Editions and Translations

Prose vs. Verse: The First Decision

The first question that confronts any reader beginning the Odyssey in English translation is: prose or verse? The original Homeric Greek is poetry — dactylic hexameter, a rolling, six-beat line that carries the narrative forward with a rhythm that has often been compared to the sound of waves on the sea. English, however, has no native dactylic hexameter tradition, and the question of how best to render Homer's form in our language has occupied translators for more than four hundred years.

Verse translations attempt to recreate the experience of the original as poetry. They may use blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), rhyming couplets, or — most commonly in modern translations — a free verse line that approximates the cadence of Homer while remaining idiomatic English. Prose translations, by contrast, aim at clarity and narrative accessibility, sacrificing the poetry of the line in favor of a straightforward rendering of Homer's meaning. Neither approach is inherently "better." The choice depends on what you, as a reader, are looking for: whether you want to read the Odyssey as a great story, or as a great poem, or — ideally — both.

Major Verse Translations

No single verse translation of the Odyssey will satisfy every reader. Each has its own character, its own strengths, its own philosophy of translation. Here are the major modern and modern-classic versions, ordered by date of publication, with brief notes on their tone and suitability for a first-time reader.

Samuel Butler (1900). Butler was a Victorian polymath, best known today for his novel The Way of All Flesh and his eccentric theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman. His translation is prose, not verse, but it reads with a clarity and directness that still feel surprisingly modern. It is also one of the most readily available free translations online — a great option for readers who want to dip into the text without committing to a purchase, or for students on a budget. The tone is plain, conversational, unadorned: the Odyssey as a novel rather than an epic poem.

A. T. Murray (1919, revised by George E. Dimock, 1995). The Loeb Classical Library edition is a facing-page translation: Greek on the left-hand page, English on the right. Murray's English is old-fashioned now — Edwardian prose, formal and a little stiff — but it has the virtue of being literal and accurate, and it is still the standard facing-page edition for readers who want to check the Greek alongside the English. The Loeb is available as two small, well-made hardcover volumes (Harvard University Press), pocket-sized and built to travel. For students of Greek, or for readers who want to feel the physical presence of the original text beside the translation, this is indispensable.

E. V. Rieu (1946, revised by D. C. H. Rieu, 1991). The original Penguin Classics translation, and for decades the Odyssey most widely read in British schools. Rieu was an editor, not a poet, and his translation is deliberately prosaic — he set out, he said, to make Homer "read like a modern novel." The result is lucid, readable, and frequently charming, though some readers find it flat. The revised edition by his son D. C. H. Rieu, in consultation with the Homer scholar Peter Jones, updates the language where it has dated and restores a little more of the original's poetry. Still an excellent choice for a first-time reader who wants the story unobscured by self-conscious stylistic flourishes.

Richmond Lattimore (1965). Lattimore was a poet and classical scholar whose translation of the Iliad (1951) is still regarded by many classicists as the gold standard for Homeric translation into English verse. His Odyssey is written in a six-beat, loosely dactylic line that is probably the closest any English translation has come to reproducing the rhythm and the cadence of the original hexameter. It is a deliberately austere translation, eschewing ornament in favor of fidelity to Homer's syntax and vocabulary. Some readers find it slow or difficult at first; others find it hypnotic, the closest thing in English to the experience of hearing Homer recited. Not the easiest first read, but perhaps the most rewarding for readers who will return to the poem.

Robert Fitzgerald (1961). Fitzgerald, like Lattimore, was both a poet and a scholar — a translator of Virgil and Sophocles as well as Homer. His Odyssey is written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), and it is, by any standard, a magnificent piece of English poetry. Fitzgerald makes no attempt to reproduce the dactylic hexameter; instead, he absorbs Homer into the great tradition of English narrative verse that runs from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton. The result is lush, lyrical, and extraordinarily readable — the most purely enjoyable of the mid-century translations, and for many readers still the best single introduction to the poem in English. The opening lines — "Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending" — are among the most famous in modern Homeric translation.

