What’s the Greek Word for “Picnic”? Adventures in Translating the Odyssey

In this lecture, author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn takes his audience into the heart of the process of translating. Beginning with the dauntingly enigmatic adjective that Homer uses to describe his hero in the first line of the poem—polytropos, “of many turns,” about which no two translators have ever agreed—Mendelsohn will present a series of case studies in translation culled from his own experience during his six years working on his Odyssey. In so doing, he allows the audience to watch the translator at work as he grapples with the distinctive technical challenges posed by Homer’s verse: its meter and rhythms, diction and tone, the poet’s use of line-breaks, alliteration, and assonance, and the real meaning of famous phrases such as “gray-eyed Athena” and “wingèd words.” (Hint: they don’t have wings.)

Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, and translator. His books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; as well as a translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy. His honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. Mendelsohn’s new translation of the Odyssey has been called “the edition for our time and beyond” by Jorie Graham and “fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment” by Lee Child. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Admission is first come, first served, so we encourage you to arrive early.

Cosponsored by the Department of Classics, Humanities Program, and Yale Translation Initiative
Photo credit: Matt Mendelsohn
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