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The Odyssey
A New Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn
Brief Description
A magnificent new translation of The Odyssey by best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn. 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...
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Description
A magnificent new translation of The Odyssey by best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn.
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 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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780241733592
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 23 April 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Contributors:
- Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 35.0mm
Width: 153.0mm
Height: 234.0mm
Weight: 500g
Pages: 576
About the Author
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.
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