Allen Mandelbaum (1990). Mandelbaum, an American poet, had already produced widely praised translations of the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy before turning to the Odyssey. His translation is in free verse, written in a supple, flexible line that reads easily without sacrificing the dignity of the original. He is particularly good with the similes — those extended comparisons that Homer uses to anchor the action in the world of nature and everyday life — and with the speeches, which come across as natural spoken English without becoming colloquial. A good middle-of-the-road choice: more poetic than Rieu or Butler, less demanding than Lattimore, less deliberately lyrical than Fitzgerald.

Robert Fagles (1996). Fagles was the third in the great mid-century triumvirate of American Homer translators (with Fitzgerald and Lattimore), and his Odyssey — published towards the end of his career, after his Iliad (1990) — is probably the most widely read English translation today. Fagles writes in a free verse line that is deliberately modern, conversational, even colloquial at times. He is not afraid to bend the literal sense of the Greek if it will make the English live. His Odysseus is a distinctly modern hero: a man we would recognize, quick-witted, articulate, charming, dangerous. The introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, one of the great modern Homer scholars, are alone worth the price of the book. This is probably the best all-around recommendation for a first-time reader in 2024: it is fast, vivid, gripping, and genuinely fun to read, though some scholars object to its liberties with the original.

Emily Wilson (2017). The first complete translation of the Odyssey by a woman into English, and the most important new translation of the twenty-first century so far. Wilson, a British classicist and poet, makes no bones about her agenda: she wants to strip away the accumulated layers of "Homeric grandeur" that have been deposited by centuries of male translators, and to return the reader to a Homer whose language is sharp, clear, and — above all — fast. Her iambic pentameter lines are shorter than Fitzgerald's, deliberately unadorned, almost plain. The famous opening line — "Tell me about a complicated man" — is already a cause célèbre: wilfully unpoetic, deliberately provocative, entirely characteristic. This is a translation that will make you see familiar episodes with new eyes, whether you are reading the poem for the first time or the tenth.

Facing-Page Greek Editions

For readers who are learning Greek, or who simply want to have the original text beside the translation, the standard edition is the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), in two volumes, with the Murray/Dimock English translation on the facing page. The Greek text used in the Loeb is the Oxford Classical Text edition of T. W. Allen — a conservative text, established in the early twentieth century, that is still the default for most scholarly purposes.

More advanced readers may prefer the Oxford Classical Text (Oxford University Press) itself, edited by M. L. West (2017). West's edition is the product of a lifetime of Homeric scholarship, and it differs in many hundreds of readings from the older Allen text; it is accompanied by a critical apparatus (at the foot of each page) that records the variant readings from the medieval manuscripts and ancient papyrus fragments. West has also published a separate two-volume commentary on the Odyssey — the most detailed and up-to-date line-by-line commentary in English, and an indispensable reference for serious students.

Commentaries and Study Guides

The great comprehensive commentary on the Odyssey in English is the Heubeck-West-Hainsworth commentary, published in three volumes by Cambridge University Press between 1988 and 1992 (officially titled A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey, edited by Alfred Heubeck, Stephanie West, and J. B. Hainsworth). It is directed primarily at scholars and advanced students, with heavy use of untranslated Greek and technical philological discussion; but even for less advanced readers, the introductions to each book, the textual notes, and the discussions of the major themes are invaluable.

For first-time readers looking for a less daunting companion, the best single-volume guide is probably Barry B. Powell's Homer (Wiley-Blackwell, second edition 2013), which includes chapters on both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the historical background, the oral tradition, the gods, the heroes, and the afterlife of the poems. Charles Segal's The Poet's Progress: The Narrative Art of Homer's Odyssey is a more specialized literary reading — a short, brilliant book by one of the great American classicists of the late twentieth century, devoted to the craft of the Odyssey as a story. And for readers who want a book-by-book summary with key terms and discussion questions, the Cambridge Companions to Homer (two volumes, one for each epic) offer essays by a wide range of contemporary scholars, pitched at the advanced undergraduate level but accessible to any serious reader.

The most important advice, however, is the simplest: pick a translation and begin. The Odyssey has survived three thousand years of readers, and it will survive the choices you make about which edition to buy. There is no "wrong" translation. There is only the translation that you, in your particular moment as a reader, are able to hear.