The Iliad and the Odyssey are often regarded as being among the greatest works of world literature and many people have an interest in reading them—but how does one go about starting? Which translations are the best? In what manner should one read them? In this post, I will give advice in response to all these questions and discuss both the strengths and shortcomings of the most widely read translations, drawing on my experience as someone who has a master’s degree in classics, knows Ancient Greek, and has read the epics in the original Greek as well as in multiple translations.
Important context for understanding Homeric poetry
Before one begins reading the Iliad or the Odyssey, it is important to recognize several facts about the poems. The first is that they were composed nearly 2,700 years ago for an audience who had very different literary expectations and background knowledge from the average contemporary reader.
As I have discussed many times before on this blog, the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally composed and performed orally. A performer of oral poetry would not memorize the entire epics word-for-word, but instead would go into each performance with a mental outline of the story and an assemblage of epithets and stock phrases known as formulae, such as “swift-footed godlike Akhilleus,” “son of Atreus king of men,” “Zeus-sprung son of Laërtes much-devising Odysseus,” or “he spoke with winged words.”
The poet would then perform by composing each line as he went along to fit the story he had memorized, filling out lines using these formulae while he composed the next line in his head. Literary references and artistic depictions attest that poets often used a stick to keep rhythm while they performed.
At first, the poems were fairly fluid and poets felt free to change things up based on factors such as the audience for whom they were performing or how the last audience responded to certain elements. Over time, however, the Homeric epics became more fixed and less subject to these sorts of revisions on a whim. Some version of the Iliad most likely became relatively fixed by around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE and a version of the Odyssey by the middle of the same century.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were initially just two of the dozens of epic poems that are known to have circulated orally during the Archaic and early Classical Periods of Greek history, but, starting around the final quarter of the sixth century BCE, these two epics exploded in popularity and gradually surpassed all the other epics of the time to become the foundational works of the emerging Greek literary canon. It was most likely around this time that the two epics were first written down in their entireties and began to circulate in written, rather than oral, form.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are composed in dactylic hexameter, which was the standard meter for Greek poetry dealing with lofty or heroic themes. In this meter, each line consists of six metrical “feet,” each of which must be either a dactyl (i.e., one long syllable followed by two short) or a spondee (i.e., two long syllables). On top of this, the Ancient Greek language had tonal rather than stress accents, similar to modern Turkish, Japanese, Basque, or Norwegian, which meant that, as a person spoke the language, their voice would naturally rise and fall in pitch according to the rules of accentuation.
Even though ancient performers of epic poetry did not literally “sing” in the modern sense, the combination of a set meter and tonal accents gave their performances a distinct rhythmic, musical quality. A performer of epic poetry was known as an ἀοιδός (aoidós), which literally means “singer” or “bard,” and the Homeric epics themselves regularly describe the process of performing epic poetry as “singing.”
The Iliad and the Odyssey are not composed in the ordinary spoken Greek of their original time and place. Instead, they are composed in an artificial literary dialect that was meant to sound lofty and archaic to their original audience. By the time the epics became widely popular and may have been first written down around the late sixth century BCE, their language would only have sounded even more archaic to the average native Greek speaker than it had originally.
Finally, the original ancient audiences of these epics came into their performances already highly familiar with all the gods and famous heroes who appear in them and with the myths that the poems themselves retell. As a result, the poems frequently introduce characters without explaining who they are and allude to figures from other poems and myths without elaborating on who they are or why they are significant because the poet assumes that the audience already knows this information.
ABOVE: Detail from the British Museum website showing an Attic red-figure neck-amphora attributed to the Kleophrades Painter dating to between c. 490 and c. 480 BCE, discovered at Vulci in Etruria, currently held in the British Museum, depicting an aoidos (i.e., a performer of epic poetry) standing on a bema (i.e., a platform) holding a knotted stick which he is using to keep the rhythm while he performs
Preparing to read Homer
Before one begins to read the Iliad, the Odyssey, or really any work of ancient Greek mythic poetry, I would recommend familiarizing oneself with the main characters and the basic outline of the story. This may sound like strange advice, since readers of contemporary fiction are often accustomed to avoiding “spoilers,” but developing prior knowledge of the characters and story actually brings one closer to the experience of ancient audiences, who, as I have said, would have already known the broad outlines of the myths the epics tell before they went to a performance of them.
If you haven’t already done so, I would recommend reading about Greek myth, learning who all the gods and famous heroes are, and reading a plot summary or abridged retelling of the epic you are planning to read before you begin.
