The classic translation of The Odyssey, now in a Noonday paperback.

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's Odyssey is the best and best-loved modern translation of the greatest of all epic poems. Since 1961, this Odyssey has sold more than two million copies, and it is the standard translation for three generations of students and poets. The Noonday Press is delighted to publish a new edition of this classic work.Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, food and drink, sensual pleasure, and mortal danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory.

Of the many translations published since World War II, only Fitzgerald's has won admiration as a great poem in English. The noted classicist D. S. Carne-Ross explains the many aspects of its artistry in his Introduction, written especially for this new edition.

The Noonday Press edition also features a map, a Glossary of Names and Places, and Fitzgerald's Postscript. Line drawings precede each book of the poem.

Winner of the Bollingen Prize

Although diplomats negotiate more and more aspects of world affairs from trade and security issues to health, human rights, and the environment we have little idea of, and even less control over, what they are doing in our name. In Independent Diplomat, Carne Ross provides a compelling account of what's wrong with contemporary diplomacy and offers a bold new vision of how it might be put right.For more than fifteen years, Ross was a British diplomat on the frontlines of numerous international crises, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Afghanistan, and the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, over which he eventually resigned from the British civil service. In 2005, he founded Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit advisory firm that offers diplomatic advice and assistance to poor, politically marginalized or inexperienced governments and political groups, including Kosovo, Somaliland, and the Polisario movement in the Western Sahara, as well as to NGOs and other international institutions.Drawing on vivid episodes from his career in Oslo, Bonn, Kabul, and at the UN Security Council, Ross reveals that many of the assumptions that laypersons and even government officials hold about the diplomatic corps are wrong. He argues passionately and persuasively that the institutions of contemporary diplomacy foreign ministries, the UN, the EU, and the like often exclude those they most affect. He exposes the very limited range of evidence upon which diplomats base their reports, and the profoundly closed and undemocratic nature of the world's diplomatic forums.As a diplomat, Ross was encouraged to see the world in a narrow way in which the power of states and interests overwhelmed or excluded more complex, sophisticated ways of understanding. As Ross demonstrates, however, the reality of diplomatic negotiations, whether at the UN or among the warlords of Afghanistan, shows different forces at play, factors ignored in reductionist descriptions and academic theories of "international relations." To cope with the complexities of today's world, diplomats must open their doors and minds to a far wider range of individuals and groups, concerns and ideas, than the current and increasingly dysfunctional system allows."

Carne Ross was a diplomat on the front line of today's most pressing issues, from Israel/Palestine to Afghanistan and Iraq , over which he resigned from the British Foreign Office. He was trained to see the world through a prism of states and interests, but the reality of his negotiations revealed very different -- more complex, and more human -- forces at play. 'Independent Diplomat' exposes this fundamental weakness of institutional diplomacy: exclusion of those most affected by its outcomes, whether at the UN, the EU or within national foreign ministries. Illustrated with vivid episodes from his career -- from New York to Kabul -- Ross offers a refreshing critique of contemporary diplomacy and of how to put it right.

GO ON - CHANGE THE WORLD! Wherever you are live in the world, few ordinary people would vote for a government that promised to lead them to war, that announced that they couldn't predict or control the world markets in any way, that declared ambivalence about pollution and global warming, that openly appeared to be corrupt and self-serving. And yet, it appears to many that these are the leaders we end up with. Vacuous promises of 'change' amount to nothing, and there seems little decent, good people can do. The world has got too big, and we can only tinker at the edges. The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing way of understanding the world of the 21st century that is a clear and easily comprehensible call to all of us - that we do matter as individuals and we can effect change. Mining the rich but little-examined histories of cosmopolitanism and anarchism, The Leaderless Revolution shows how both ideas, in combination, are relevant and necessary for the problems of today. As grass-roots movements in the Arab world rise up against corruption and injustice, and people in the West form organisations to fight against the inequalities in our societies, Carne Ross offers not only an antidote to our global crises, but a route to fulfillment and self-realisation for us all.

