Bookmoot: The Odyssey

The Rabbit Room’s Bookmoot selection for the month of August is The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Grab the book and join us here at Inland Books @ 11am Central Time on August 18th when we’ll discuss it together. (You are welcome to join for the discussion if you have read a different translation of The Odyssey.)

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.  

A magnificent feat of translation, hailed by classicists and poets alike as “maybe the best translation of the Odyssey yet”: “thrilling,” “rich and rhythmical,” “superb,” “mesmerizing,” “searingly faithful—yet absolutely original.”