I read both the Iliad and the Odyssey in translation for the first time when I was in seventh grade. By the time I started reading the Odyssey itself, I had already read Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels (which reference aspects of its plot), at least a dozen different books about Greek myth, the Wikipedia article about the Odyssey, the abridged retelling of the epic by George Herbert Palmer and Padraic Colum in P. F. Collier & Son Corporation’s Junior Classics volume four, and several other retellings, so I was already quite familiar with the story and found that this preexisting familiarity helped tremendously with understanding what I was reading at that early age.
The author-illustrator Gareth Hinds has published graphic novel retellings of both the Odyssey (2010) and the Iliad (2019) through Candlewick Press, which I have not personally read, but which others have recommended to me as being both highly accurate and beautifully illustrated. These may help readers to learn the epics’ basic plot outlines before they begin reading the actual epics. If you don’t want to spend the time and money on them, though, even reading just the Wikipedia summary beforehand will probably help.
ABOVE: Front covers of Gareth Hinds’s recent graphic novel adaptations of the Iliad and the Odyssey
Choosing a translation
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the main characters and basic plot outline of the Iliad and/or Odyssey, you are ready to research and pick out a translation.
At this point I must emphasize that all translations are imperfect and that no translation of any poem can ever fully capture both the precise literal meaning and poetic beauty of the original. If you want to get the most out of reading the Iliad or the Odyssey, then the only way to do it is to learn Ancient Greek and read those epics in their original language.
Learning Ancient Greek, however, is an immensely challenging endeavor that requires many years of effortful study and practice and it is even more challenging (bordering on impossible) to do on one’s own without a teacher. Most people cannot afford to invest the time, mental effort, and financial resources to learn a dead language just to be able to read poetry in it and that is fine. Anyone reading a translation, however, must be aware that what they are reading is not exactly the same thing that a Greek 2,650 years ago would have heard performed.
Furthermore, each translator of a work of literature has different priorities and goals. Some prioritize faithfulness to the literal meaning of the source text, some prioritize capturing the poetic quality of the original, some prioritize using language that is accessible to their particular audience, and some try to balance all of these priorities roughly equally.
This means that no translation can ever be objectively “the best” or “the worst”; different translations are useful for different audiences and purposes. Deciding on a translation is not about finding the “best” one, but rather about finding one that suits the needs and priorities of a particular reader.
Below I discuss the merits and shortcomings of different English-language Homeric translations, addressing them in the chronological order of when they were published.
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope’s translations of the Iliad (published in multiple volumes between 1715 and 1720) and the Odyssey (a collaboration with William Broome and Elijah Fenton, published in 1725 and 1726) have been considered classics of English-language poetry for three centuries now and many people today still revere them.
That being said, I am personally not a fan of Pope’s translations, mainly because he rendered them to fit a very eighteenth-century, Rococo-era English conception of “good poetry” and to me they resonate much more of Pope’s own milieu than of anything to do with Archaic Greece. Most overtly, because rhyme was a common expectation for eighteenth-century English poetry, Pope rendered both the Iliad and the Odyssey entirely in rhyming couplets.
Rhyming couplets, however, were not a feature of ancient Greek poetry at all, the original Homeric epics in Greek do not rhyme, and, in my opinion, Pope’s attempt to shoehorn the epics fit a strict rhyme scheme feels forced and unnatural, as well as singsong-y and frivolous in a way that detracts from the gravitas that gives the epics so much of their power in the original language.
In fairness to Pope, this may be partly because rhyme evokes very different associations for me than it did for English readers of his time. Eighteenth-century English readers associated rhyme with serious, traditional poetry, whereas I think most people of my generation associate it much more strongly with Dr. Seuss books for children, limericks, and pop song lyrics, so our culture has trained us to take rhyme less seriously.
Pope also replaces the Greek names for deities that are used in the original epics with the names of the Roman deities who were equated with them, since Roman names were more familiar to his eighteenth-century English audience. Modern audiences, however, who are more likely to be familiar with the Greek names than the Roman, may find it annoying or confusing to read a translation of a Greek epic full of references to “Jove,” “Minerva,” and “Neptune.” (For more on the history of names in English for the classical deities, see this post I wrote four and a half years ago.)
Faithfulness to the literal meaning of the Greek was not a high priority for Pope’s translations; he freely omitted epithets while adding descriptive words and embellishments not found in the original Greek to pad out his lines and fill out his rhyme scheme. Because of this, the renowned English classical scholar Richard Bentley (lived 1662 – 1742) famously quipped, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”
Last, but not least, Pope’s translations are now three centuries old, their language is fairly dated, and readers who are not accustomed to reading early eighteenth-century poetic English may not find them accessible.
