Daniel Mendelsohn, Translator of the Odyssey, Brings Homer’s Epic to Life at Utah

Daniel Mendelsohn has spent six and a half years completing a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press—the publisher’s first since Richmond Lattimore’s influential 1962 edition. The author of the acclaimed memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), which recounts his father’s enrollment in his freshman Odyssey seminar, Mendelsohn brings both scholarly rigor and personal insight to Homer’s epic of suffering and homecoming.

Speaking on September 24 in the Moot Courtroom of the S.J. Quinney College of Law with Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center, Mendelsohn challenged common assumptions about why new translations emerge. Despite sixty English translations since World War II, he emphasized that “translation, particularly of a work that is so important and has been translated so many times, is collaborative rather than competitive.”

This collaborative spirit shapes his technical approach. Unlike most modern translators who compress Homer’s expansive seventeen-syllable lines into English’s more natural ten-syllable blank verse, Mendelsohn preserves the original’s “waltz-like rhythm” and rolling elasticity. His attention extends to Homer’s sound patterns—transforming passages where Greek’s mournful long a sounds evoke death into English’s sadder ooh and oh sounds. His translation of the famous epithet polytropos at the poem’s opening underwent last-minute revision when a frustrating encounter at a traffic roundabout provided the perfect solution: roundabout ways.

At the heart of Mendelsohn’s reading lies the paradox of identity over time. This tension between continuity and change permeates the poem’s recognition scenes, where Odysseus must prove “he is the same person who left, but he isn’t the same person who left.” This enduring instability makes Odysseus surprisingly contemporary—“a guy with a shifty identity traveling through a world in which there are no rules anymore.” Unlike the Iliad’s warriors with their fixed heroic codes, Odysseus embodies constant adaptation. His name itself encodes this duality, meaning one who causes and suffers aggravation.

Rather than smoothing Homer’s textual features for modern readers, Mendelsohn preserves the repetitive epithets and formulaic phrases that serve not only as motifs, but also functioned as markers in the epic’s memorized oral performance over millennia. As he affirmed: “I have great faith in the intelligence of my readers. This is a 3,000 year old artifact from a very different culture. And some of it is gonna be weird—that’s fine.”

Mendelsohn’s lecture coincided with a “Homerathon” reading on September 24th and 25th of the entire Odyssey—in Mendelsohn’s translation—in the courtyard of the Languages and Communications Building. Participants included faculty, students, and the occasional precocious child, who donned laurel wreaths, braved the occasional drizzle of rain, and read all 12,000 dactylic hexameter lines. The marathon reading was organized by the University of Utah chapter of the classics honors society Eta Sigma Phi (ΗΣΦ) and Jordan Johansen, the Department of World Languages and Cultures, and the Tanner Humanities Center.