The Odyssey

Reviews

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 Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule 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 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 Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity... He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane 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 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 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 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. Expand reviews