins at 8% on the Kindle: "O Muse! resound; Who when his arms had wrougt the destined fall of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall, wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd..."
"Now at their native realms the Greeks arrived; all who the wars of ten long years survived; and scaped the perils of the gulfy main."
It is the translation by Alexander Pope and you either like his translation or you don't; there are, I believe, easier ones to understand.
Buckley says,"It would be absurd, therefore, to test Pope's translation by our own advancing knowledge of the original text. We must content to look at it as a most delightful work in itself,-- a work which is as much a part of English literature as Homer himself is of Greek."
The Kindle edition has what I consider a major problem:
There is no Table of Contents so you can not jump to a particular book which is very unfortunate because when studying the book you want to do exactly that. The fix would be to add a Bookmark every time you come to a new book so that you can easily go back and forth. But that, obviously, would mean you have to read through the whole book bookmarking as you go which is why I gave this a four star instead of five star review for this Kindle edition.
But... it is free and free is a very good price.
 Not Homer's Odyssey December 31, 2009
R. Christiansen (Hignland, UT)
8 out of 18 found this review helpful
I downloaded this thinking it was Homer's Odyssey. It is not. The title is misleading.
Not the best adaptation for the Kindle November 1, 2009
T. Simons (Columbia, SC United States)
64 out of 67 found this review helpful
This is Alexander Pope's verse translation of the Odyssey, first published in 1726, glommed into a kindle edition. It is not formatted for the Kindle and is thus very difficult to read -- instead of stanzas, it's all oddly-broken chunks that vaguely resemble paragraphs, presumably an artifact of whatever software was used to scan the original text. To add to that, it's poetry *by Alexander Pope*, and thus largely in heroic couplets, deliberately archaic even to the ear of Pope's 18th-century contemporaries, with "thou"s scattered throughout -- there's a reason that William Wordsworth thought Pope's poetry archaic and artificial.
As this is a "kindle bestseller" but there aren't any other listed reviews, I suspect a lot of people are (like myself) downloading this for their kindles because it shows up readily in a search for "Odyssey", and then getting stymied by the five-hundred-"location" introductory essay (written, as best I can tell, in the early 1800's, and thus hopelessly outdated by little things like two hundred year's worth of Homerian scholarship, Schliemann's discovery of Troy, etc.) and the near-impenetrable arrangement of the text. If anyone can find a better-formatted free-download kindle version of the Odyssey (perhaps a prose translation?) please link me to it in a comment. Thanks.
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