How do you bring a 2,800-year-old poem back to life while keeping its identity? Modern retellings of Homer’s epic, both in text and on screen, aim to make it comfortable for modern readers, often streamlining and modernising the verse and its meanings. How much of the original poem is lost in translation?
Classicist, critic and author Daniel Mendelsohn has spent decades reading and re-reading The Odyssey. In 2025 he published his own translation of The Odyssey, completing six years of work. Mendelsohn’s text stays closer to the original Greek than many recent versions, restoring aspects that other translators had smoothed away. Critics have called it one of the finest English versions yet, seeing it as a worthy successor to the translations of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles.
Mendelsohn is the editor-at-large of The New York Review of Books and professor of literature at Bard College, New York. He is the author of ten books, including the internationally bestselling memoirs The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and Three Rings, exploring storytelling methods in The Odyssey and The Bible. His work has earned him a long list of awards and accolades, including Italy’s Premio Malaparte and France’s Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.
At the House of Literature, Mendelsohn draws on a career as an Odyssey-expert to ask what a classic text asks of its translators today and what The Odyssey’s own long road might teach us.
