Translations
a lumbering rhythm, no inaptly
compared,by someauthor,to the noiseofpumpkins roll ng on a
barn-floor.
Anonymousreviewer of Derby' s Iliad
Odyssey. George Steiner's Homer in English(London: Penguin, 1996) reprints selections
from many of these and more besides. The changes from the dactylic hexameters of the
original are both dramatic and diverse. You will also find in this list of translators,
authors who are famous in their own right. Retellings of the Odysseyare in a separate
bibliography.
. London,: Dent 1948.
. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929. [Verse, a
school edition.]
The Odyssey of Homer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1871. {Blank
verse. Also, The Iliad. Both use Latinate names: Jupiter ( not Zeus), Ulysses (not
Odysseus).]
. London, 1874.
The Odyssey of Homer. London, 1879; New York:
Modern Library, [n.d.] {Prose. Lang also did abbreviated retellings for children.]
The Odyssey of Homer. 1900. Ed. Louise Ropes Loomis. New York:
Walter J. Black, 1944. Rpt. Write Together, 2000. [Also The Iliad, 1898. Butler’s
translations were preceded by an 1897 book in which he argues that the Odyssey
was written by a woman, and furthermore, “young, headstrong, and unmarried”
(142).]
The Odyssey. London, 1923.
Homerica.Ed. Allardyce Nicoll. 2nded. London: Routledge, 1967. Rpt. Welcome
Rain, 2001. [The great Elizabethan translator inspired John Keats's sonnet, "On
First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816).]
The Odyssey. 2nded. New York: Norton, 1967. [The translation used in the
Norton Critical Edition.]
,H. B. Homer's Odyssey: A Line-for-line Translation in the Metre of the
Original. Illus. Patten Wilson. London: G. G. Harrap, 1911.
. London, 1700.
The Odyssey. Lewes: Book Guild, [1994?]. [The translator describes
his effort as "entirely devoid of literary merit" and accompanies it with
commentary explaining which passages should be omitted (for example, Book 8)
because he believes that they are later additions to the original.]
The Odyssey of Homer. London, 1869.
The Odyssey. Intro. Bernard Knox. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.
[Fagles's translation is currently the translation of choice. It is unrhymed verse,
with lines of irregular length and number of stressed syllables. His Iliad won the
1991 Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets.]
The Odyssey. 1961. Illus. Hans Erni. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963.
Rpt. Illus. Jackie Schuman. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990. Rpt. Farrar, 1998.
[In poetry, unrhymed and with lines of uneven length; winner of the 1961
Bollingen Award for the best translation of a poem into English. Also The Iliad,
1974. Fitzgerald's Odysseywas the standard choice of its day. See also, Ralph
Hexter's A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of
Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Vintage Random House, 1993.]
. Gerald Duckworth, 2000.
. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Rpt.
HarperCollins, 1999. [Also The Iliad,1951. As Fitzgerald's Odysseywas the
standard, so Lattimore's Iliad, which so dominated its age that a 293-page
commentary based upon the translation was eventually published. A six-stress
line that usually runes line-for-line with the original Greek. See also, Peter V.
Jones's Companion, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988.]
[Lombardo begins, "Speak, Memory." His irregular lines are grouped into
irregular, poetic stanzas.]
. London, 1948.
. London, 1903-10.
The Odyssey of Homer. Illus. Marialuisa de Romans. Berkeley:U of
California P, 1990. [Five-stress, unrhymed lines that do not attempt to be line-for-
line with the Greek. Mandelbaum is a polymath, with translations of Vergil and
Dante also to his credit.]
The Odyssey of Homer, Done into English Verse. London, 1887.
The Odyssey. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1919, 1984. Rev. George E.
Dimmock, 1995. [A prose version, part of the venerable Loeb Classical Library
series, which prints Greek text on the left side of the page, literal translation on
the right.]
. London, 1865.
The Odyssey of Homer. Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1884, 1912,
1921. Rpt. Dover, 1999. [In prose, a popular school text in the first half of the 20th
century.]
TheOdysseyofHomer. 1725. Illus. John Flaxman. New York: Heritage,
1942. [ Heroic couplets.]
The Odyssey of Homer. New York: Random House, 1960. Rpt. Prentice
Hall, 1990.
. London, 1946. Rpt. Viking Penguin, 1992. [Prose. Also, The
Iliad,1950. Inspired a poem, whose title, "On Looking into E. V. Rieu's Homer"
(by Kavanagh 333-34), is also a nod to Keats's earlier sonnet of similar name.
Although Rieu’s Odysseyis not a popular choice today, it “marks the greatest
single ‘hit’ in Penguin’s publishing history”—with the possible exception of Lady
Chatterley’s Lover(Steiner, "Introduction," Homer in Englishxvii).
. London, 1932. Rpt. NAL 1999. [Prose. Lillian E.
Doherty, "On Teaching Homer from Translations," Classical JournalDec.-Jan.
1986: 161-66, calls Rouse "glib," Rieu "stodgy."]
. New York, 1932/Oxford, 1935,
1956. [Prose. One of Doherty's (see above) favorites, although also one with a
large number of errors.]
Homer, The Odyssey. World's Classics. Intro. G. S. Kirk. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1980. [Includes an Epilogue on translation.]
The Odyssey of Homer. London, 1834.