It was perhaps inevitable that the critic, editor, classicist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn would take on a translation of the Odyssey. After all, he has already written a book (in part) about it, An Odyssey, A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017). In that volume, as Mendelsohn is preparing to teach a semester-long seminar on the poem to undergraduates at Bard College, his irascible elderly father decides to enrol. Afterwards, Mendelsohn fils and père take an Odyssey-themed cruise in the Mediterranean, culminating in Ithaca. The resulting insights – into fathers and sons, life’s journey, long marriages, circling and returns – make both a moving memoir and an unusual commentary on the poem. It’s an experience of the ancient epic as a son and a teacher, as Telemachus and Mentor (the son’s guardian while Odysseus was away).
An Odyssey opens by quoting Aristotle’s précis of the epic:
The plot of the Odyssey is not long in the telling. A man has been away from home for many years. Poseidon is always on the watch for him; he is all alone. As for the situation at home, his goods are being laid waste by the Suitors, who plot against his son. After a storm-tossed journey, he returns home, where he reveals himself, destroys his enemies, and is saved. (Poetics, Mendelsohn’s translation.)
Like Uberto Pasolini, whose recent film version of the Odyssey was titled The Return, Aristotle and Mendelsohn understand that the poem’s narrative is, strictly speaking, about the homecoming – with the tall tales of cannibals and one-eyed giants, transmogrifying witches, ghosts and sea monsters, relegated to stories within stories and spun by the ultimate unreliable narrator, Odysseus. (As he is the lone survivor, none of his companions can gainsay him).
The Odyssey has, of course, been translated scores of times, into verse and prose, for radio, and onto the small and large screens. George Chapman (of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” fame) was the first to translate it into English (published c.1614), and had perhaps the best excuse, claiming in a poem that the shade of Homer had possessed and inspired him. In a blurb for the ages, Homer’s ghost tells him:
. . . and thou didst inherit
My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit;
And I, invisible, went prompting thee,
To those faire greenes, where thou didst English me.
Alexander Pope published his version to capitalize on the huge financial success of his Iliad. (The great classicist Richard Bentley famously remarked of his translation: “It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer”.) By the time Pope got around to the Odyssey, however, he was tired of turning the Greek into his trademark slick heroic couplets, and outsourced half the poem to two other translators.
Others have had other reasons to translate the Odyssey. T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) was commissioned to do a translation for the fine book designer Bruce Rogers in 1928. His version, in prose (in keeping with his view of the Odyssey as “Europe’s first novel”), had the benefit of Lawrence’s peculiar qualifications. He had, he explained to Rogers, special insights into its Bronze Age world:
I have handled their weapons, armour, utensils of those times, explored their homes, planned their cities. I have hunted wild boars and watched wild lions, sailed the Aegean (and sailed ships), bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men.
E. V. Rieu’s crisp prose rendering, which he began in London during the Blitz (distracting his wife and daughter with episodes from it in the evening as bombs rained down), launched Penguin Classics in 1946. (The Odyssey evidently remains something of a talisman for the publishing house, which now offers at least three versions.) Rieu wanted to be accessible in plain English to a reader without any background in Greek or the ancient world. (It is perhaps no coincidence that it was published at the same time as George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”.) It resonated with a generation that had just returned from war or kept the home fires burning, and was a bestseller.
No heavyweight modern verse Odyssey contender would appear until 1961, when Robert Fitzgerald approached Richmond Lattimore, who had published a verse Iliad in 1951, to ask if he was planning to do the sequel. (He wasn’t, but in the end, after a falling out, both poets translated both poems.) In the US especially, classics were increasingly taught in translation. Adopted as a textbook, a translation could be a lucrative prospect.
Emily Wilson, the first woman to turn the Odyssey into English (Caroline Alexander had produced an Iliad in 2015), found that her publication coincided with the eruption of “MeToo” in 2017, colouring its reception. Wilson had made a point of calling a slave a slave (rather than a serving maid), a rape a rape. Refusing to “other” some of the peoples Odysseus encounters on his wanderings as savages, Wilson describes the huge, one-eyed, man-eating Cyclopes, for instance, as “high-minded … mavericks” rather than outrageous scofflaws. The translation was praised for its swiftness and clean lines, and (in some quarters) was controversial for its contemporary register and supposed “wokeness”.