Ultimately, though, my objections to Pope’s translations come down to taste. Readers who enjoy rhyming, descriptively ornate, eighteenth-century English poetry will love them. An additional plus is that, because Pope’s translations are now three centuries old, they are solidly in the public domain and you can easily find them for free in many places online.
ABOVE: Portrait of the eighteenth-century poet and translator Alexander Pope, painted by Michael Dahl c. 1727
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler’s translations of the Iliad (1898) and Odyssey (1900) are both in prose, are well over a century old at this point, and use fairly dated language. Additionally, like Pope’s translations, they substitute the Roman names for the Greek gods and heroes in the place of the Greek names. I do not recommend them and mention them only because a combination of Butler’s literary prestige due to his other works and the fact that they are in the public domain and therefore easy to find for free online or for cheap in print have kept people reading them.
I will say, however, that the 2013 Barnes & Noble hardcover deluxe edition of Butler’s translations (of which I own a copy) is quite possibly the most gorgeous edition of any ancient Greek text in translation that I have ever seen. It is a shame that the translation itself does not live up to the beauty of the volume.
A. T. Murray
A. T. Murray’s editions of the Odyssey (1919) and the Iliad (1924) for the Loeb Classical Library are useful for those who already know some Ancient Greek or are trying to learn. These editions feature the original Greek texts of the epics accompanied by a facing-page, very close prose translation. The original primary purpose of these translations was to serve as a guide for amateur scholars and students who were trying to read the epics in the original language.
For those who do not know Greek, however, I would not highly recommend Murray’s Loeb editions because they are in prose, they use language that was already archaic at the time they were published, and they were meant more as a study help than with literary style in mind, so they read fairly clunky even for prose. On top of all this, they are now over a century old, which makes their language seem even more archaic.
E. V. Rieu
I’ve already discussed the shortcomings of E. V. Rieu’s translations of the Odyssey (1946) and the Iliad (1950) at considerable length in this post I made several weeks ago. The short version is that I do not recommend them. They are mediocre prose translations whose main original purpose was to be accessible for a lay audience to read and understand, but they were published over three quarters of a century ago now and have since generally been surpassed in terms of accessibility by more recent verse translations, such as those of Fagles, Lombardo, Alexander, and Wilson.
Richmond Lattimore
If one wanted to find the exact opposite of Pope’s approach to Homer, one might find it in Richmond Lattimore’s verse translations of the Iliad (1951) and the Odyssey (1967), which generations of classics scholars have revered as the gold standard for closeness to the literal texts of the poems in the original Greek.
Lattimore retains virtually all of Homer’s formulaic language and adds very little embellishment. On top of this, instead of trying to fit any contemporary poetic fashion, he tries to imitate the approximate sound of poems’ original dactylic hexameter, which is something that very few modern translators have even tried to do.
The main reason why most translators have avoided trying to imitate dactylic hexameter is because English is a less inflected language than Greek and Latin and it relies on word order to convey meanings that Greek and Latin convey using inflection. As a result, word order in our language is less flexible. This makes it extremely difficult to use dactylic hexameter effectively, especially for long works such as epic poems.
Lattimore’s translations work around this issue by using a loose meter that sounds hexametric without strictly following that meter. A few other translators have tried to do something similar, but Lattimore is generally regarded as the most successful at it.
For all these reasons, Lattimore’s translations are highly favored among professional classicists and are commonly assigned in undergraduate Greek literature courses. Nonetheless, some contemporary English readers may find the Greek expressions and formulaic language he preserves strange, confusing, or repetitive and his quasi-hexameter makes his word order sometimes a bit unconventional, which may make his verse occasionally difficult for some readers to follow.
ABOVE: Covers of the most recent editions of Richmond Lattimore’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published by University of Chicago Press and Harper Perennial Modern Classics respectively
Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Fitzgerald is often regarded as one of the most poetically gifted modern Homeric translators and his renditions of the Odyssey (1961) and the Iliad (1974), published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, generally prioritize poetic beauty over both literal faithfulness and contemporary accessibility. In a sense, one could say that he is the twentieth-century modernist equivalent of Alexander Pope.
If Lattimore’s translations win favor among classical scholars, Fitzgerald’s win favor among poets and artists. In contrast to Lattimore, he significantly reduces Homer’s formulaic language, leaves out most of the epithets, and often deliberately echoes the language of Shakespeare. His translations are perhaps the most poetically brilliant to read.
