The Odyssey

'This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet. Daniel Mendelsohn’s rendering of Homer’s text is both highly readable and faithful to the original metre. It’s impressive, thrilling stuff... a sonorous new translation' - Edith Hall, The Telegraph

With his Odyssey, bestselling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike―a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles.

Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.

The result is the richest, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, one that fully conveys its oral poetics while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer’s work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.

Review

Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus’s heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I’ve ever read -- Edith Hall ― The Telegraph

Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties ― Deborah Roberts, Haverford College

Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement ― Rosanna Warren

The expertly crafted work of a true scholar-poet, Mendelsohn’s rich and rhythmical version hews closely to the Homeric verse-line – it feels like the original … this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic ― Richard P. Martin, Stanford University

Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule ― Sebastian Barry

His knowledge as a renowned classicist, his ear and eye for sound and image, his acuity in rendering the circuitous yet also self-arresting syntax, and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond … [a] triumph ― Jorie Graham

Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing … take[s] us deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetr ― Joyce Carol Oates

Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity... He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane ― Michael Chabon

Neither jarringly contemporary nor distractingly archaic, Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliant and necessary translation of The Odyssey is a testament to the enduring power and grace and beauty of Homer's narrative ― Francine Prose

History's greatest adventure story brought to us anew by America's greatest living classicist―this is fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment ― Lee Child

About the Author

Daniel Mendelsohn (Translator)
Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. His honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honour for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.