Good But Not That Good

Hillel Halkin:

But the Ionian islands meant Ithaca, and Ithaca meant The Odyssey, and The Odyssey is a book I have cherished. Several years ago I made a list of the things I most wanted to do before I died. One of them was learning Greek to read The Odyssey in the language Homer wrote it in. Poetry, not just as language heightened, but as language transformed, its particles fused into rare new elements, begins with Homer. The winedark sea! The rosyfingered dawn! No book has lovelier phrasing. How could I have been so foolish in college as to major in English, which I needed no instruction to read, when I could have been studying Greek? How not sail to Ithaca now?

Having read the book a number of times, experiencing a teacher who studied the epic poem in the original Greek, I can safely say that I don't intend on every looking at the Odyssey ever again, its place as the foundation for all other works of literature notwithstanding. And I have no hungering to retrace the steps of Odysseus either.