The Odyssey

Reviews / Votes

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 * This may well be the best translation of Homer's poem yet. Mendelsohn's rendering is highly readable - monsters, thrashing swims and wine-dark seas churn to life - and yet, thrillingly, it stays faithful to the original metre. Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation won't rival this * Telegraph Best Poetry Book 2025 * 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 * 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 they are looking for -- A. E. Stallings * The Times Literary Supplement * 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 * 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 * 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 ... this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic * Richard P. Martin, Stanford University * Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule * Sebastian Barry * 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, and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond ... [a] triumph * Jorie Graham * Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing ... take[s] us deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetr * Joyce Carol Oates *