Publisher: Penguin Canada
Publish date: 23 April 2026
Pages: 400
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Subjects: Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology, World Literature, Greece, Literary Collections, Ancient & Classical, Poetry, Epic
With his Odyssey, best-selling 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 master work 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.