The Odyssey - by Homer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The most accurate and poetic translation of the world's greatest epic, which is now a film by Academy Award winner Christopher Nolan!

"This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet."--Edith Hall, The Telegraph

A magnificent feat of translation, hailed by classicists and poets alike as a "momentous achievement" "thrilling," "rich and rhythmical," "superb," "mesmerizing," "searingly faithful--yet absolutely original."

With this edition of Homer's Odyssey, the celebrated author, critic, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic to vividly poetic new life. Widely known for his essays on classical literature and culture in The New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn gives us a line-for-line rendering of The Odyssey that is both engrossing as poetry and true to its source. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, he artfully reproduces the epic's formal qualities--meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance--and in so doing restores to Homer's masterwork its archaic grandeur. Mendelsohn's expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer's dense verses without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.

The result is the richest, most ample, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, conveying the beauty of its poetry, the excitement of its hero's adventures, and the profundity of its insights. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative version of this magnificent and enduringly influential masterpiece.

Review Quotes

"Homer wrote a very long line of poetry--dactylic hexameter, with its six beats, and as many as seventeen syllables. Daniel Mendelsohn, the most recent translator of the Odyssey, preserves that scheme, writing a detailed, luxuriant, often beautiful line."

--David Denby "The New Yorker"

About the Author

Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and TheNew 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, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy's highest honor 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.