The Odyssey

With his new Odyssey, bestselling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a major new work, a translation to stand with Penguin Classics' famous translations by E.V. Rieu (1946) and Robert Fagles (1996). Mendelsohn sets aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on reproducing the epic's formal qualities-meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance-to bring the great story to life in all its archaic grandeur. In this meticulous 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. This is a magnificent feat of translation, one that conveys the oral 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 some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction, notes, and commentary, Mendelsohn's Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.