Translating Homer in the 21st Century

Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. University of Chicago Press, 2025. $39.00, 560 pp.

In the fall semester of the year 2000, I took a seminar on Homer’s Iliad. The math was simple: the Iliad has 24 books, and the semester has a little over 12 weeks. Moving at the pace of two books per week much of the fall, we read the entire epic. In the original Greek. In a building located just steps away from the statue of Homer on the University of Virginia’s legendary Lawn. Cast in bronze as a blind bard, Homer is seated at rest yet looking agitated, as though about to break into epic recitation at a moment’s notice. A boy holding a lyre is at the bard’s feet, ready to accompany the performance.

A word of explanation for the unfamiliar: seminars in Greek and Latin literature that are the main staple of coursework in the classics consist of translation. Students are assigned increasingly longer chunks of the work of an ancient author, which they first translate on their own, looking up words, consulting commentaries, checking grammatical guides, noting sentences they cannot crack alone. Class time, then, is spent going over parts of the assigned text as a group, trying to understand just what the author from two or more millennia ago was trying to say and why he said it the way he did.

In other words, no one does slow reading like classics students. 

But just because we could render Homer’s Greek poetry into wooden English prose by the end of the semester doesn’t mean that anyone should ever be subjected to students’ translations of ancient epics. Translating for publication is an art, a craft, a pursuit of beauty and truth that requires so much more than just the knowledge of language A and language B. This reality, true to some extent for prose, is amplified manyfold for poetry. 

How do you approach the task of translating an epic poem composed orally over the course of centuries in an artificial dialect that was never even spoken by anyone in real life, in a meter that doesn’t quite work the same way in English, and that contains words and expressions on whose meaning even expert scholars do not fully agree? 

No doubt, Homeric translators have their work cut out for them, but they themselves cannot agree on every detail of the scope and aim of their work. Perhaps this is also why there are so many of them. When reviewing Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey in 2017 for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Richard H. Armstrong noted that there have been 27 translations of the Odyssey since the year 2000. Several more have, of course, come out since. So how is a modern reader supposed to make an informed choice of a translation? To put it in Homeric terms, which one is the best? Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of the Odyssey, out this month, offers a good excuse to consider these questions.

It was natural for me to think back to my first serious encounter with Homer when opening this new translation. But I found an additional reason for a trip down memory lane right away: Mendelsohn dedicates this translation to Jenny Strauss Clay, the fabled Homerist who was his college Greek professor. As it happens, it is Professor Clay whose Iliad class I describe above—although I took it about two decades after Mendelsohn himself was an undergraduate. 

Mendelsohn’s post-college journey to this new translation of the Odyssey is important background: after getting a PhD in classics from Princeton University, he has pursued an illustrious career as a literary critic, essayist, and translator, writing regularly for such venues as The New Yorker and New York Review of Books. He has won multiple national and international book awards, including for his translation of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and for a book on reading the Odyssey with his elderly father. 

The present translation is Mendelsohn’s tenth book. It is clearly the work of a mature thinker and writer—someone who has lived not only with the Odyssey but with a vast world of human emotions for decades. It is a reminder that not only do academic qualifications matter for the work of translators, but life experiences too. The result is well worth reading. In addition to the translation, the reader gets a forty-page introduction to the epic, a twenty-page process essay on the making of this translation, and a handy pronunciation guide. While it may be tempting to skip these and jump into the translation proper, I highly recommend reading these sections first—especially the translation essay, which is key for understanding Mendelsohn’s approach. 

Mendelsohn notes in the process essay that classicists are usually either Iliad people or Odyssey people: people relate more deeply to one or the other epic. I know what he means: I’ve always been an Iliad person, enthralled with the narratives of war and honor. I enjoy the Odyssey, but for me, it is clearly the inferior of the two epics. Mendelsohn is an Odyssey person, though, a loving life-long reader and re-reader of this epic. His goal in this translation is “to offer an English-language Odyssey that is pleasurable to read—by which I mean, has the fluency, muscularity, and rhythm of poetry—while reproducing to the greatest extent possible, what I see in each dense line of Homer’s Greek.” In other words, he offers a line-for-line translation of the Odyssey, in poetry, and keeping the content without omitting some details the way some verse translations have done. These points are all significant, as each represents a concrete choice he had to make.

