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The Odyssey
- Narrator
- Daniel Mendelsohn
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 24 April 2025
- Run Time
- 19 hours 5 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A magnificent new translation of the Odyssey by best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn
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.
'This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet. Daniel Mendelsohn’s rendering of Homer’s text is both highly readable and faithful to the original metre. It’s impressive, thrilling stuff... a sonorous new translation' - Edith Hall, The Telegraph
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.
© Daniel Mendelsohn 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
Critics Review
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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
The Telegraph
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This may well be the best translation of Homer’s poem yet. Mendelsohn’s rendering is highly readable – monsters, thrashing swims and wine-dark seas churn to life – and yet, thrillingly, it stays faithful to the original metre. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation won’t rival this
Telegraph Best Poetry Book 2025
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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
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Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they they are looking for
The Times Literary Supplement
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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
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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
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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
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Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule
Sebastian Barry
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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
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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
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Homer and Daniel Mendelsohn
- Narrator
- Daniel Mendelsohn
- Duration
- 19 hours 5 minutes
- Release Date
- 24 April 2025
- ISBN
- 9781837310180
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Ancient Greek and Roman literature, Ancient Greek religion and mythology, Fiction in translation, Adventure / action fiction, Narrative theme: journeys and voyages
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin. A magnificent new translation of the Odyssey by best-selling author and classicist Daniel MendelsohnSetting 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.'This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet. Daniel Mendelsohn’s rendering of Homer’s text is both highly readable and faithful to the original metre. It’s impressive, thrilling stuff... a sonorous new translation' - Edith Hall, The TelegraphWith 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.© Daniel Mendelsohn 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
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