The Odyssey with Daniel Mendelsohn

Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy's hallowed keep…

Thus begins Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey from the University of Chicago Press, a searingly faithful—and yet absolutely original—new translation of the best-know epic in the Western canon. Please join him at Clio's on Wednesday, May 7th, to celebrate and discuss the gripping adventure, profound human insight, and powerful themes that make Homer’s work continue to resonate today.

Widely known for his essays bringing classical literature and culture to mainstream audiences in the New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn eschews the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—in order to bring the Odyssey to life in all its archaic grandeur. In this line-for-line rendering, the long, six-beat line he uses, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each Greek line without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result is a magnificent feat of translation. Supported by an extensive introduction, notes, and commentary, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this enduringly influential masterpiece.

Clio's is fully dedicating the evening to this event; your ticket includes entry to a reception following the discussion at which we will be serving Greek food and wine to exalt Homer's hero and Daniel's efforts.

Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

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