The Odyssey is Homer's epic of a Greek king ten years late home from Troy, with one-eyed giants and the land of the dead on the way and suitors at his door. It opens with his son, stuck in a house where strangers are eating the family's wealth. Much of the adventure is told by the hero over dinner, so the poem cares as much about storytelling and lying as about monsters.
The English behind each tap is Samuel Butler's prose, and both languages use his Roman names: Ulysses, Minerva, Jove. The 24 books are long, but Butler's winding sentences are often cut into two or three shorter Vietnamese ones. Books IX to XII, told in the first person and often gory, are among the easier stretches. Stock phrases like rosy-fingered dawn return in nearly the same words. Watch the pronouns when gods go in disguise: Telemachus says tôi or cháu to Minerva, depending on whose shape she has taken.