Fitzgerald mostly uses a loose pentameter, but he doesn’t restrict himself to it and he plays around with different poetic forms in some places. For instance, in both epics, he renders Hermes’s speech using rhyming couplets, which evokes modern readers’ association of rhyme with folkloric tricksters such as Rumpelstiltskin. In the Odyssey Book 12, he renders the song of the Seirenes using shorter lines with rhyming couplets broken into four- or five-verse stanzas that are meant to evoke traditional English sailors’ ballads and sea shanties, even though, in Greek, the whole song is in the same meter as the rest of the poem.
Fitzgerald’s Iliad and Odyssey will always have a special place in my heart because they were the very first translations of the poems I ever read, the ones whose lines I memorized in middle school. My experience of re-reading his translations now, though, is that often I will find a line or phrase that is so powerful, beautiful, evocative, or profound that I have to look it up in the Greek, only to find that the line in Greek is really much flatter than what Fitzgerald has made it into. The same criticism that Bentley lodged against Pope’s translations could just as well apply to Fitzgerald’s.
On top of this, Fitzgerald’s translations are not the most accessible. He mostly uses direct transliterations of Greek names with diacritics, rather than the Latinized spellings that are more common. His spellings are more accurate to how the names are spelled and pronounced in Greek, but readers who are accustomed to the Latinized spellings may find his forms of names unfamiliar and confusing.
Fitzgerald’s language is also self-consciously archaizing (much like the language of the original epics in Greek). For instance, he often says “swine” instead of “pigs” and “beeves” instead of “cattle.” This makes his verse sound loftier, but it can make it harder for the average layperson to understand.
ABOVE: Front covers of Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Robert Fagles
Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad (1990) and the Odyssey (1996), published by Penguin Classics, prioritize poetic beauty and accessibility of language to a contemporary lay audience over literal faithfulness. They are known for being highly readable, clear in expression, and punchy. Like Fitzgerald, Fagles eliminates a large amount of the epics’ formulaic and repetitive language. His translations are more colloquial than most previous verse translations and sometimes use contemporary idioms and expressions that do not occur in the original Greek.
Fagles’s translations are arguably just as poetically moving as Fitzgerald’s, but in a different way. While Fitzgerald sounds profound and haunting with every line, Fagles has a simpler, understated beauty that still grips his readers. If Lattimore appeals to scholars and Fitzgerald to artists, Fagles appeals most strongly to students and general readers. His translations were the most widely read for over two decades until Emily Wilson’s translations came out and gave them a run for their money.
The popularity of Fagles’s translations with general readers is helped by the fact that the deckle-edged Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions of them are absolutely gorgeous, iconic, and easily stand out on any bookshelf.
Fagles’s translations, however, do not rate very highly in terms of closeness to the literal meaning of the Greek text. In fact, he is in some ways an even looser translator than Fitzgerald. Some have said that Fagles’s approach to translating “takes no prisoners” and critics of his translations have occasionally labeled them “Homer for bored undergraduates who want to get on with the action.”
ABOVE: Covers of Robert Fagles’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published by Penguin Classics
Stanley Lombardo
Stanley Lombardo’s translations of the Iliad (1997) and Odyssey (2000), both published by Hackett Publishing Company, eliminate nearly all of the poems’ formulaic language, are even looser and more colloquial than Fagles’s, and are strongly geared toward American general readers and undergraduate students.
The covers of Lombardo’s translations emphasize their very modern, specifically American focus. The cover of his Iliad bears Robert F. Sargent’s iconic photograph Into the Jaws of Death showing U.S. soldiers disembarking at Omaha Beach on D-Day, while the cover of his Odyssey bears William Anders’s photo Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 while orbiting the moon on December 24, 1968. The purpose of putting these modern photos on the covers is clearly to foreground the association between the ancient epics and the twentieth-century American experience.
This American focus also influences Lombardo’s translation choices. He incorporates allusions to works of twentieth-century American literature. For instance, he translates the famous opening words of the Odyssey—“ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα” (“Sing in me, Muse”)—as “Speak, Memory” in reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir by that title. Meanwhile, he renders the characters’ words so that they often sound more like twentieth-century American G.I.s than ancient noble heroes.
Uniquely, Lombardo composed his translations with the intention for them to be performed aloud, as the original epics were in antiquity. He himself has extraordinary talent as a performer and has given some really powerful public performances of his translations using a drum for accompaniment. (If you want to watch one of these, here is a YouTube video of him performing a section of his translation of the Iliad.)