If this all seems a roundabout way of getting to Mendelsohn’s translation, “roundabout”, as in deviousness and delay, is his keystone in the poem’s opening line. “Man” (andra) is the first word of the poem, as “supernatural wrath” (mênin) is the first word in the Iliad, tuning us to the human, even domestic scale of this poem, unlike the Iliad’s cosmic conflict of gods and heroes. That man is described as “polytropos”, shifting and much turning, or much turned about – a tricky word for a tricky man. Wilson’s “complicated” (“Tell me about a complicated man”) emphasized the internal twists of Odysseus’s multifarious mind. Mendelsohn’s verse takes a different tack, with an expansive opening:
Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander …
In a typical move, Mendelsohn’s enjambement is meant to apply “roundabout ways” both to the unnamed man and to his wanderings.
Mendelsohn makes it clear in his introduction that his translation is at least in part a reaction to Wilson’s, including in its verse form. Like many English translators, ever since Chapman, she exchanged the unrhymed stretchy hexameter (in six feet) of the Greek for a brisker iambic pentameter in five feet. Mendelsohn imitates the Greek more closely by hewing to a hexameter, taking care to retain the cantering bounce to the rhythm (to counter the usual complaint that, in English, hexameter is too “sluggish”), if tending to the anapestic rather than the dactylic. His choice is part of a programme of high fidelity to the original: going line for line, with verbatim repetition of formulae, imitation of sound effects and preservation, where English permits (and maybe once or twice where it does not), of the Greek word order.
To quote Matthew Arnold, though, in his comments on two competing Victorian translations that have since faded from view: “Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s ‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists.” In his lectures “On Translating Homer” (1860), Arnold listed Homer’s essential qualities:
that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.
These lectures were notable at the time for their being delivered in English instead of Latin; Arnold was the first Oxford Professor of Poetry to profess in his native tongue. Almost inevitably, he suggests, the translator of Homer is going to sacrifice one of these at the expense of the others: Chapman had rapidity, but not nobility; Pope nobility, but not plainness and directness of ideas.
Not everyone holds with these tenets. Wilson, in line with Rieu and Lawrence, has protested that nobleness is not an essential. The Odyssey, with its stinks and stenches, its pigsties and drugged dinner parties, its beggars and bards, its seaside laundry and volleyball, its felicitous sneeze, its epic simile of grilling sausages, is not so high-flown as the Iliad. But it does share with the Iliad a poetic register, an amalgam of dialects, never spoken, but that, for its ancient audience, meant “poetry” with a capital Pi.
Mendelsohn aims to observe the nobility, employing a register of diction that allows for some elevated language and the odd archaism. If he compromises on one of the Arnoldian tenets, it is rapidity. His long lines, though they skip along on their own terms, invite slow reading, and the decision to capitalize the start of each (an English verse convention, but not a Greek one) contributes to this effect. Because Greek words are often polysyllabic, a seventeen-syllable line might consist of only a handful. English, with its Anglo-Saxon roots, leans to the monosyllabic. To fill out his hexameter, Mendelsohn occasionally has twice or thrice as many English words as the original. (“To catch sight of the smoke of the fires of home as it leaps in the air” is, in the original, only five words long.) Yet this is also an opportunity. The single word “xeine” – “stranger”, but also “guest,” as strangers fell under the protection of Zeus, the god of hospitality – is amplified by Mendelsohn as “stranger and friend”. Likewise, when we meet Penelope in the first book, her son, a tetchy twenty-year-old Telemachus, dismisses his astonished mother with the following words:
So now go back to your rooms and see to the work you’ve got there –
The loom, tall like a mast, and the spindle – and order your maids
To weave their work back and forth.
“Tall like a mast” isn’t in the Greek. Yet “istos”, which properly means anything stood upright, can refer to looms or masts, depending on context. This, arguably, is less padding than illuminating nudge, reminding the reader (as the Greek does) of Penelope’s and Odysseus’ simultaneous plying of a sea of troubles.
