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Scott Black: Why do we need old books? Why do we read old books? How do you translate and update classic works for a modern audience? Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I am Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I’m delighted to be joined by Daniel Mendelsohn to discuss his new translation of The Odyssey, with Jordan Johansen, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Utah.

Through his many essays, books, and now his wonderful new translation, Dr. Mendelsohn is one of our best contemporary guides to Homer’s Odyssey. His translation is notable for being both faithful to the original and a wonderful English poem in its own right—recreating Homer’s Greek poetry in our language and enabling this great classic to continue to speak to us.

Jordan Johansen: How are you?

Daniel Mendelsohn: I’m good. How are you?

Jordan Johansen: Good! I thought the event was so interesting—so great. Thank you. I’d heard you talk; I did my PhD at the University of Chicago.

So I heard you talk—was that two years ago when you came?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Oh, in Chicago? Yeah.

Jordan Johansen: Yeah, that was fun. So it’s been a few years. I got to follow this translation, and I was really excited that you were coming.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Oh, great. Thank you.

Jordan Johansen: My students were really excited that you were coming as well.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Excellent.

Jordan Johansen: That’s one of the things I wanted to start with. We had a whole marathon on Monday and Wednesday—really directed by the students—and we read your translation. The students wanted to read your translation since you were coming, and we spent fifteen hours, sometimes out in the rain, reading.

Daniel Mendelsohn: No way!

Jordan Johansen: Yeah! About 150 people came by.

Daniel Mendelsohn: That’s amazing.

Jordan Johansen: Really exciting. We read aloud for hours, and it was such a different experience. I’ve listened to your audiobook, I’ve read the translation, but actually sitting in community with students, faculty, and staff—physically reading it aloud—was such a different experience for me. I could really hear the poetry and feel the poetry in my mouth. So I wanted to ask you: when you were thinking about this translation, but also when you were actually doing it, how did reading aloud—the physical experience of sound and orality—affect the way you translated?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Oh, very much. I was very conscious of wanting to create a translation that had a degree of musicality—because meter is what sets verse apart from prose. When one reads Homer in Greek, one is very aware of the meter in a way that I don’t think one necessarily is in many English translations, particularly those that use blank verse or iambic pentameter.

Because one of my priorities was to try to find a way to recreate the line, I really thought a lot about crafting each line in a way that forced you to feel the rhythms and the music. My typical process was to do about thirty lines a day—that was a day’s work.

First I’d do a rough draft for sense, then research to make sure I was getting everything right, and then I had to fit it into the metrical form I was using. Then I read it aloud to myself, because quite often what works silently doesn’t sound right when spoken. A line might look fine on the page—I’d think, “Okay, it’s got the right meter”—but when I read it aloud, I’d realize the rhythms of natural English speech weren’t quite working.

So I thought a lot about that, and I’m very happy to hear it seems to have worked.

Jordan Johansen: I think it worked brilliantly. When I was reading aloud, you could really feel the alliterations and even the enjambment—that’s what I was so impressed with. It’s one of my favorite parts about Homer, and there were times when I thought, “I’m reading this wrong because there’s an enjambment,” but I realized—that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Absolutely. Yeah, I tried to recreate the enjambment whenever possible. Obviously, English and Greek have different syntaxes, and you can’t always do it, but whenever I felt that Homer enjambs in a very pointed way, I would try not to shy away from it. I think it’s very important—a lot of people don’t pay attention to that—but it’s one of the most important tools in Homer’s toolkit.

Jordan Johansen: Your translation, for me, is one I’d want Greek students to read, because it captures so much of what I love in the Greek: the sound, the alliteration, the physicality of the words, and the enjambments with their shifting meanings. That’s often missing in other translations. And it follows the Greek closely—the fidelity is there. It’s a translation that helps readers understand how deep the Greek really is.

Daniel Mendelsohn: That’s great. Thank you.

