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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
Homer’s Odyssey is the most famous work of ancient literature besides Aesop’s Fables. The story of the resourceful Greek who endured nine years of wandering before arriving home in Ithaca, it has been translated into most world languages and transformed into countless operas, plays, novels, poems, paintings and video games. Its second half, narrating Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, has recently been made into an emotional and realistic movie, directed by Uberto Pasolini, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche and filmed in Greek and Italian sea-washed locations. Christopher Nolan’s fantasy-action adaptation, which features Matt Damon as Odysseus, astounding special effects, supernatural encounters with immortal nymphs and the enormous Cyclops, is due next year. My hope is that this mass-market cultural projection of the epic will draw attention to Daniel Mendelsohn’s sonorous new translation of the original poem.
His rendering of the epic into its authentic metre, the dactylic hexameter (a six-beat line, vocalised in two clusters or asymmetrical half-lines) has been keenly anticipated; in his memoir-cum-critcism, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), Mendelsohn revealed his intense, personal engagement with the story, especially Odysseus’s relationship with his son Telemachus. Mendelsohn’s skill with Greek verse has also previously been demonstrated in his sensitive translations of the poet CP Cavafy (2009-2012), another admirer of the Odyssey.
Some of his innovations, such as glossing proper names with their meanings (“Eurýalos Broad-Sea”), are illuminating to the Greekless reader. His metrical dexterity comes over in the pleasing rhythms he’s found for even the most formulaic of lines: “She of the bright owl-eyes, the goddess Athena, addressed him”; here, the long vowels of the spondaic “bright owl-eyes” are foregrounded by the surrounding patter of dactyls.
His translation of the Odyssey’s celebrated opening couplet is an aesthetic manifesto in itself:
Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep.
The alliteration (T/t, m/M, w/w), the enjambement (continuing the phrase beyond the line-break) and the sweet variety of emphasised vowels in the second line (a-oy-a-ee), remind us forcefully that Homeric epic was enjoyed in oral performance accompanied by a lyre. A comparison with the other 21st-century attempt at a hexameter, a 2002 translation by Rodney Merrill, is instructive:
Tell me, Muse, of the man versatile and resourceful, who wandered
many a sea-mile after he ransacked Troy’s holy city.
This is far less euphonious. It also specifies that Homer’s notoriously ambiguous epithet “polutropos” means qualities of character, whereas Mendelsohn’s “who had so many roundabout ways / To wander” leaves the types of wandering – experiential, psychological, geographical – open to interpretation. His shrewd decision to avoid the standard “city” for Troy reminds us that this “keep” was no modern conurbation but a fortress with high defensive walls – which Odysseus had enabled his comrades to penetrate by the ruse of the wooden horse.
Such intense intellectual engagement continues in the aesthetic choices of the remaining 12,107 lines. Where Merrill uses archaisms (“scion”, “no whit”, “hither”), and in his desire for fidelity to Homer, reproduces word order that is almost incomprehensible in English, Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. I would have preferred him not to capitalise the first letter of each line, however; for the reader (though not the listener), this somewhat disrupts the fine flow of the enjambement to which his translation is otherwise so gloriously sensitive.
Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically. Humans respond to this metre to their physiological benefit: medical research has shown that patients’ heart and respiratory rates decelerate when they read them. Yet, since Alexander Pope’s bestselling translation in 1725, many Odyssey translators have chosen the indigenous English iambic pentameter, including Emily Wilson in her vivid, fast-paced Odyssey (2017).
Mendelsohn might have refrained from some slightly dyspeptic criticism of Wilson’s version in his introductory essay (her choice of metre means that “the poem as a whole loses much of its subtlety and texture”). There’s more than room for diverse, up-to-date renderings of this poem: my undergraduates, for example, love Wilson’s breezy modernity. But Mendelsohn is also correct that only the dactylic hexameter can express the acoustic resonance of the original; since this metre did not relate to the predominantly iambic natural rhythm of Greek speech, Homer sounded elevated and even unearthly to his ancient audiences – an effect more than worth reproducing.
The dispute about the appropriate metre for Homeric translation is centuries-old. German poets controversially attempted hexameter Odysseys in the 18th century; Goethe’s friend Vasily Zhukovsky’s Russian hexameter translation, however, made an incalculable impression on Slavic aesthetic culture in 1849. It was Matthew Arnold whose On Translating Homer (1861), in response to the turgid and ersatz Anglo-Saxon Iliad by UCL Classics professor Francis Newman (1856), made a cogent case for reviving the ancient metre. Poets including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Kingsley began experimenting with it in original poems, and numerous clunky, mediocre hexameter versions of Homer soon followed.
What I feel Mendelsohn has appreciated, in the way most of those versions have not, is the connection between the Odyssey’s maritime content and the rolling effect of its broad-sweeping verse. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in his poem, ‘The Homeric Hexameter’ (1803),
Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.
When Jorge Luis Borges’ eyesight began to fail, he spoke of divining the “murmur of glory and hexameters… of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle”. 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: Odysseus “straddled a plank with his legs as if he were riding a racehorse”. He heard “the thundering thud of the reef as the sea crashed against it / Since the massive swells were dashing against the shoreline, roaring / Fearfully, everything frothed with foam churned up from the sea.” I doubt that even Nolan’s movie can make this ordeal as visceral and as spectacular.
Edith Hall’s books include Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World. The Odyssey, tr Daniel Mendelsohn, is published by Penguin Classics at £30. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books