Best translation of The Odyssey: which one should you read?

The Italians have a saying, I’m told: "tradurre, tradire". With a fun wordplay which, appropriately, can’t be rendered into English, it effectively means "to translate, to betray".

There you have it: translating is betraying.

The nuances and behaviours of different languages leave shades of meaning and implication untransferable from one language to another – and that’s before you get to the thorny issues of poetry and translating verse. Literary translation is a game played with these parameters: what to lose, what to sacrifice, what type of encounter are you sculpting for your reader.

All this makes the issue of choosing a translation a rather thorny one. If you’re considering picking up The Odyssey for the first time with a certain major blockbuster releasing very soon, you might be wondering: which edition of the text is right for me? This article will take you through some of the issues you may want to consider, and help you decide which of the various translations to pick up.

Verse or prose?

First, decide whether you’d like a prose or verse translation. If you go for prose, E. V. Rieu's classic prose translation of The Odyssey is literally the cornerstone of all Penguin Classics, so you’d be in considerably good company making it a piece of English literary history in its own right. These were my first exposure to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and hold a special place in my heart. (I once heard a student describe hearing them broadcast on the radio as an evacuee in World War Two). 

There are other excellent, modern prose editions too. However, let’s assume you do want to read a verse edition. Now, I have a bias here: I teach the Homer’s Odyssey reading group: in translation course here at the City Lit, and when I took over the course I advocated strongly that we switch to a verse edition.

It’s my belief that you are experiencing something closer to the original by reading a verse version, composed at a time when written prose fiction hadn’t even been invented. Which is mind-boggling. As Emily Wilson puts it, ‘it reads nothing like prose and nothing like any spoken or non-poetic form of discourse’. It’s also likely to be fewer words on the page, with space around the text allowing it to breathe.

Three major translators: the big picture

So, which verse edition to go for? Let’s focus mainly on three big contenders here: Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, and Emily Wilson.

Robert Fitzgerald

Hailing from 1961, Fitzgerald’s is the senior of this triumvirate, and with plaudits from such luminaries as Ezra Pound, this comes with serious caché. It should be mentioned that the Fitzgerald uses ‘Greek-style’ spellings of the names, such as Akhilleus for Achilles: great for Academy-busting purposes, but it might not exactly invite you in as a first-time reader (not that the ‘standard’ spellings are much easier to figure out: how are you meant to know how to pronounce ‘Diomedes’, honestly).

Robert Fagles

Fagles announces his intention to ‘find a middle ground…between the features of Homer’s performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader’. Fagles’ metre is a little less tight than the others’, with as many as seven or as few as three beats- per-line. Fagles explains this as ‘a kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation’, and one that he’s happy to be more flexible on than the others.

Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson’s translation, meanwhile, is built for speed. For Wilson, rapidity and pace are the biggest things to communicate in a translation: the original narrative is designed to have oomph and drive, so a wordy translation will, to go back to our Italian proverb, betray that. To some, this means expending too much musicality. Joyce Carol Oates described it, rather disparagingly, as ‘plainspoken’, and substantially prefers the recent Daniel Mendelsohn translation, which uses a longer six-foot meter rather than Wilson’s pentameters. I won’t go into the details and travails of metre here, but essentially a shorter line means you can fit less information in, obviously, and Emily Wilson’s fits into the same number of lines as Homer, using shorter lines (five feet instead of six). That essentially means that some words or ideas in Homer might not make it into Wilson’s translation. It’s a tradeoff of fidelity against punchiness. Certainly I’ve read some Twitter / X rants condemning Wilson for slicing through the Gordian knot of complexity, but, to own up to my own biases again, I use the Wilson translation in my own courses.

Labelling Wilson’s as a more ‘feminist’ translation is slightly reductive, but it’s not without reason: choices have been made to draw the reader’s attention to the dynamics of power and gender in the work. She’s not inserting anything that isn’t there in the Greek, just bringing it back to the fore.

On the subject of pronunciation, the guides in the back of Wilson’s edition is also very helpful.

The audiobook option

While I’ve never tried this myself, listening to a translation via audiobook is a great way to experience the ‘spoken-ness’ of the work, which was never intended to be read as a book. The Odyssey is oral in origins. Of course, it’s still a world away from sitting in a smoky hall listening to a bard with his lyre, but in some roundabout way, it might be closer to ‘what the creator intended’.

There’s an excellent audiobook version of the Fagles translation read by living legend Ian McKellen, and a version of the Emily Wilson translation read by Claire Danes, of Homeland fame — so your preference here may come down to which voice speaks best to you. (There’s quite a lot that connects Homeland to The Odyssey, actually – but that’s a story for another day.)

Just stay away from the much-discussed new version by ElevenLabs, starring the AI voice of Michael Caine – you probably want your audiobook experience read by an actual human, and one that doesn’t destroy the planet in the process.

