The Odyssey
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Daniel Mendelsohn
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.
Advance Praise:
“It is a thrill to have Mendelsohn’s searingly faithful—and yet absolutely original—new translation of The Odyssey. Moving us expertly through the hero’s journey with profound learning and an exquisite attunement to the original’s formal textures and thematic nuances, Mendelsohn’s radiant translation gives us not only the marvelously freighted yet buoyant craft itself, but the pulsing experience of its ongoing momentum and reach. His knowledge as a classicist, his acuity in rendering the circuitous yet also self-arresting syntax (a journey of its own), and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond.”
—Jorie Graham, author of To 2040
“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. . . . Sharply focused on narrative nuance, lucid, vivid, and smart, this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic.”
—Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
“Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful sure-footedness of imagination, an almost mystical insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity: how it must have looked, felt, smelled, and sounded to its ordinary and its superhuman denizens alike. He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane.”
—Michael Chabon
“Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing. It doesn’t take us through a reportorial account of the adventures of Odysseus but deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetry. Highly recommended.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“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. His approach makes this translation ideal for any class in which an instructor wants the students to have a full sense of the poetics of Homeric epic and other orally based literature.”
—Deborah Roberts, Haverford College
“Following the roundabout journey of its hero and the seductive rhythm of lines packed with music and meaning, Mendelsohn’s fresh and vigorous translation reminds me that what is at the heart of Homer’s epic—for all its sea-soaked adventures and creatures and gods—is entrancing poetry. His Odyssey is a homecoming worthy of th pleasure and dignity and endurance of the original.”
—Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers
“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, author of the Jack Reacher novels
“This Odyssey brilliantly succeeds in its ambitious plan to provide a worth companion for our time to Richmond Lattimore’s classic Iliad. Mendelsohn’s long and flexible dactylic lines are eminently readable while communicating the heft and dignity of what the Greeks called Homer’s ‘heroic’ hexameter. With a scholarly and personal Introduction that sets out the major themes of the poem, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey will put all who read (and teach) the poem in English in possession of the most illuminating insights of modern scholarship while equipping them to understand the epic sympathetically and to appreciate the artistry of this astonishing work of ancient art and its uncannily modern hero.”
—Andrew Ford, author of Homer: The Poetry of the Past
“This Odyssey is a gift, an act of true literary hospitality. Balancing ear and mind, Mendelsohn ushers the reader by every available device—the amplitude and charm of his introduction and notes, as well as the assurance and clarity of the tale’s unspooling—into the strange familiarity and familiar strangeness of a distant world which still breathes its magic and insight so fully into our own.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule.”
—Sebastian Barry, author of Old God’s Time
“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