The Odyssey of Homer: Translated by T.E. Lawrence
The point of comparison between these two volumes is that neither will be well received by serious classicists. There have been at least ten previous editions of Lawrence's prose translation of the Odyssey . When it was first published in 1932, Lawrence's admittedly "free" translation was criticized by many as being too fast and loose with the original text. This and the colloquialisms that bothered critics then are all the more pronounced 60 years later. Nor does Bernard Knox give any discernible reason for the reissue of the work in his preface to the volume. Billed as a rediscovery, this is just new packaging of an old translation. Believing that the topography and the meteorology of the Mediterranean does not mesh with its descriptions in the Odyssey and the Iliad , Wilkens presents a compelling argument that moves the Trojan War to Western Europe and Troy to East Anglia near Cambridge. The "Trojan War," he contends, was actually a Celtic battle that was fought hundreds of years before Homer's time and passed down to him by oral tradition. Wilkens redraws the map of the Trojan War, justifying each location with archaeological evidence or etymological analysis of place-names. The volume makes for interesting reading, albeit somewhat frustrating for one who is a Homerian by enthusiasm but not scholarship because most of the cited references are in languages other than English (this work has been translated from French). Libraries without Lawrence's translation can do without it, and only large libraries will want to consider adding Wilkens.- Marjorie F. MacKenzie, Washington State Univ. Libs., PullmanCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.