I am personally not a huge fan of Lombardo’s translations because I find them too loose, too colloquial, and too U.S.-centric. Of all the translators I discuss in this post, he is the one who typically departs the furthest from the literal meaning of the Greek and I don’t think his translations are poetically the best either. His translations’ greatest strength is their accessibility of language.
ABOVE: Covers of Stanley Lombardo’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published by Hackett Publishing Company
Caroline Alexander
In sharp contrast to Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo, Caroline Alexander’s 2015 translation of the Iliad, published by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco, places a high priority on faithfulness to the literal meaning of the poem in Greek. She takes very few poetic liberties, she doesn’t try to make her poem fit a specific meter, and her lines vary in length considerably.
Alexander retains nearly all the Iliad‘s epithets and formulaic language, the line numbers of her translation match those of the original Greek text exactly, one can easily match every word of her translation with a corresponding word in Greek, and she even stays fairly close to the word order of the original Greek.
Alexander’s translation is quite possibly the most literally faithful English poetic translation of the Iliad currently in print. On top of this, I personally think that her language is quite accessible. That being said, her translation is not the most poetically inspired and can sound almost like prose at times; her poetic approach is less about showing off her own talents and more about letting the poetry of the Greek speak through in English. Similar to Lattimore, some readers may find the Greek phrases and formulaic language that she preserves strange, confusing, or repetitive.
Unlike the other translators I discuss in this post, Alexander has only translated the Iliad.
ABOVE: Front cover of Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad, published by Ecco
Emily Wilson
Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey (2018) and the Iliad (2023), published by W. W. Norton & Company, both received extensive attention when they each first came out and their popularity has rapidly exploded since. They seem to be already rivalling if not surpassing Fagles’s translations for the title of most popular with students and the general public. They have even gotten people who wouldn’t normally pick up a copy of a nearly 2,700-year-old epic reading Homer.
A major selling point of Wilson’s translations is that, in contrast to other modern translations of Homer, which use only a loose meter or no meter, they try to replicate the metrical sound of the original Greek poems by following a strict meter—specifically blank verse (i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter), which is the traditional meter for poetry dealing with epic themes in English. It is the same meter that Shakespeare uses frequently in his plays and that John Milton used for his epic poem Paradise Lost. The use of a strict meter gives Wilson’s poems a rhythmic quality that is reminiscent of the original epics, even though they are not in the same meter as the originals.
Despite all the headlines that have either praised or condemned Wilson’s translations for their “modernity,” in terms of her poetic choices, she is actually markedly traditional—more traditional than any other well-known modern Homeric translator, in fact. She is a staunch formalist and proponent of strict meter in an era in which very few people still compose in meter at all and the word poetry is virtually synonymous with free verse.
Wilson tries to balance the priorities of using a strict meter, fidelity to the meaning of the Greek, and using language that is accessible to a contemporary lay audience. She displays a strong preference for short, simple words, especially monosyllables, which help to accommodate her meter and to make her translation accessible to the contemporary lay reader. Nonetheless, she says that she tries to match the number of syllables a word occupies in her translation roughly to the number of syllables it occupies in the original language; where the original epic uses a long word, she often uses one as well.
Wilson’s translation style is in some ways quite literal while in other ways very loose. Unlike Pope or Fitzgerald, she almost never pretties up a line by adding more description or meaning to it and she retains a large proportion of Homer’s epithets and formulaic language. On the other hand, though, she often simplifies and tries to reproduce more the approximate sense or “vibe” of the original than the exact literal meaning.
To illustrate this, let us examine how Wilson chooses to translate the word πολύτροπος (polýtropos), which is an epithet that the poet uses to describe Odysseus in the very first line of the Odyssey. This epithet is a compound of two words; the first word is πολύς, which means “much” or “many” and the second is τρόπος (trópos), which literally means “turn,” “way,” or “manner.” It comes from the verb τρέπω (trépō), which literally means “to turn” or “rotate,” but can mean, by extension, “to change someone’s mind” or (in the passive voice) “to wander.”
Thus, the epithet literally means “much-turning,” but the sense of the term is ambiguous. On the one hand, Odysseus may be “much-turning” in the sense that he spends ten years wandering all over the known world, but, on the other hand, he may also be “much-turning” in the sense that he is crafty and he knows how to persuade people to give him what he wants.
