The Homeric Hymns

It is a great read; highly recommend it if you are interested in this sort of topic.

Every Pagan ought to have some Homeric Hymns just to see how our Gods were venerated in another time and place. Homer is a beautiful poet and a great inspiration for writing our own, modern poems of devotion. Too often we spent time asking for things and not enough time expressing our love and appreciation for the powers we worship. Reading this might help you find a key to opening your own door to such amazement of our Gods and Goddesses that we find inspiration to give back to them. I gave it 4 stars only because I can't relate to many of the Deities as I am Celt based.

These dynamic translations will interest both beginners and more advanced readers, whether to read these as poetry and great stories, for their importance in World Literature, or their particular relation to classical antiquity. The hymns are immensely readable in Rayor's smooth and engaging translations, and the length of the hymns, and their appeal to myth, makes them really perfect for classroom use. Readers will be fascinated with their speculations on the origins, powers, and mishaps of the gods and goddesses, and they provide a great take-off point for writing assigments, in my classes. Rayor's notes are clear, to the point, giving just enough detail for readers who want more, and signalling where we can look further. The text throughout is well-informed by recent anthropological approaches that have expanded knowledge of ancient Greek culture, evident in the valuable introduction and notes, which attend to the interrelation of literature, folklore, religion, and geography. Rayor's introduction adopts a practical-minded, functionalist approach to literary problems such as genre and authorship, describing a hymn as a poem of praise, sometimes narrative, addressed to a god, and noting the importance of oral performance in Greek culture. I took personal delight in the maps and glossary, whose easy-to-follow pronounciation guide anticipates and lays aside the uncertainties about proper names that many students find to be the greatest single obstacle to the Hymn and to classics. Casual readers will appreciate the clarity and accuracy of the language, with its fast-paced readability: the English of the hymns neither extrapolates nor subtracts from the original texts, balancing the desire for accuracy with creating a translation that is at once concise and musical. The introduction is clear and the bibliography offers a well-balanced selection of recent criticism. Of particular value are the the notes, which point to additional ancient and contemporary sources, always stressing the poems' contexts in poetic performance and religious worship in the ancient world.

The Athanassakis translation of the "Homeric Hymns" -- a somewhat disparate collection of narratives, possible opening invocations for performances of longer poems, and a mix of what seem to be actual religious documents and literary exercises -- displays both literary grace (in the verse-line translations), and scholarly explication (in the introduction, and in the accompanying notes to the individual hymns). [In his 2004 revised edition -- my review is of the original 1976 publication -- the translator continues to insist he was not aiming at producing poetry. It is indeed not formal English verse, but after decades of use I still find his translation not only readable but exceptionally attractive, and at least poetic, and not just by comparison to the old Evelyn-White translation.] The poems are described as Homer's in the manuscript tradition, in which they are offered together with hymns by historical poets, but also some attributed to the mythical Orpheus. They are in the dactylic hexameter line of the Homeric epics, which in some of them is employed as a lyric meter -- a somewhat astonishing idea to those who know the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." Athanassakis does a wonderful job of producing consistently attractive English versions, while attempting to adhere closely to the original. (I have no claims to real scholarship in this, but I once took the trouble to work through passages against the corresponding lines in a Greek text, with the help of the Liddel- & -Scott "Lexicon" and several grammars.) After a long period of neglect on the part of translators into English, this group of poems has been translated in both verse and prose a number of times in recent decades. This volume first appeared at about the same time as translations by the poet Charles Boer (extremely "modern") and by Thelma Sargent in the Norton Library (to mention those still in print). These lacked the helpful apparatus (although Sargent could probably have provided something similar). The later Shelmerdine translation, in the Focus Classical Library series, is very extensively annotated, but is aimed at readers completely unfamiliar with Greek myth and literature. (In other words, a good textbook in a world in which the "classics" have dropped out of pre-collegiate courses.) Among the crop of *very* recent translations, by Cashford (Penguin Classics, with notes by Richardson), by Crudden (Oxford World's Classics), and (in a Loeb Classical Library bilingual edition) by M.L. West) [and now (2004) Diane Rayor], the work of Athanassakis seems to me to retain its place as both attractive and useful. Although Crudden, in particular, shows the benefit of another quarter-century of scholarship, his annotations often address other issues, and his notes on some of the hymns range from slim to nothing at all. How important are the notes? To a casual reader, they are of interest only if they help to make sense of a passage at hand. Some readers, however, will be using the boo

After reading the Loeb translation of the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, I was inclined to look askance on this slim little volume by Thelma Sargent. Upon opening the cover, however, I found I had been mistaken. Not only are these verse translations of short invocations and hymns to the Greek Gods and Godesses lovely and effecting (to which I will give credit where credit is due to Homer,an unlikely but romantic notion,or whichever ancient bard had the presence of mind to create them), they manage to be quite readable as well (credit for which I am willing to divide up between said bard and Thelma Sargent). The hymns are very straightforeward, utilizing in conjunction with the familiar stories of the Gods and Godesses, imagery common to the times and people for which they were written. Taking this alone into consideration, their beauty is impressive; rather like poetry invoking a Goddess to be present in your daily coffee making and data processing. Then again, maybe not, to have survived two and a half centuries, they would have to be pretty good little poems. I found the Hymns to Demeter, Delian Apollo, and the Mother of the Gods particularly elegant. It is from some of these hymns that we get our primary source material for some of our knowledge of Greek mythology. It is interesting to me, who was weaned on English re-tellings of these same myths, to read them in, at least closer to, their origional form. They are much deeper, the language much more sweeeping, than I had ever imagined- like the Psalms or Song of Solomon. We don't often think of those well-worn myths as religious tales. The way (I guess I mean the words and rythms)in which they were written, and then translated in this edition, makes the fact that they are religious texts decidedly apparant. It was, if not mind-blowing, than at least mind-stretching and intriguing to have them presented in this way.