This library guide was designed by Gina Bastone, the English Librarian, specifically for E 303C: World Literatures taught by Professor Janine Barchas.
Research Help
The Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) holds many translations through time in the main stacks. (What are "the stacks"? It's the part of the library with the books and shelves!)
You have two options for finding English translations of The Odyssey:
It's easy to check out a book! Once you find the translation you like in the stacks, bring it to the PCL Check Out Desk and show the staff your UT ID card. Your ID card is your library card. Staff can answer any questions you have about borrowing books.
Odyssey, Volume I & II
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Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of the resplendent epic tale of Odysseus's long journey home from the Trojan War and the legendary temptations, delays, and perils he faced at every turn. Homer's classic poem features Odysseus's encounters with the beautiful nymph Calypso; the queenly but wily Circe; the Lotus-eaters, who fed his men their memory-stealing drug; the man-eating, one-eyed Cyclops; the Laestrygonian giants; the souls of the dead in Hades; the beguiling Sirens; the treacherous Scylla and Charybdis. Here, too, is the hero's faithful wife, Penelope, weaving a shroud by day and unraveling it by night, in order to thwart the numerous suitors attempting to take Odysseus's place. The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the Odyssey and Iliad. These texts have long stood in the Loeb Classical Library with a faithful and literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. George Dimock now brings the Loeb's Odyssey up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray's admirable style but is worded for today's readers. The two-volume edition includes a new introduction, notes, and index.
Print copies vailable at the Classics Library
Metamorphoses, Volume I & II
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Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE-17 CE), born at Sulmo, studied rhetoric and law at Rome. Later he did considerable public service there, and otherwise devoted himself to poetry and to society. Famous at first, he offended the emperor Augustus by his Ars Amatoria, and was banished because of this work and some other reason unknown to us, and dwelt in the cold and primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued writing poetry, a kindly man, leading a temperate life. He died in exile. Ovid's main surviving works are the Metamorphoses, a source of inspiration to artists and poets including Chaucer and Shakespeare; the Fasti, a poetic treatment of the Roman year of which Ovid finished only half; the Amores, love poems; the Ars Amatoria, not moral but clever and in parts beautiful; Heroides, fictitious love letters by legendary women to absent husbands; and the dismal works written in exile: the Tristia, appeals to persons including his wife and also the emperor; and similar Epistulae ex Ponto. Poetry came naturally to Ovid, who at his best is lively, graphic and lucid. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid is in six volumes.
Print copies vailable at the Classics Library
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