Safe Refuge

My friend and colleague bought me this copy of The Illustrated Odyssey last week, and it’s amazing. Samuel Butler is the translator, and the imagery included is phenomenal. My only complaint concerns the image credits.

I find the information included in the credits extremely lacking as it doesn’t mention any of the artists, just who currently owns the originals, which isn’t helpful.

The illustrations are more than illustrations, they’re great works of art, like John Willian Waterhouses’s Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, which gets full-page treatment. If I were encountering this image for the first time, I would need to do an image search to discover the oainting’s title and creator, as that information is not disclosed in the text or credits. I’m familiar with many of the images, but I’m unfamiliar with more, so I have work to do to fully understand these illustrations— who created them? At what point in human history, and in what social and political climate? Are they symbolic beyond the text of The Odyssey? These are things I want to know, and I can usually depend on editors to provide that information. New York’s Fall River Press has failed me in correctly citing sources—who owns the images now is far less important to me than who created when and where. Simply knowing that an image is in a private collection is insufficient.

This morning, I returned to The Odyssey, as I often do in times of trouble, as I see it as a guide to navigating life’s journey and all of the obstacles and hardships along the way. And I hit a roadblock with the images. Admittedly, it’s an obstacle I can navigate, but I expect editors to do the heavy lifting instead of the reader.

This isn’t a book review, it’s just one writer talking about one edition of one of the cornerstones of the canon. Rather than add an additional three hundred words to put this in Book Club, I am choosing the Writers community. I have images to look up and notes to write about them. If you simply want an edition of The Odyssey with stunning imagery, I highly recommend this edition. If you seek full documentation of sources, you may want to forgo this one—there’s work to do for readers who seek the origins of the images.