The Odyssey of Homer
Translated into Blank Verse by
George William Edginton
Licentiate in Medicine
With Illustrative Notes and Three Maps
in Two Volumes
London 1869

Sample from the Opening of the Poem

Book i

The Council of the gods. Minerva exhorts Telemachus.

Sing, Muse, of that deep man, who wander’d much,
When he had raz’d the walls of sacred Troy,
And many towns saw, many customs learnt,
And many griefs endur’d upon the sea;
Anxious to save his comrades and himself: 5

But them he sav’d not, though desiring it:
For through their rash deeds perish’d of that band
Those foolish men, who ate Apollo’s kine:
That god depriv’d them of return’s glad day.
Of these men, goddess, tell us too in part! 10
“The rest now, who destruction had escap’d,
Had landed safe from warfare and the sea,
But him, who long’d so much for wife and home,

Calypso, nymph divinely born, detain’d
In hollow cavern, anxious him to wed: 15
But when revolving round, that year arriv’d,
Wherein the gods design’d for him return
To Ithaca, where toils await him too,

’Midst friends so call’d: the gods all pitied him;
Neptune except, who never ceas’d to rage: 20
Towards Ulysses, ere he reach’d his home.
But he was gone to distant Æthiop men,
Th’ extreme of all men sever’d in two parts,
(Some tow’rd the setting, some the rising sun;)
Who roast a hecatomb of bulls and lambs: 25
There at this feast regal’d he: while the rest
Collected were in Jove’s Olympic halls:
The sire of gods and men discours’d to them,
Of ‘faultless shap’d Ægysthus’ thought he, whom
Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, had slain, 30
Him mindful of, he to the gods then spake,
“How much, alas! do mortals blame the gods!

Their ills from us spring, say they; but mankind
Endure griefs for their own deeds, not of fate:
As ’gainst all right, Ægysthus hath join’d with 35
Atreides’ wife, and slain that chief at home,

Conscious of ruin; we foretold it him,

For Hermes sent we, Argiphontes call’d,
To bid him not to slay him, nor to wed:
For vengeance from Orestes sure would come, 40
When reaching puberty, he sought his home:
Thus Hermes told him, but persuaded not,
Advising good;—full penalty he pays.”

REVIEW COMMENT

Edginton writes blank verse in a very plain style, with frequently awkward syntax. The result was, in the eyes of some of his contemporaries, not particularly welcome, as the following brief review notice in The Nation (1869) indicates:

Mr Edgington’s “Odyssey” meets with a cool welcome from the critics, and apparently deserves nothing better. In accordance with a theory which he holds, that in times of primitive antiquity men used unpictorial, unadorned language, Mr. Edgington employs a diction which may be called simple to baldness, and which makes one of his assailants say, that if it is by the lack of adornment that we are to judge of the antiquity of poetical works, then Mr. Edgington is “more ancient than Homer—or than Lord Derby, which would be saying something more.” That Mr. Edgington’s remarkable theory was made to fit the dimensions of his own rather than Homer’s vocabulary, even a reader who had no views on the general question might be inclinded to suspect . . . .

For the text of Volume I of Edginton’s Odyssey, use the following link: Edginton Odyssey

[List of Published English Translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey]