Choosing a Translation
The translation you choose shapes the poem you read
Before you pick up the Odyssey, understand this: no English translation is the Odyssey. Homer composed in ancient Greek hexameter — a rolling six-beat meter built for oral performance, for memorization, for the repeated formulaic phrases that a singer could deploy without breaking rhythm. That meter does not exist in English. Every translator must decide what to do about that fact, and every decision they make cascades through the entire poem.
The opening word is already a battlefield. The poem begins with the word andra — "man" — and then stacks modifier upon modifier: polytropos, meaning something like "of many turns" or "much-wandering" or "of many wiles." Fagles renders it "the man of twists and turns." Lattimore writes "the man of many ways." Emily Wilson writes "a complicated man." Those three phrases launch three different poems, and they reflect genuinely different readings of Odysseus's character — hero, wanderer, or morally ambiguous schemer. Which poem you read depends on which opening line you encounter.
When choosing the best Odyssey translation, you'll want something different than what works for the Iliad. Where the Iliad benefits from grandeur and sweep, the Odyssey benefits from clarity and forward momentum. This is a poem about a man desperately trying to get home, and the best translations keep that urgency alive on every page. A translation that moves slowly, however faithful to the Greek, loses something essential about what the poem is.
Emily Wilson's 2017 translation is this guide's primary recommendation. It is the most direct, honest, and readable Odyssey translation available. Wilson makes choices about Odysseus's character that illuminate the poem's moral complexity in ways older translations obscure. If you're reading the Odyssey for the first time, start here.
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About the Translators
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her 2017 Odyssey for W. W. Norton was the first English translation of the poem by a woman. Wilson has also translated Euripides and Seneca's tragedies, and her approach to Homer is shaped by decades of work in feminist classical scholarship. The controversy around her word choices — most notably her rendering of polytropos as "complicated" — reflects genuine scholarly disagreement about how to weight Odysseus's resourcefulness against his moral slipperiness. Her notes to the translation are among the most illuminating available for any version of the poem.
Robert Fagles (1933–2008) was Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. His Odyssey (1996) followed his celebrated Iliad (1990) and preceded his Aeneid (1998), completing a trilogy of epic translations that transformed how English-language readers encountered ancient epic. Bernard Knox, the distinguished classicist who wrote the introductions to both the Iliad and Odyssey, considered Fagles's translations the finest literary renderings of Homer available in English. His Odyssey has sold over a million copies and remained the standard university text for nearly thirty years.
Peter Green is a classicist, translator, and ancient historian — author of the standard modern history of the Hellenistic period and translator of Catullus, Juvenal, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Ovid. His Odyssey (2018), published when he was eighty-eight, represents decades of sustained engagement with Homer. Green's choice to render the poem in English hexameters is the most technically demanding decision any recent translator has made, and his footnotes are the most extensive of any major translation. For readers who want to understand what Homer is doing technically, line by line, Green is without equal.
Richmond Lattimore (1906–1984) was Professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr. His Odyssey (1965) followed his Iliad (1951), which remains the gold standard of scholarly Homer translation in English. Lattimore's method was to stay as close as possible to Homer's diction, syntax, and formulaic repetitions — preserving all the fixed epithets that modern translators often suppress for the sake of readability. The result is slow and demanding for first-time readers but uniquely faithful to the texture of the Greek. For scholars and serious students, his translations remain the primary reference point more than fifty years after publication.
Themes
The Odyssey's central drive is nostos — the Greek word for homecoming that gives us our word "nostalgia." Everything in the poem is organized around Odysseus's need to return to Ithaca, and everything that delays him — the Cyclops, Circe, Calypso, the Sirens — represents a different kind of obstacle to that return. What distinguishes the poem from a simple adventure narrative is that the obstacles are not only external. Odysseus himself is tempted. Calypso offers immortality; Circe offers pleasure and oblivion; the Lotus Eaters offer the forgetting of all obligation. The poem asks, repeatedly, what a man owes to the people waiting for him, and whether he can resist the temptation to disappear into a more comfortable existence. It never fully answers the question.
The poem's moral center is metis — cunning intelligence — as opposed to the brute strength (bia) that defined the heroism of the Iliad. Odysseus wins by thinking, not by fighting. He outsmarts the Cyclops with a pun about his own name, navigates past Scylla and Charybdis by following Circe's instructions precisely, and endures years of captivity with Calypso by playing a long game. Every translator must make choices about how to render this intelligence: Wilson's "complicated man," Fagles's "man of twists and turns," Lattimore's "man of many ways." Those three phrases describe the same Greek word — polytropos — and the three translations that emerge from those choices are substantially different poems.
