Odyssey on the Newsstand

HOMER: THE ODYSSEY--A New Translation by E. V. Rieu (31 I pp.)--Penguin Books (25-c-).

The U.S. public is getting this classic job for two bits because eleven years ago a young Englishman named Allen Lane decided that the people who shopped at Woolworth's would just as soon buy good literature as bad. Penguin Books, London, which he founded, was enormously successful, at first with reprints, then with new books. Recently Lane hired Scholar Rieu to edit a series of classics in new translations. This is his first, and it is good.

William Morris' verse translation (1887) of the Odyssey came nearest to doing it poetic justice in modern English.* Well-known prose translators--Samuel Butler, S. K. Butcher, T. E. Lawrence-have put it into their own idioms, neither Homer's nor that of poetry. E. V. Rieu's is the best of the more modest prose translations intended as transparencies, making it easy for the reader to follow the Odyssey as a wondrous novel of adventure.

A new 25-c- translation of the Iliad by Rieu is also coming; so are Sophocles, Xenophon, Theocritus and Tacitus. Penguin has entrusted mystery writer Dorothy Sayers with The Divine Comedy. Turgenev, Gorki and Ibsen will also get badly needed fresh coats of English.

Penguin Books in the U.S., financially independent of English Penguins but closely tied editorially, has never come close to the sales of its two-bit rivals, Pocket Books and Bantam Books. In seven years, Pocket Books has sold 152 million books in the U.S., by a canny formula of catering to mystery-story and drugstore novel addicts, with a slim proportion of "prestige" books. Only last month Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre became the first U.S. Penguin to sell a million copies. But Penguin, along with a smattering of mysteries, has consistently put out first-rate titles (e.g., Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence; Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine; Shaw's Pygmalion, Saint Joan and Major Barbara), and neither of Penguin's rivals has ever tried to make a quick quarter sale of Greek or Roman masterpieces.

* Alexander Pope's famous and munificently rewarded translation (1725) in heroic couplets (iambic pentameter) was a polished poem, but no more an equivalent to Homeric Greek (dactylic hexameter) than a silver-headed cane is to a flight of arrows.

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