Special Collections
Grade 9-10 Common Core Text Exemplars
Description: These books exemplify the level of complexity that Common Core State Standards require students to engage with. While the choices serve to help educators select texts of similar complexity, quality, and range, this not a required reading list. #teachers
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Metamorphoses
by OvidThe first and still the best modern verse translation of the Metamorphoses, Humphries' version of Ovid's masterpiece captures its wit, merriment, and sophistication.
Everyone will enjoy this first modern translation by an American poet of Ovid's great work, the major treasury of classical mythology, which has perennially stimulated the minds of men. In this lively rendering there are no stock props of the pastoral and no literary landscaping, but real food on the table and sometimes real blood on the ground.
Not only is Ovid's Metamorphoses a collection of all the myths of the time of the Roman poet as he knew them, but the book presents at the same time a series of love poems--about the loves of men, women, and the gods. There are also poems of hate, to give the proper shading to the narrative. And pervading all is the writer's love for this earth, its people, its phenomena.
Using ten-beat, unrhymed lines in his translation, Rolfe Humphries shows a definite kinship for Ovid's swift and colloquial language and Humphries' whole poetic manner is in tune with the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 9-10 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
The Odyssey
by HomerRobert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.
"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy."
So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in The New York Times Review of Books hails as "a distinguished achievement."
If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once the timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.
In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.
Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.
This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 6-8 at http://www.corestandards.org.] .