"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."
 

"Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule."
 

"Mendelsohn’s [translation] is much more ample; he has chosen a roomier, six-foot line that cleaves as close as possible to the original hexameter without losing the intricacies and force of Homer’s language. The result is more languorous.”
 

This Odyssey brilliantly succeeds in its ambitious plan to provide a worthy 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.”
 

Whereas Wilson’s lines are swift and spare, Mendelsohn’s are prolonged and attentive. He pauses because Odysseus’ plight demands that we pause; we need to pay attention to the condition that has befallen not just Homer, but will befall most all of us sooner or later.

Mendelsohn’s [translation] is much more ample; he has chosen a roomier, six-foot line that cleaves as close as possible to the original hexameter without losing the intricacies and force of Homer’s language. The result is more languorous.

"Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek. He conveys the dignity of an ancient aristocratic world as well as the timeless drama of homecoming, monstrous encounters, fidelity, and self-revelation. A momentous achievement."
 

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."

Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic 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.

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 the pleasure and dignity and endurance of the original.

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.

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 with a truly rare and exquisite attunement to the original’s formal textures and thematic nuances, Mendelsohn’s brilliant, supple, and 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 renowned classicist, his ear and eye for sound and image, 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. The breathtaking introduction and notes are tours de force and finesse, a superb frame for this—yes, heroic—triumph.

"There’s much else to praise in Mendelsohn’s Odyssey, from his sticking to the hexameter, to his imitating successfully the Greek word order, to his capturing of quite a few of Homer’s puns."

"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. He brings into contemporary English not just the precise meaning of the Greek at every turn, but also fine-grained variations in the poem’s soundscape, diction, pace, and speech-styles. Sharply focused on narrative nuance, lucid, vivid, and smart, this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic."
 

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.

"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."
 

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. 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.

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. . . . Ultimately, I applaud Mendelsohn’s new translation.

"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 available in the English language as it conveys the beauty of its poetry, the excitement of its hero's adventures, and the profundity of its insights."

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. . . . What I feel Mendelsohn has appreciated, in the way most of those versions have not, is the connection between the Odyssey’s maritime content and the rolling effect of its broad-sweeping verse.”

"Verity offers an excellent, clear, traditionally literal but avowedly non-poetic [translation]." - Colin Burrow, London Review of Books

McCrorie's new translation can be recommended without reservation to the generations of students to whom it is bound to be assigned and to any reader who'd like to get as close to the original as is possible without reading the original Greek. It is refreshing, accurate, and direct.

Edward McCrorie's translation of the Odyssey into English hexameter has much to recommend it . . . I have developed an appreciation for the clarity and briskness of McCrorie's verse.

Bold new translation.

A lively and engaging version of Homer's Odyssey that brilliantly blends pleasurable readability with fidelity to the original. . . McCrorie has simplified the choice of an English Odyssey even in a field of very skillful competitors (Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Mandelbaum, Fagles, Lombardo), providing the best available verse translation of the Odyssey for Greekless readers.

McCrorie has produced an epic with its own rhythms, idioms and developing pleasures.

2017-09-04
Fresh version of one of the world's oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland "complicated man," the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as "of twists and turns." Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn't strictly support, one of them being "monstrous," meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus "showing initiative" seems a little report-card-ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus' great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, "their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony." In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging "allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls' abused, sexualized bodies," and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors "fell like flies," mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue's work and lacking some of the music of Fagles' recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.