The question of identity runs through the poem in a way that distinguishes it from any simple homecoming story. Odysseus is almost always in disguise — a beggar, a stranger, an anonymous wanderer. "Who are you? Where are you from?" is the poem's recurring question, posed by Nausicaa, by Penelope, by his own son. His final revelation — drawing the great bow, shooting through the axe-heads — is the poem's central dramatic act. But the poem also quietly asks whether the man who returns is really the same man who left. Twenty years of war and wandering leave marks. Whether he is still who he claims to be is a question the poem raises without fully resolving, and a good translation holds that uncertainty intact rather than resolving it on the reader's behalf.
Key Characters
Odysseus — The poem's hero is not a simple one, and understanding him requires attending to how different translations render his essential quality: polytropos. He is resourceful, deceptive, ruthless when necessary, and capable of genuine tenderness — toward his son, his dog, his aging father. The suitors' massacre at the poem's end, which Odysseus plans methodically and carries out without mercy, is morally complicated in ways that older translations tend to smooth over. Wilson's version is particularly valuable here: her Odysseus is recognizably human and recognizably dangerous in ways that make the poem feel newly urgent.
Penelope — Often read as simply the faithful wife, but the Penelope of the poem is far more interesting than that. Her weaving and unweaving of the funeral shroud — three years of strategic deception — is exactly what Odysseus would do. She plays for time, buys information, and tests the people around her with the same intelligence her husband applies to every obstacle. Whether Penelope recognizes Odysseus before his official reveal, and whether she orchestrates the bow contest knowing what will happen, is one of the poem's great unresolved questions. The text supports both readings. Good translators leave the ambiguity intact.
Telemachus — The opening four books follow Telemachus rather than his father: a young man who has grown up without a father, surrounded by men eating his inheritance and insulting his mother. His journey to find news of Odysseus is a coming-of-age narrative embedded within the homecoming story, and Athena's guidance of Telemachus mirrors her guidance of his father in ways that illuminate what the poem is doing with divine patronage and the transmission of identity across generations.
Athena — The most present of the Olympians in the poem, and the most interesting. She is Odysseus's patron goddess — the deity of intelligence and craft — and she appears in the poem in disguise more often than Odysseus himself does. Her relationship with him is one of mutual recognition: she favors him because he thinks the way she does. The scene in Book 13 in which they drop their disguises and simply talk to each other as equals is one of the warmest and most surprising moments in the poem.
Circe and Calypso — The two divine women who delay Odysseus's return are not mirror images of each other, though they are often treated as such. Circe is dangerous, hostile at first, eventually transformed into an indispensable guide to the underworld. Calypso is genuinely loving — perhaps the poem's most melancholy figure — since she cannot understand why Odysseus would choose a mortal woman and eventual death over immortality with her. Her lament when Hermes arrives with Zeus's order to release Odysseus is one of the poem's most quietly devastating moments, and it reads very differently in Wilson than in Fagles.
The Suitors — Not individuals but a collective threat: over a hundred men eating Odysseus's livestock, drinking his wine, competing for Penelope's hand, and threatening Telemachus with death. Their violation of xenia — the guest-friendship code that Odysseus himself invokes throughout the poem — is what makes their deaths a restoration of order rather than simple vengeance. But the poem does not entirely let Odysseus off the hook. The enslaved women hanged alongside them deserve the attention that Wilson, more than any other translator, has insisted on paying them.
Recommended Sources
Classical Quarterly — Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Classical Association, this is the leading peer-reviewed journal for Greek and Latin scholarship in the United Kingdom. It regularly publishes translation reviews, articles on Homeric reception, and close readings of the Odyssey's narrative technique. Back issues through JSTOR provide access to decades of foundational Homeric scholarship.
American Journal of Philology — Founded in 1880 at Johns Hopkins University, one of the oldest and most authoritative classical philology journals in North America, and a primary venue for Homeric scholarship including translation comparison and reception studies. Its centenary issues include landmark essays on the Odyssey's structure and themes that remain essential reading.
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology — Annual publication from Harvard's Department of the Classics. Long-form articles on Greek epic, including landmark studies of Homer's oral composition theory by Milman Parry and Albert Lord whose work in the 1930s and 1940s fundamentally changed how scholars understand what the Odyssey is — not a written poem but a transcription of an oral tradition with its own logic of repetition and variation.
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classical Tradition — Published at Boston University, Arion publishes both scholarly articles and personal essays on classical literature and its reception. Its translation criticism — including extended reviews of Wilson, Fagles, and others — is more accessible than specialized philology journals while remaining rigorous. An excellent entry point for readers who want to engage seriously with the translation debate without working through technical philology.
Still deciding which Odyssey translation to read? Browse recommended editions and gifts for the serious reader, or return to the Odyssey reading guide to plan your approach.
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