Jordan Johansen: This is my second year at the University of Utah. I’m trained as an ancient historian and classicist, but I never thought I’d be teaching so much Homer. I’m a real generalist here, which has been really fun. This is my first year teaching Homer. I’d taught a little before in Greek civilization classes, but this year I got to teach him in the Great Books course, and I’m also teaching classical mythology.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Oh, excellent.

Jordan Johansen: I loved your memoir, which I read a few years ago. I didn’t have a typical classics background—I never took that undergraduate freshman seminar in The Odyssey. I jumped into graduate school needing to learn the theology, the meter, and the dialects. Your memoir was like taking a class on how to teach Homer. So I was wondering: how did teaching the poem shape the way you translated it—and how did translating it change the way you now teach Homer?

Daniel Mendelsohn: I think the greatest intimacy one can have with a text is as a translator. I’ve taught this poem many times over the last three and a half decades, but translating it makes you get into the bones in a totally different way.

There were discoveries I made even after years of teaching it. For example, Eumaeus the swineherd—I noticed he’s very sarcastic. He has a sarcastic turn of phrase that I’d never paid attention to. When you’re reading the original text for scholarship, you’re reading passively. But when you’re translating, you have to embody the characters—you have to decide what they’re putting across.

So I noticed a lot about the characters I hadn’t before. You’ve got to give them a voice, and that means you’re acting a little bit through the translation. That forces you to wrestle with what’s going on in the text in a different way than when you’re just teaching or critiquing it.

Jordan Johansen: Yeah, that comes through. Eumaeus felt really different than I’d experienced before. There were a lot of funny moments I hadn’t noticed, and I loved every time you had “No one”—I smiled every time. It’s funny, it’s complicated, and I think that really comes out in your translation.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Oh, great—thank you.

Jordan Johansen: In eighth grade we read Huckleberry Finn, and my teacher said you should revisit it every ten years because while the book doesn’t change, you do. And that’s true—it feels new each time. I think The Odyssey is the same kind of book. You’ve taught it for decades, and every time you reread it, it’s something new.

You’ve written about reading and teaching it with your father, and I think the poem reveals different things depending on your stage of life. How has that changed for you over time?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Of course it changes. Any great text offers you different things at different times, because your own equipment keeps morphing. At first you’re drawn to the adventure stuff—that’s so appealing when you’re young. When I taught the seminar my father attended, I was in my early fifties and suddenly paying attention to the father–son relationships—Penelope and Telemachus, Telemachus and Odysseus, Odysseus and Laertes.

That had never struck me before. Now, in my sixties, I notice all the stuff about time—how the poem is preoccupied with what time does to our understanding of who we are and our ability to talk about what’s happened to us. Any great book should be reread every ten years because you’re a moving target. You’re not the same person. The “you” of high school is—hopefully—not the “you” of 55 or 65. The new you needs to re-experience it, and you’ll keep seeing different things depending on where you are in your own journey.

Jordan Johansen: Yeah. Last night you talked about Calypso asking, “Why would you go back to Penelope? She’s aging, she’ll only get older and uglier—why go back? I’m a goddess.” And yet Odysseus still chooses to go back to his aging wife. I’d read that many times but hadn’t thought about what that means as one ages—to have desire and heroism still present in old age.

You’ve said The Iliad is about youth cut short—you can’t imagine an old Achilles. That’s the point. But The Odysseygives us a hero who ages, grows, and changes. It’s such an interesting text for that reason—and an important one to teach young people.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Totally, yes.

Jordan Johansen: There are things that await you. You can read it now with great pleasure, but just think how much fun it’ll be to read it when you’re 35, then 55.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Absolutely.

Jordan Johansen: You’ve lived with The Odyssey for a long time, but now even more deeply—six and a half years wrestling with it. You talked about the prooimion, the opening line, and how it wasn’t until a week before the deadline that you changed it. Are there any passages that still nag at you—ones you’re not quite satisfied with?

Daniel Mendelsohn: I always think that rosy-fingered Dawn could still use improvement. I’m fine with what I did—“Then morning-born Dawn touched the sky with her fingertips of rose”—but originally I had something like, “Then Dawn, the daughter of morning, streaked the sky with pink fingers.”

