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SKU: 9780241733585-1 Category: Uncategorised

T&L: The Odyssey

Homer, Daniel Mendelsohn

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
SKU: 9780241733585-1 Category: Uncategorised
Hardback

£30.00

Out of stock

Description

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.

Publisher Review

Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek... Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... 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 -- Edith Hall * The Telegraph * Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem's language and thought but also to its formal properties * Deborah Roberts, Haverford College * Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer's Greek ... A momentous achievement * Rosanna Warren * The expertly crafted work of a true scholar-poet, Mendelsohn's rich and rhythmical version hews closely to the Homeric verse-line - it feels like the original ... this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic * Richard P. Martin, Stanford University * Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule * Sebastian Barry * His knowledge as a renowned classicist, his ear and eye for sound and image, his acuity in rendering the circuitous yet also self-arresting syntax, and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond ... [a] triumph * Jorie Graham * Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing ... take[s] us deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetr * Joyce Carol Oates * Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity... He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane * Michael Chabon * Neither jarringly contemporary nor distractingly archaic, Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliant and necessary translation of The Odyssey is a testament to the enduring power and grace and beauty of Homer's narrative * Francine Prose * History's greatest adventure story brought to us anew by America's greatest living classicist-this is fast, fluent, thrilling, and a hugely impressive accomplishment * Lee Child *

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