iliad/odyssey

[pjssully]

Is there an abridged version of the iliad and odyssey that would still be considered high school level?

pam

[stephanier.1765]

There is an abridged version of the Fagles translation of the Iliad at Audible.com but I don't know if there is a matching book. It'd be nice to have both.

[MyThreeSons]

Is there an abridged version of the iliad and odyssey that would still be considered high school level?

pam

 

My son did an abridged version of both during a college summer session in June. They were in -- I think -- a Norton's Anthology of Western Literature.

[abc123mom]

MFW uses Fagles translation and I purchased the audiobooks to go along with them from Amazon. I think it will be easier for my dd to follow along while listening-that way she gets to hear all those names in the stories pronounced correctly, as well.

[flyingiguana]

One recommendation I've heard for the Iliad is to skip the book that is the list of ships and crew. It's of great interest to archaeologists and historians, but there's very little going on storywise in it.

 

I've actually found the rest of it fairly easy to read, just so long as I'm in a quiet room and take my time. I have to read slower than a novel, but there's lots of margin space to make up for it. The translation may make a big difference in readability --maybe more than an abridgement (?). But I don't know which are the more readable translations.

 

I also found that the Elizabeth Vandiver lectures on the Iliad and Odyssey make reading them a lot easier. I understood a lot more of what was going on.

 

Somewhere on Amazon, in discussing the Aeneid, someone suggested just reading books 1,2,4, and 6 of the Aeneid (I *think* those were the numbers). They claimed the rest of them were just boring battle scenes. Maybe there are similar suggestions for which books are most important (and interesting) to read of the Iliad and Odyssey. Then you wouldn't need a special abridged version.

[Corraleno]

The Essential Homer contains lightly abridged versions of Lombardo's translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The translation itself is more accessible than most, which makes it especially appropriate for high schoolers.

 

Jackie

[Hannah C.]

Imho, considering the length of the full-length Iliad and Odyssey, it might be easier to simply get the full-length copies and skip parts, perhaps using something like Sparknotes to decide what is worth reading and what isn't. Neither are especially long. I don't know of any abridged versions.

[Moira in MA]

The Derek Jacobi recording of the Fagles translation of the Iliad is abridged -- sections are omitted with a different narrator sumarizing the content of the omitted lines.

 

dd is using this and reading the omitted sections herself. But I'm sure you could use it as is.

 

hth

~Moira

[bugs]

Somewhere on Amazon, in discussing the Aeneid, someone suggested just reading books 1,2,4, and 6 of the Aeneid (I *think* those were the numbers). They claimed the rest of them were just boring battle scenes.

 

"Boring battle scenes"?! I doubt it :lol:!

[flyingiguana]

"Boring battle scenes"?! I doubt it :lol:!

 

I haven't read the Aeneid, but I did read the battle scenes in The Iliad. They did tend to go on and on, but battle scenes in the Iliad aren't like battle scenes in modern books/film. For one thing, everyone stops to consider whether they know each other, or know their relatives, or if any of their relatives have ever hosted any of the other's relatives, because then they can't fight each other and they'll have to move on to someone else.

 

It's rather different than just firing into the nearby trenches or dropping something lethal out of a plane.

 

However, if one is interested in having a shorter version, the battles do tend to get a little repetitive and it might make sense to cut a few of them out. However, a summary of who killed who might still be useful in making sense of the rest of the work.

[Guest Carolyn Atwood]

To help High School kids understand the Iliad and the Odyssey, there is a good simplified app on the Itunes and Google app store, type in Gen4web in the search bar when you are in the apps part, and it brings up all these free apps and there is an Iliad and Odyssey App, it is done by a company called MVE systems out of San Francisco.

They also have a site called Ericshs.com where you can download the two courses; it’s free and well done. The same company does computer games and they started creating educational apps.

I found it is a nice supplement for kids since it gives a good background of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, makes reading the poems simpler to understand.

[Candid]

 

My son did an abridged version of both during a college summer session in June. They were in -- I think -- a Norton's Anthology of Western Literature.

 

 

:iagree:

 

Up until now this is what Tapestry has used. The Iliad is substantially abridged while the Odyssey is only lightly abridged (it appeared to me they remove line sections that repeat other sections, what are called "set pieces.")