Читать книгу A Man in a Distant Field - Theresa Kishkan - Страница 5

Although this novel is a work of fiction, it is set in two actual places—Oyster Bay on B.C.’s Sechelt Peninsula and Delphi, in County Mayo, Ireland. I’ve tried to make the landscapes as accurate and real as possible, but the characters are products of my imagination, as are their stories, and any resemblance to those living or dead is pure coincidence.

The list of people who helped me with research and encouragement is too long to reproduce here, but I trust that they know who they are and I thank them all. Specific mention must be made of my husband and children, who provide love and good humour in necessary amounts. This book is for them. I would also like to thank Diana Davidson for reading the manuscript at a difficult time in its development and in turn her friend Gwyneth Evans for reading the passages about the harp and correcting a few errors. My editor, Barry Jowett, has been helpful but not intrusive, and I am grateful for that. And I would like to acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts and the B.C. Arts Council, whose generous support made much of the work of this novel possible.

I am not a Greek scholar but tried to figure out the kind of translation a passionate but amateur reader of the Odyssey in a late-nineteenth-century edition might come up with. I used the Loeb edition of the Odyssey as a model and the Liddell and Scott standard Greek-English lexicon as well as Cunliffe’s Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. Any mistakes of grammar and usage are mine entirely.