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<''This superb translation ... feels like the original'' Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
From the acclaimed translator and author Daniel Mendelsohn, a spellbinding new verse translation of one of the greatest stories ever told, Homer''s The Odyssey, bringing us closer to the original than any recent version
With his new Odyssey, author and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has created a translation to stand with the famous versions by E.V. Rieu and Robert Fagles. Mendelsohn sets aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic''s formal qualities to bring the great story to life in all its archaic grandeur. This line-for-line rendering brings us closer to the poetics of the original than any other recent translations.
This is a magnificent feat of translation, one that brings to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer''s work continue to resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction, notes, and commentary, Mendelsohn''s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.
''Daniel Mendelsohn''s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer''s Greek ... A momentous achievement'' Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems
''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'' Deborah Roberts, Haverford College<>
About the author
Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New 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, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. His honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honour 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.
Report
Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek... Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus's heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I've ever read Edith Hall The Telegraph
