A Made-Up Place: New Zealand in Young Adult Fiction Anna Jackson, Geoff Miles, Harry Ricketts, Tatjana Schaefer and Kathryn Walls Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780864736970 Chapter four of this collection of essays by five authors is called “Utopia”.…
The Magician of Hoad Margaret Mahy HarperCollins, $39.99, ISBN 9781869506872 The Magician of Hoad takes Margaret Mahy into new territory – new for her at least. Her earlier YA novels were set in the real world. A highly-coloured version of…
Homer, Odyssey: An Antipodean Translation for the Early Twenty-First Century
Brian Dawkins
Steele Roberts, $60.00,
ISBN 9781927241100
Homer’s Odyssey has been a recurring presence in the literature of our islands, from A R D Fairburn landing Odysseus on the pohutukawa-fringed beaches down to Catherine Mayo’s YA novels about the hero’s boyhood. So “an antipodean translation for the early 21st century” raises intriguing expectations: Homeric epic in the down-to-earth Kiwi vernacular of beach, bach and barbeque? A fusion of ancient Greek and Polynesian motifs, as in Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka, Vana Manasiadis’s Ithaca Island Bay Leaves or the art of Marian Maguire?