The Odyssey: A New Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn

(Hardback)

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A magnificent new translation of the Odyssey by bestselling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn With his Odyssey, bestselling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike - a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles. Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic's formal qualities - meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance - and in so doing restores to Homer's masterwork its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer's verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result is the richest, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, one that fully conveys its oral poetics while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer's work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Mendelsohn's Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.

Reviews

Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poems language and thought but also to its formal properties * Deborah Roberts, Haverford College *
Daniel Mendelsohns Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homers Greek ... A momentous achievement * Rosanna Warren *
The expertly crafted work of a true scholar-poet, Mendelsohns 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 *
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 * Michael Chabon *
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 *
History's greatest adventure story brought to us anew by America's greatest living classicistthis is fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment * Lee Child *
This Odyssey brilliantly succeeds in its ambitious plan to provide a worthy companion for our time to Richmond Lattimores classic Iliad. Mendelsohns long and flexible dactylic lines are eminently readable while communicating the heft and dignity of what the Greeks called Homers heroic hexameter. With a scholarly and personal Introduction that sets out the major themes of the poem, Mendelsohns 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 Bio

Daniel Mendelsohn (Translator) Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost- A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey- A Father, a Son, and an Epic, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. His honors include the Prix Medicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy's highest honour for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.