Books: Homer Continued

THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL (824 pp.)—Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar—Simon & Schuster ($10).

Masterpieces of literature are hard to come by and even harder to recognize. This is particularly true when they are written in verse, and when they presumably lose their pristine shine in the process of translation. It has taken 20 years for The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to reach English in hexameter from its original modern Greek. The poem has not been translated into any other language and so is virtually unknown outside its native Greece. But in it,...