"The Princess threw the ball, and the girl whose turn it was to catch missed it. The ball went into the river and was carried down the stream. At that they all raised a cry. It was this cry that woke up Odysseus who, covered over with leaves, was then sleeping in the shelter of the two olive trees.
He crept out from under the thicket, covering his nakedness with leafy boughs that he broke off the trees. And when he saw the girls in the meadow he wanted to go to them to beg for their help. But when they looked on him they were terribly frightened and they ran this way and that way and hid themselves. Only Nausicaa stood still, for Pallas Athene had taken fear from her mind."
From The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy** by Padraic Colum, illustrated by Willy Pogany (MacMillan, 1918) via Project Gutenberg.
Pogany also did the illustrations for the edition of The Songs of Bilitis I blogged about recently. All the drawings for the Colum book are beautiful, and I've included a couple more below. To see them all without paging through the text at Project Gutenberg, click here. Colum, by the way, is an interesting fellow. Read his Wikipedia page here.
(**If this link takes you to a catalog page at Project Gutenberg, just go to the box headed "Download this ebook for free" and click on either the "main site" or "mirror sites" links at the first HTML entry. Ignore the Plucker option.)
4 comments:
Fabulous...love those exquisite colors.
Aren't they beautiful? I think the line drawings are amazing, too.
Great entry!
BTW, the text by Padraic Colum (judging from the piece you posted) seems like a very accurate translation of the Homer original. Colour me impressed!
Helg, I'm glad you enjoyed it--and I'm so glad you mentioned being impressed with the translation. I don't have a clue about judging that, and I always wonder. It's nice to get a knowledgeable assessment.
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