A TELEGRAPH BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2025

A magnificent new translation of the Odyssey by best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn

'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.

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.