In depth: three translations, side-by-side

By way of illustration, let’s take a climactic episode: the death of the maids. Hopefully this isn’t a spoiler (I’m going to assume the statute of limitations has passed on this one) but, in the climactic beats of Odysseus’ battle to regain his palace, several of the maidservants (female slaves) are executed for their apparent loyalty to the suitors, who have been eating Odysseus out of house and home. It’s a chilling bit of realpolitik, and a useful point for translation comparison, chiefly because (in my view) the narrative voice’s sympathy diverges from the will of our main characters, who we might elsewhere sympathise with. There’s a key simile about birds here, which offers a great clue for how we’re supposed to feel about this moment – whatever the maids were in life, in death they are abject and defenseless, summarily executed by Odysseus’ young son, Telemachus, no less.

Each translation here reveals something about the choices and strategies of the translator.

The Fitzgerald 

Let’s look first at the Fitzgerald:

He tied one end of a hawser to a pillar

And passed the other about the roundhouse top,

Taking the slack up, so that no one’s toes

would touch the ground. They would be hung like doves

Or larks in springès triggered in a thicket,

Where the birds think to rest – a cruel nesting.

So now in turn each woman thrust her head

Into a noose and swung, yanked high in air,

To perish there most piteously.

Their feet danced for a little, but not long.

There’s a lot to like here: the ghoulish metaphor of the dancing feet is a standout, and I almost wonder if Fitzgerald has deliberately bucked the metre’s flow in ‘passed the other about’ in order to create an unsettling disruption: why not just say ‘passed the other round’? However, the hypothetical, conditional phrasing of ‘they would be hung’ is done with close reference to the Greek, but it takes the impact and immediacy out of the moment somewhat.

Your enjoyment of this might depend on how much you tolerate words like ‘springès’, which I certainly had to look up and I imagine you did too. (A few lines earlier, Fitzgerald describes the maids as ‘trulls’, a 16th-century term for prostitutes.) A good translation might also help us to imagine this hunting-snare for birds in a thicket (are they all hung by the neck in this trap, or by the hunter later?). I’ve certainly never encountered such a thing, and arguably the vocabulary choices are getting in my way here. As a product dating back to the Sixties, Fitzgerald might not be your first choice — and that goes for the Lattimore too.

The Fagles

Now for the Fagles:

With that, taking a cable used on a dark-prowed ship

He coiled it over the roundhouse, lashed it fast to a tall column,

Hoisting it up so high no toes could touch the ground.

Then, as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings

Against some snare rigged up in thickets – flying in

For a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them –

So the women’s necks were trapped in a line,

Nooses yanking their necks up, one by one

So all might die a pitiful, ghastly death…

they kicked up heels for a little – not for long.

Immediately we can see the latitude gained by the extra metric feet per line, affording space for the rather resonant kenning ‘dark-prowed’. the enjambment of ‘flying in / for a cozy nest’ reinforces that sense of a nasty surprise, and there’s great punchline drama created by that last dash before the ‘not for long’. Very little not to appreciate here.

The Wilson

Finally, here’s Emily Wilson’s version:

At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope

Round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar,

Stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground.

As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly

Home to their nests, but someone sets a trap –

They crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;

Just so the girls, their heads all in a row,

Were strung up with the noose around their necks

To make their death an agony. They gasped,

Feet twitching for a while, but not for long.

To me, Wilson’s choices really shine here. Wilson is relatively against the Fitzgerald philosophy of using words which are archaic and unknown to the reader: she is trying to keep it punchy and immediate, and we really see that here. On a level of craft, it takes a lot to say so much in such simple language. Wilson has no problem repeating the round-idea of the winding, which certainly doesn’t strike my ear as a problem (not all repetition is bad!). The mention of the ship is lost — but maybe it didn't matter that much anyway. The bitter bedtime clinches it, the alliteration helping the phrase strike as the grim punchline.

Elsewhere, Wilson avoids the ambiguous term maids — easily misinterpreted as some kind of Downton Abbey domestic servant — and prefers slaves, which is probably important.

Honourable mention: Alexander Pope

A number of archaic and dialect touches mean that reading a 16th-century translation for us might be the best way to experience Homer as Plato and Alexander the Great did – if you’re happy to dispense with Emily Wilson’s idea that pace is king, Pope’s translation is in rhyming iambic pentameter, and is seriously vintage in vibe. 

My final verdict

Sometimes, the differences are down to philosophy or methodology, sometimes it’s more random, a question of which moments or notes the translator really wants to stick out.

There’s very little to de-recommend the Fagles, unless you happen to instinctively prefer the Wilson (which, as you may have noticed, I do). 
In the example of the maids passage, all three really bring out the ghastliness of the death as a horrific form of rest, which is neatly juxtaposed with Odysseus and Penelope’s reconciliation over the famous bed in the next book.

And if you’re interested in delving in further, check out the reading group courses which run at the City Lit, or other courses in the Ancient Languages and Civilisations department.

Still confused!

Go for Fagles for poetry and accuracy, or Emily Wilson if you want a straight-to-the-point version which also grapples with the gender politics of the poem. 

Quick comparison table of major Odyssey translations

Study at City Lit

Interested in delving in further? Check out the reading group courses which run at the City Lit, or other courses in the Ancient Languages and Civilisations department.