Mendelsohn also uses the roominess of the line to retain all the epithets, and sometimes to unpack them. These formulae, often compound adjectives, tend to fall in the same place in the line and tend to be coupled with a particular noun: the “wine-dark sea” (an indelible expression introduced into English versions of Homer by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang’s Victorian prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey), “rosy-fingered dawn” (ditto), “Poseidon earth-shaker”, “winged words”, “prudent Penelope”, “immortal Night”, and so on. Occasionally, they appear to be little more than metrical filler from an oral tradition, as in “curved fishhooks” (aren’t hooks by definition curved?), or “single-hoofed” (as opposed to cloven-footed) horses.
In his introduction, Mendelsohn argues for strict repetition in the translation of such formulaic phrases in the Greek, rather than jazzy multifaceted variations. “Rosy-fingered Dawn” (“rosy”, Mendelsohn declares, is too “Edwardian” – though elsewhere he doesn’t mind the Hardyish “twain” or the Housmanian “lad”) becomes Dawn “with her fingertips of rose”. The “wine-dark sea” is trickier. The meaning of the Greek oinopa ponton (which sounds like waves slapping a prow) is less certain: drunken-faced? Burgundy? Mendelsohn opts for “the sea whose face is the color of wine”. It’s less purple than “wine-dark”, but more straightforwardly literal. His bent for the didactic, to spell out, even when it comes to ambiguities, can sometimes lead to phrases that are not “eminently plain and direct”. Aigisthus, who seduces Agamemnon’s wife, then murders him, is described by Homer as “blameless”, a common epithet for a nobleman – the “most controversial single word” in the poem, according to Mendelsohn’s extensive note. What can it mean here, if anything? Is it ironic? Ancient and modern commentators on the poem have tied themselves in knots. His solution, “a man who was not one to blame,” is clarified by his note, but can remain puzzling on the page. (Compare Wilson’s neutral and inconspicuous “well-born”.)
When epithets are consistently unfurled into phrases and clauses, they can slow down the poem’s momentum (the single Greek word euryporoio, “broad-wayed”, for example, becomes the “open [sea], whose routes are widely travelled”), especially if they start piling up. But sometimes this kind of expansion captures sound effects and wordplay. The Odyssey, a self-conscious sequel, delights in puns more than its predecessor. Odysseus’ name is related to the Greek verb for hate/rage – “Yet you now find Odysseus odious”, as Mendelsohn has it. And Penelope coins a nickname for Troy/Ilium: Kakoïlion (“Evil-Ilion” for Mendelsohn – though no one has bested Lawrence’s perfect “desTroy”, which Robert Fagles, in his 1996 translation, for instance, adopts as a gift).
It is unlikely that any charges of political correctness will be laid at Mendelsohn’s door. In contrast to Wilson’s “mavericks”, his Cyclopes are an “arrogant and lawless lot”. Ships are given conventional, if old-fashioned, female pronouns. Helen, in the ultimate cameo, calls herself “kynôpidos” – an evidently pejorative but somewhat unclear word. Literally, “kynôpis” might be “dog-faced” or “dog-eyed” (as Athena is always “owl-eyed”). Is this an ancient version of “resting bitch face”? “Wanton that I am” is Fagles’s solution. Lattimore deploys a cynical “whore”. Wilson retains the canine – “my face the cause that hounded them” – without dogging Helen with self-blame. Mendelsohn unleashes the snapping monosyllable “bitch” not only here, but several times in the text.
But an epic, like an opera, is held together by its recitatives. It is often in the least famous or debated passages that a translation can best be judged; not when the translator is on notice, but when no one is watching. Mendelsohn is at his best when writing about the sea – where something of the freshening salt wind of his adventure with his father (and the light touch of his quicksilver prose) blows into the text:
We asked the god to show us a sign, and indeed he gave one to us,
Pointing out a path straight across the sea
To Euboia, so we could escape disaster as fast as we could
A whistling wind sprang up and blew; swiftly the ships
Sped along their course, teeming with fish, and put into
Geraistós in the dead of night. On Poseidon’s altar
We laid the thigh-bones of many a bull after sailing the sea’s vast leagues.
Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they are looking for.
A. E. Stallings is Oxford Professor of Poetry. A selected poems, This Afterlife, was published in 2022. Her most recent book is Frieze Frame: How poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, 2025.
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