The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)

With hisOdyssey, bestselling 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 epics formal qualities meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance and in so doing restores to Homers masterwork 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 Homers verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.