What Homer’s thinking of is that early light when the gray sky starts to be streaked with rose. But it’s a metaphor, not a simile—you don’t want to say “like red roses.” I kept toying with things, never totally happy. I may revisit that before the paperback.

I think the first time anyone ever heard that phrase, rosy-fingered Dawn, they must have been gobsmacked—it’s so vivid. I’d like to find something not quite so tame—something that makes your eyes pop open. Maybe something with “blooming” or “streaking.” But “pink” doesn’t feel Homeric. I’m still thinking about it—hopefully the solution will pop into my head before we close out the paperback edition.

Jordan Johansen: Speaking of epithets—the “brow-bright,” “owl-eyed”—that’s my new favorite. I think it’ll enter the pantheon with rosy-fingered Dawn.

Daniel Mendelsohn: I hope so!

Jordan Johansen: “Gray-eyed Athena” never quite worked. I love how you traced the etymology of the word—it captures what’s unique about Athena. You learn more about her through that epithet. Kudos to you.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Thank you! I’m so happy to hear that. I think there’s something uncanny about Athena. I live in the country, and sometimes you walk into a barn and there’s an owl—it’s unnerving when that head turns toward you and those luminous eyes stare. That’s how the Greeks imagined her. You look at early vase paintings and the eyes are huge. You don’t want to be the object of that stare—unless she’s on your side.

Jordan Johansen: Reading aloud, those epithets teach you so much about character. Even when Telemachus isn’t acting sensibly, he’s still “the sensible lad”—he has to grow into it.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Exactly.

Jordan Johansen: I’m glad you kept the epithets—that’s one of my favorite parts of Homer. And honestly, when you’re reading in grad school and racing through, you hit those and think, “Okay, I remember this part—I can get through it.”

Daniel Mendelsohn: Believe me, when you’re translating, that happens too—you think, “Wait, I’ve done these thirty lines. I can go have lunch early.”

Jordan Johansen: We’re getting near the end of our time, and a lot of our students will be listening. We have some amazing Classics students here.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yeah, I met some—blown away.

Jordan Johansen: And we have a lot just beginning Greek and Latin. They’d stop by our marathon and say, “Can you really learn ancient Greek?” and I’d say, “In fact, you can—right here, I’ll teach you!” Do you have any advice for students starting out with the languages? It’s hard—you get bogged down in -mi verbs and start dragging. What advice would you give to inspire them?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Greek and Latin are difficult languages, with many more complexities than English, syntactically and grammatically. I always say: don’t approach learning a language as an exercise in finding out what the words mean in English.

When you learn a new language, you’re learning how those people thought. The structure of the language is the key to how they thought—and that’s exciting. It’s like a key to a door. The fact that Greek has a middle voice—somewhere between active and passive—is really interesting. It tells you a lot about them. The fact that Greek has definite and indefinite articles, and Latin doesn’t—that’s interesting too.

If you think of it as a portal to understanding how a civilization understands itself, rather than “What does this verb mean?” or “I have to memorize the principal parts,” it’ll be more fun. Words like themis—an idea of what’s just in a cosmic sense—are related to the verb meaning “to place” or “to set down.” That tells you something about their worldview.

It’s not just “Now I can read ten lines of The Iliad” or “Now I can read Plato’s Apology.” It’s “Now I understand how these people thought.” That’s much more exciting. It’s a carrot to keep dangling in front of yourself, because it isn’t easy. But the payoff is huge. As I said in my remarks, this is a language in which you can express to soldiers about to be killed—in one word—so much. That’s pretty cool.

So just keep your eye on the prize—and remember what the prize is, which is not “Now I know how -mi verbs are conjugated.”

Jordan Johansen: Yeah.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Thank you so much.

Jordan Johansen: Oh, my pleasure. This has been really great.

Scott Black: You’ve been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our theme music is Jelly Roll Morton’s “Perfect Rag.” Thanks for joining us.