Anyone who has not yet dared to approach Homer because he was put off by the verse form or the ancient language of the translations at hand can experience the Iliad and the Odyssey in Karl Ferdinand Lempp's prose translation as what these oldest documents of European literature really are: captivating novels.
The complete translation by Karl Ferdinand Lempp, edited here for the first time from the estate, frees these two interrelated world books, in which the War of Wars and the Journey of All Journeys are told, from the slag that is owed to the ancient form of lecture, and intervenes cautiously in an explanatory manner if the content is not easily understood by today's readers. Without any linguistic ingratiation, Lempp presents a modern and fast-paced text that brings the wrath of Achilles and the odysseys of Odysseus as immediately before our eyes as if it had all happened only yesterday.