Product details
- ISBN 9780241733592
- Weight: 866g
- Dimensions: 154 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 23 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet' Edith Hall, Telegraph, Books of the Year
'History's greatest adventure story brought to us anew by America's greatest living classicist – this is fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment' Lee Child
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.
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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2026
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 Médicis 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.