An epithet like this creates serious difficulty for any translator. On the one hand, a translator can try to render the epithet’s literal meaning through a translation like “much-turning,” but, if one does this, then most readers who don’t know Ancient Greek will not understand what this means and will find the obscure expression confusing. Wilson therefore decides to go a different direction; she translates πολύτροπος as simply “complicated.” Every reader knows what the word “complicated” means and, although it does not capture the literal meaning of the Greek, it neatly captures the approximate sense.
Media coverage of Wilson’s translations has heavily focused on the fact that she is the first woman to publish a complete translation of the Odyssey in English and the second woman (after Caroline Alexander) to publish a complete translation of the Iliad in English. As I discuss in this post I made a year ago, some media outlets have misleadingly simplified this statement and some readers have misunderstood it to mean that Wilson is the first woman ever to translate the Odyssey, but this is not true.
Women had, in fact, published complete translations of the Odyssey in French, Italian, and other languages long before Wilson and women have also made partial or unpublished translations of the poem into English.
Even so, Wilson’s translations display a keen attentiveness to words describing women that many earlier translations lack. For instance, in Iliad 3.180, Helene describes herself by the unusual epithet κυνῶπις, which literally means “dog-eyed” or “dog-faced.” Most male translators have taken this as a sexual slur. For instance, Lattimore translates it as “slut,” Fitzgerald translates it as “wanton,” and Fagles translates it as “whore.” Later, in Iliad 6.344, Helene addresses Hektor as “δᾶερ ἐμεῖο κυνὸς κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοέσσης” (“Brother of me, a dog contriving and horrible”), which male translators have generally taken in a similar fashion.
The Homeric epics, however, also apply dog-based insults to male characters. For instance, as I previously discussed in my post about colorful insults in ancient Greek and Roman poetry, in Iliad 1.225, Akhilleus insults Agamemnon by calling him “οἰνοβαρές, κυνὸς ὄμματ᾽ ἔχων, κραδίην δ᾽ ἐλάφοιο” (“You wine-sodden man who has the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer!”). The male translators who have rendered the phrase “dog-eyed” as “slut” or “whore” when Helene uses it for herself have not translated it the same when it is used for male characters, even though the Greek wording is almost identical.
The scholar Margaret Graver has argued convincingly in a paper published three decades ago (Graver 1995) that insults comparing characters to dogs in Homeric poetry are not about sexual promiscuity or unfaithfulness, but rather greed. Wilson, following this scholarship, departs from previous translations by rendering Helene’s insult for herself in Iliad 3.180 literally as “dog-face” and using the same term when Akhilleus calls Agamenon dog-faced/dog-eyed in Iliad 1.225.
To give another example of Wilson’s feminist sensibility in translating, Odyssey 21.6 refers to Penelope’s hand when she unlocks the storeroom door to retrieve Odysseus’s bow as “παχύς,” which literally means “thick.” This word poses a difficulty for translators because twentieth-century western beauty standards dictate that women are not supposed to have thick hands.
As a result, most translators prior to Wilson either omitted the adjective entirely or rendered it into something less objectionable. For instance, Fitzgerald renders it as “clenched” while Fagles renders it as “steady.” Wilson, by contrast, translates it as “muscular, firm.”
Wilson displays a similar keenness when it comes to words describing enslaved people. Even though slavery is widespread in the world that the Iliad and the Odyssey depict and many characters who appear in the epics, especially the Odyssey, are enslaved, most translators before Wilson display a strong aversion to using the word “slave” and instead often use words that could conceivably describe a person of free status, such as “servants” or “maids.” Wilson, by contrast, resists such delicate papering over of the issue of slavery; whenever a word implies that a character is enslaved, she translates it simply as “slave.”
Wilson’s translations are overall brisk, highly readable, unpretentious, and poetically moving, but they can be colloquial to the point of flatness at times. Their covers are also absolutely gorgeous.
ABOVE: Front covers of Emil Wilson’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published by W. W. Norton & Company
Wrap-up on translations
In conclusion, which translation you should read depends on who you are and what you personally want to get out of the experience. In my opinion, Lattimore and Alexander’s translations are generally the closest to the literal meaning of the Greek, while Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Wilson are generally the strongest poetically (although they have strikingly different poetic styles). Fagles, Lombardo, Alexander, and Wilson are all generally strong in terms of accessibility of language.
If you asked me my personal favorite translation, I would say that I like different things about Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Alexander, and Wilson.
How to read the Homeric epics
Once you’ve decided which translation you want to read, you are ready to begin reading. As you do so, it is important to remember that these epics were not originally composed to be read from printed books in the manner that we are accustomed to, but rather to be performed out loud for audiences of listeners.
