“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

“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.”
 

Francine Prose, author of 1974

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

Sebastian Barry, author of Old God’s Time

“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.”
 

Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels

“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.”
 

Andrew Ford, author of Homer: The Poetry of the Past

“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.”

Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers

“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.”

Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow: A Novel

“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.”

Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

“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.”

Mere Orthodoxy

“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.”

The Guardian (UK)

“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.”
 

The Guardian