Translating The Odyssey for Today
When I told a friend that I was going to a lecture on a new translation of The Odyssey, he quipped, “Oh, did someone make a shocking discovery that changes everything we know about it?” He said it in jest, of course, but underlying the joke is a real question: Why do we need another translation of the Odyssey?
Daniel Mendelsohn is well aware of this question. The Bard College professor and internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator opened his recent Humanities Now lecture, “What’s the Greek Word for ‘Picnic’? Adventures in Translating the Odyssey,” by acknowledging the vast number of translations already in existence and praising the “classic” ones, like Fagles, for aspects of the work they capture well. At the same time, he emphasized that his own translation does not aim to solve all the problems of those earlier versions, nor does it seek to supplant them. Instead, his goal is different: he wants—above all—for his translation to be useful.
Introducing him at the lecture, Chris Kraus, professor of Latin, said that Mendelsohn has managed to do something that perhaps all classicists secretly want to do: “He turned a nascent academic life into a thriving freelance writing career.” His dual role, as both an academic classicist and a writer for general audiences, gives his translation a purposefully paradoxical quality: he strives to stick as close to the original Ancient Greek as possible while making the meaning accessible to modern readers.
Before his lecture at the Whitney Humanities Center, Mendelsohn visited a Yale graduate course in translation studies, where he shared some of the considerations behind his translation. As Professors Alice Kaplan and Robyn Creswell, who co-teach the class, explained, “Mendelsohn joined our graduate core course in translation studies for a free-wheeling conversation about the centuries-long history of English language translations of Homer, from Chapman to Pope to Lattimore to Emily Wilson. Mendelsohn talked about the genesis of his version, why he thinks only hexameters can get the job done, and his belief that translation is an inherently collaborative enterprise.”
One example of Mendelsohn’s approach is his treatment of the phrase epea pteroenta, often translated as “winged words.” For Mendelsohn, as someone prioritizing usefulness in his translation, the challenge is not just to understand the literal meaning of these words but to grasp the metaphorical possibilities they carry. What exactly is Homer trying to convey with this phrase? Is he conjuring the image of words flying like birds out of the speaker’s mouth? Or, as Mendelsohn argues, should we think of the feathers of an arrow, with words aimed and shot directly at the listener? The two translations offer distinct effects, and Mendelsohn’s goal is to bring out a vivid, meaningful image, rather than relying on phrases that are linguistically accurate but lack resonance. In this way, he makes the archaic language of the Odyssey more familiar by disentangling its fixed epithets and phrases.
Still, Mendelsohn seeks to preserve the distance between us and the poem. For instance, he retains the Greek spelling of the name “Kalypso” rather than the Latinized “Calypso,” and he translates what we might think of as the Greek word for “picnic” as “neighborly feast,” rather than Fagles’s “potluck.” These choices remind us that the Odyssey was created thousands of years ago.
“Sometimes,” Mendelsohn says, “I twist things out of shape to remind you that it is an unusual text.” This sense of the Odyssey as a strange and foreign work is important—much of Homer’s world and work is alien to us. Yet the beauty of the poem lies in its underlying human story, which transcends the boundaries of time and place.
Mendelsohn’s translation simultaneously brings us closer to Homer and reminds us of his distance through its use of a longer line, whose meter more closely resembles Homer’s dactylic hexameter (the meter of Greek and Latin epic poetry, consisting of six metrical feet in a line). Though iambic pentameter is the more natural meter for English to use (think Shakespeare), the longer meter allows Mendelsohn to translate Homer line by line, preserving much of what other translations have omitted due to space limitations. This approach further enhances the usefulness of his translation: it makes it possible for there to be a line-to-line correspondence between the English and the Greek texts, something not achievable in translations using shorter meters.
But the length of Mendelsohn’s line does not sacrifice the rhythmic readability of the work. After all, we must remember that the poem was originally recited. In keeping with that tradition, a group of undergraduate students gathered outside the lecture hall to listen as one of their peers read a passage of the poem aloud. You could practically see the rhythm of the lines in the subtle swaying of their bodies as they listened. Mendelsohn’s translation asks to be recited—and perhaps this is how the Odyssey should be read: aloud and among friends.