"It's been a long time since I've read a more interesting, informing, and inspiring book."-Bill Moyers What can we do beyond Occupy Wall Street? Political and economic systems are failing us, and it's time for citizens to create change-individually and collaboratively. In The Leaderless Revolution, Carne Ross sounds a call to action. With dramatic stories from the United States and around the world, Ross's analysis contrasts with the naive, Panglossian optimism of globalization boosters like Thomas Friedman. Uncontrolled economic volatility, perpetual insecurity, rampant inequality, and accelerating climate change are heading us into a dangerous period of prolonged crisis. Ross-a former British diplomat to Iraq who resigned over his nation's involvement in the U.S.-led invasion-draws from his own experiences to offer an empowering new vision of how we can put things right.

This book presents a sequence of six related studies of poets from classical antiquity to the present (Pindar and Sophocles at one end, Pound at the other, with Dante somewhere in the middle). This group of literary essays is framed by two more general papers showing how the texts can reach out into our society and into the lives we lead there--and can question the lives we lead. the opening paper argues for a way of reading (as rigorous as those honored in the academy but directed to different ends) that would restore to literature its old didactic function, and the final paper searches for a place where such a reading might be possible--a way of reading that would also be a way of living. Literature matters, more than it ever has before, because it is the strongest remaining witness to much that mankind has always known but is now in danger of losing. It can tell us things about human being and about nature and about "the gods" that we have forgotten. But it can do so only if we read very hard, hence the body of this book consists of close textual studies of poets old and new that will be of value even to those who are disturbed by the author's views on the role of literature today. The word "instauration" means renewal and is also intended to point to a conception of poetry as celebration. Beyond that, it means a founding, the sense Bacon had in mind when he called his program for the advancement of natural science Instauratio magna. Three and half centuries later, we may be coming to the end of the great movement at whose beginnings Bacon stood. If so, the question that faces us all is, What comes next, what new founding is possible? This books looks forward to another instauration: One to which poetic thinking will have more contribute. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

This book presents a sequence of six related studies of poets from classical antiquity to the present (Pindar and Sophocles at one end, Pound at the other, with Dante somewhere in the middle). This group of literary essays is framed by two more general papers showing how the texts can reach out into our society and into the lives we lead there--and can question the lives we lead. the opening paper argues for a way of reading (as rigorous as those honored in the academy but directed to different ends) that would restore to literature its old didactic function, and the final paper searches for a place where such a reading might be possible--a way of reading that would also be a way of living. Literature matters, more than it ever has before, because it is the strongest remaining witness to much that mankind has always known but is now in danger of losing. It can tell us things about human being and about nature and about "the gods" that we have forgotten. But it can do so only if we read very hard, hence the body of this book consists of close textual studies of poets old and new that will be of value even to those who are disturbed by the author's views on the role of literature today. The word "instauration" means renewal and is also intended to point to a conception of poetry as celebration. Beyond that, it means a founding, the sense Bacon had in mind when he called his program for the advancement of natural science Instauratio magna. Three and half centuries later, we may be coming to the end of the great movement at whose beginnings Bacon stood. If so, the question that faces us all is, What comes next, what new founding is possible? This books looks forward to another instauration: One to which poetic thinking will have more contribute. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Pindar has for centuries been the least understood and appreciated of the great classical poets, for the type of composition by which he is now chiefly represent-the ode written on commission to praise a victorious athlete-does not seem to fit our notions of what a lyric poem should be. This book by D.S. Carne-Ross sets out to recover Pindar as a vital presence in the Western tradition. Through critical discussion, comparison with more familiar poets past and present, and selective translation, Carne-Ross demonstrates the craftsmanship and beauty of a Pindaric ode. The first chapter examines the form of the victory ode-an inherited form with its required, recurrent features-and shows how, in Pindar's hands, its disparate elements compose a complex, harmonious whole. The rest of the book consists of close readings of a dozen odes illustrating different aspects of Pindar's genius and the wide range of experience that this seemingly limited genre can cover. Written to convey to the general reader the skill and power of Pindar's poetry, this book assumes no knowledge of the specialist literature. However, a number of Carne-Ross's interpretations do break fresh critical ground, and thus the book will also be of interest to scholars in the field.