I criticized Elon Musk for his bad advice on reading the Iliad a few weeks ago and fully stand by all my criticisms, but his suggestion of listening to it as an audiobook is not a bad one (although I would not recommend listening to one at faster-than-normal speed or while distracted, since a reader who attempts to speed through the poems or multitask while listening is most likely not doing any favors for their own ability to comprehend and follow along). The important thing is to find a way of experiencing the epics that works for you.
When I read ancient literature, whether it’s for a class, for research, or for my own enjoyment, I like to go into a quiet room alone, read the text out loud to myself, and pause, reread, and contemplate as I read. Reading aloud to oneself isn’t necessarily the best method for everyone, but I have personally found that it is the method works best for me, because it forces me to read more slowly and concentrate on the text and it also engages as many of my senses as possible in the act of reading so that I will not only see the words on the page, but feel them on my lips and hear them in my ears.
A downside to reading out loud to oneself is that it does require more exertion than just reading silently. After hours of reading aloud to myself, I do start to feel physically exhausted in a way that I don’t if I am just reading in my head.
With all that being said, happy reading!
Works cited
- Graver, Margaret. 1995. “Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult.” Classical Antiquity 14, no. 1: 41–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/25000142.
Highly informative and appreciated.
Thanks! I’m so glad to hear that you appreciate the post!
This is a great guide to anyone who wants to read these books, I think! Ironically, from your descriptions I feel drawn towards *both* Pope and Lattimore (as well as Alexander and Wilson), were I ever to read them in English. Now that I think of it, the only time I’ve read a Homeric work in full was as a child, with the Odyssey in Erland Lagerlöf’s Swedish rendering.
It actually makes perfect sense that you would feel drawn toward both Pope and Lattimore’s translations because, although their translation philosophies are almost exactly opposite, the result of their philosophies is that their translations both sound archaic and strange to modern readers. Pope sounds that way because he composed his translation in the eighteenth century to fit poetic norms and expectations that are no longer in vogue. Meanwhile, Lattimore sounds that way because he hews so closely to the literal meaning of the nearly 2,700-year-old Greek, retains so many formulaic epithets, and tries to imitate an ancient meter that almost no one uses in English. As a result, the experience of reading them is actually not as dissimilar as one might guess.
You may be right about my preference for archaic and strange language (somewhat like what you describe in a comment below).
Now that I think of it, since Longfellow managed to do a kind of hexameter for his Evangeline, it is a bit surprising that Anglophone translators seem so wary of trying it.
Another thought: I notice that you did not list Chapman, but I guess his translations are so old that (in spite of Keats’ enthusiasm) few people would consider reading them when first becoming interested in Homer.
Yes, in this post, I only reviewed the Homeric translations that are most commonly read today. I omitted George Chapman’s translations, despite their historical importance as the first complete translations of the Homeric epics to be published in English and their literary influence on generations of English poets, because a person looking to read the Iliad or the Odyssey in translation today is unlikely to pick up a copy of his translations. To find his translations, one really has to go looking for them specifically and the kind of person who goes specifically looking for Chapman’s Homer is likely to have a pretty strong knowledge of English literature and the history of Homeric translations and be specifically interested in reading Chapman for the sake of reading Chapman.
But Chapman has the distinction, I think, of being the only Homeric translator mentioned in a canonical English poem, which gives him particular interest.
True enough!
I got the Odyssey a few years ago on Audible translated by Emily Wilson. Throughly enjoyed it. It felt like I was listening to a bard tell an ancient epic.
Maybe I can listen to Emily’s translation while reading a different translation to try to get a deeper understanding of the text some time.
Thank you, Spencer. I have bookmarked this very useful page!
Thanks! I’m glad that you find it useful! Usefulness is always one of my goals.
Another person who has read Collier’s Junior Classics Volume Four! So, so dated, but still remembered as awesome when one is a kid. Its retellings at least taught me how to pronounce the names of the characters in the Mabinogion, which if given in the original Welsh would totally stump an English reader.
Thanks very much for the detailed description of the differences between the translations. In the hype about the Emily Wilson translation, I had not encountered someone actually spelling out which factors the different translators prioritized.
P.S. Do you have any ambitions of someday doing a translation yourself, Spencer?
She said in a comment on this post: (talesoftimesforgotten.com/2022/04/04/how-were-lesbians-regarded-in-ancient-greece-and-rome/) that a text translation would sadly be a lot of work for little benefit in the academic world. Of course this isn’t her fault. To me, her translations of short passages cry out begging for full translations of ancient texts in her pen. Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world.
