Literary places in Ithaca

Mapped

• 1962

  Pale Fire

  Vladimir Nabokov

  A 999-line poem by a New England poet comes wrapped in the mad commentary of his neighbour, who reads into it the story of a deposed king from an imaginary northern land; the real ground beneath it is Nabokov's Cornell and the town of Ithaca.

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• The Odyssey

  Homer

  A soldier ten years gone from the Trojan war spends ten more years fighting the sea to reach one small Ionian island; the poem's fixed point is real Ithaca, but the wanderings that fill it belong to a mythic Mediterranean whose stops scholars have argued over for centuries.

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