If this all feels a bit like learning how sausage is made, perhaps that is unavoidable. Let’s consider the decisions a translator of an ancient epic must make: to translate into prose or poetry? If opting for the latter, into what English-language metrical rhythm? Poetry in ancient Greek and Latin doesn’t rhyme, but it works by meter, and some of the meters used are not quite the same in English. Furthermore, let us not forget that translating into English poetry requires the translator to be a skilled poet to boot! And then there’s the issue of density, which Mendelsohn points out. Ancient Greek is a dense language, so to translate a Greek sentence fully and literally into English often requires several additional words.

So what does this sound like in practice? Here is Mendelsohn’s translation of the epic’s opening verses:

“Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep;
Many the people whose cities he saw, whose ways of thinking he learned,
Many the toils he suffered at sea, anguish in his heart
As he struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.
But he did not save his companions even so, though he longed to,
For their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else’s—
Fools that they were, like children, who devoured the sun god Hyperion’s
Cattle, and so he took from them the day of their homecoming.
Goddess, start where you will; daughter of Zeus, share the tale with us too.”

Compare this to Robert Fagles’ renowned translation:

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bringing his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will sing for our time too.”

And here’s Stanley Lombardo’s version:

“Speak, Memory—Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights. Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.
Of these things, speak, Immortal One, 
And tell the tale once more in our time.”

Finally, Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which proved particularly divisive for recent readers:

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.
They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, 
tell the old story for our modern times.”

Even an untrained eye can discern that there are some similarities here, but each of these four translations into poetry has its own style. So how do you compare? Which one do you need in your life? The choice, I think, is between several great options. There is a natural analogy here to the wars over Bible translations. While the divisions are often acrimonious, and there may be legitimate reasons for some of them, most often the disagreements are between fans of multiple good translations. 

There can be no perfect translation to appease everyone, perhaps, because we all look for slightly different things at the end. In the case of Homer, a good translation that focuses on the forest—the goal of giving readers a good feel of the ancient epic in their modern tongue—may not always be great at zooming in on the trees or giving the reader the best understanding of particular verses. Indeed, that is perhaps the key difference between Mendelsohn’s and Wilson’s translations. 

Both aim to translate the epic line-for-line, but Wilson opts for the shorter iambic pentameter verse, which rolls off the tongue so naturally in English. The result sounds fluid and reflects in English what she has described as “the nimble gallop” of the Greek meter. The cost of this pace, of course, is the loss of some details, which Mendelsohn is eager to keep in his translation. Indeed, in looking at the opening verses of the four translations above, one can see that Mendelsohn’s poetic lines are substantially longer than those in the other translations. This is the distinctive feature of his translation—this desire to bring the density and full detail of the Greek language into English, not worrying about the need for longer poetic lines to make it happen. 

Mendelsohn’s longer poetic line uses six beats, closer to the Homeric Greek dactylic hexameter—but it doesn’t sound as graceful in English as it does in Greek. There is always a possible trade-off, it seems. And so, ultimately, I applaud Mendelsohn’s new translation, even as reading it made me realize that no one translation could ever do in modern English everything the Homeric epics do in the original. Perhaps, it seems, even the best translations have their limits. But then, so do readers themselves, even in their native tongue. 

One of the most common questions people ask me, whenever they hear of my academic background, involves judging and choosing translations: what translations do I recommend of various Greco-Roman classics? And what translations of the Bible do I recommend? The more translations I read, the more convinced I am that the correct answer is: Whichever one will keep you reading. 

The search for the perfect Odyssey translation is tempting, but perhaps it is okay to admit: There isn’t just one.

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