- Published: 22 July 2025
- ISBN: 9780241733585
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 560
- RRP: $55.00
The Odyssey
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- Published: 22 July 2025
- ISBN: 9780241733585
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 560
- RRP: $55.00
About the author
Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties
Deborah Roberts, Haverford College
Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement
Rosanna Warren
The expertly crafted work of a true scholar-poet, Mendelsohn’s rich and rhythmical version hews closely to the Homeric verse-line – it feels like the original … this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic
Richard P. Martin, Stanford University
His knowledge as a renowned classicist, his ear and eye for sound and image, his acuity in rendering the circuitous yet also self-arresting syntax, and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond … [a] triumph
Jorie Graham
Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule
Sebastian Barry
Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing … take[s] us deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetr
Joyce Carol Oates
Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity... He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane
Michael Chabon
Neither jarringly contemporary nor distractingly archaic, Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliant and necessary translation of The Odyssey is a testament to the enduring power and grace and beauty of Homer's narrative
Francine Prose
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
This Odyssey brilliantly succeeds in its ambitious plan to provide a worthy companion for our time to Richmond Lattimore’s classic Iliad. Mendelsohn’s long and flexible dactylic lines are eminently readable while communicating the heft and dignity of what the Greeks called Homer’s ‘heroic’ hexameter. With a scholarly and personal Introduction that sets out the major themes of the poem, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey will put all who read (and teach) the poem in English in possession of the most illuminating insights of modern scholarship while equipping them to understand the epic sympathetically and to appreciate the artistry of this astonishing work of ancient art and its uncannily modern hero
Andrew Ford
Following the roundabout journey of its hero and the seductive rhythm of lines packed with music and meaning, Mendelsohn’s fresh and vigorous translation reminds me that what is at the heart of Homer’s epic—for all its sea-soaked adventures and creatures and gods—is entrancing poetry. His Odyssey is a homecoming worthy of the pleasure and dignity and endurance of the original.
Richie Hofmann
Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus’s heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I’ve ever read
Edith Hall, The Telegraph
