The Odyssey
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The Odyssey
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Narrated by:
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Daniel Mendelsohn
About this listen
This is an audiobook version of this book.
A landmark new translation of Homer’s most popular epic by distinguished author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn.
In 1961, the University of Chicago Press published Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer’s The Iliad. For more than sixty years, it has served to introduce readers to the ancient Greek world of gods and heroes and has been one of the most popular and respected versions of the work. Yet through all those decades, Chicago never published a companion translation of the best-known epic in the Western canon, The Odyssey—until now.
With his new Odyssey, celebrated author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has created a rendering worthy of Chicago’s unparalleled reputation in classical literature. Widely known for his essays bringing classical literature and culture to mainstream audiences in the New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn eschews the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—in order to bring it to life in all its archaic grandeur. In this line-for-line rendering, the long, six-beat line he uses, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each Greek line without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.
The result is a magnificent feat of translation, one that conveys the poetics of the original while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight, and powerful themes that make Homer’s work continue to resonate today. Supported by an extensive introduction, notes, and commentary, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent and enduringly influential masterpiece.
Public Domain (P)2025 University of Chicago PressCritic reviews
“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.”—Deborah Roberts, Haverford College
"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."—Richard P. Martin, Isabelle and Antony Raubitschek Professor in Classics, Stanford University
"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."—Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems
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