Yes, I read the Percy Jackson books when I was in fifth grade and, after that, I became interested in reading the original Greek myths, so I started reading Greek myth retellings. Some of the very first ones I read were Donna Jo Napoli’s Treasury of Greek Myths: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, & Monsters, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of Greek Heroes, and Olivia Coolidge’s Greek Myths. I remember being really annoyed that none of these retellings covered the story of Odysseus’s wanderings. Collier’s Junior Classics Volume Four was the first retelling I found that actually covered the plot of the Odyssey.
The story of how I found the book added to the magic of it. When I was little, my parents sometimes took me to the antiques store in my hometown. I liked going there because, even when I was little, I had an obsessive love of books and the store had section in the back on one of the upper floors that was entirely books, which sold for dirt cheap because they were so old. Most of them were priced at just one dollar. It was the cheapest place we knew in town where we could find books and, whenever my Mom or my Dad took me there, we usually bought a bunch of books because they were so cheap. That was where I found the Collier volume, along with the Junior Classics Volume Two (“Stories of Wonder and Magic”). My copy of the book was printed in 1954 and it cost $2.00. (I know because it still has the sticker.)
You’re right that it’s super outdated, but, when I was little, the age of the book added to the magic of reading it. I’ve always been attracted to old things, especially books. I liked that the book smelled old, the pages were slightly discolored and brittle with age, the language sounded a bit strange and archaic, and the Neoclassical line illustrations by John Flaxman added to the book’s aged feel, since they were in a different style from most children’s book illustrations that I was accustomed to. It felt like reading from an ancient tome.
I suppose that’s part of the reason why, as a seventh grader, I liked Fitzgerald’s versions of the Iliad and Odyssey so much; I liked the fact that they sounded a bit strange and archaic. They didn’t just come from a dark, ancient past that few people remembered; they also sounded like it, but, at the same time, they were still modern enough that I could understand them. I have occasionally wondered how differently I would have responded if, instead of reading Fitzgerald’s translations first, I had read, say, Lombardo’s or Fagles’s. Would I have found them easier to understand and liked them better? Or would I have found them less appealing because of their more modern sound? I can’t really say.
The hype surrounding the publication of Wilson’s Iliad is largely responsible for inspiring this post. I actually drafted a version of it almost a whole year ago because I was annoyed at the time that a lot of people (specifically men) were loudly complaining about Wilson’s translations online and comparing them unfavorably to earlier translations by men, despite the fact that the men complaining had little or no knowledge of Ancient Greek and they clearly did not understand the philosophy behind translating in general or the specific goals and priorities of different translations. Pope, Murray, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Lombardo, and Wilson’s translations aren’t different because they’re all trying to do the same thing and some of them are just failing at it; they’re different because they have different goals and audiences.
I also saw that, although there were a lot of articles online talking about Wilson’s translation philosophy specifically and occasionally comparing it to those of earlier translations, there was no post anywhere that I was aware of that discussed all the most commonly read translations in terms of the different philosophies and goals that lie behind them. Thus, I started writing the post, but other things distracted me and I got working on other projects. The kerfuffle on Classics Twitter last month over Elon Musk’s tweet recommending the audiobook of the Rieu translation, however, motivated me to start writing the post again and finally finish it.
Spencer, you misspelled Emily Wilson’s name in the caption for the covers of her editions.
Anyway, it’s interesting how you say people don’t take rhyme as seriously as they did a few centuries ago. Epic poetry is of course very different in tone from comical poetry and song, and as such they may work best with different meters and poetic considerations, although I will not accept any claims that the latter is not real literature.
Even Shakespeare used rhymes quite often, but blank verse in stuff like the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which I would say demonstrates how blank verse can easily seem more solemn than rhymed verse.
I imagine that much of what you said about Alexander Pope’s translations also applies to those of George Chapman and others of the era.
Thank you for this useful survey! I’m glad you emphasize how poetically traditional my translations are, which is true and has been much under-stated in a lot of the media reception.
FWIW, I personally love Pope as a poet. I think his Homer translations are far better as verse than any of the C20 American ones. But I could not possibly use his translations when I teach Homer in translation to undergraduates.
One caveat I’d make is that you don’t need to have any kind of “feminist sensibility” to translate a word meaning “dog-face” as “dog-face”, or a word meaning “thick” as “thick” (or a word meaning “slave” as “slave”, which of course has nothing to do with gender). You might need not to have a markedly anti-feminist sensibility, but that is really not the same thing. I felt you acknowledged that the gender-obsessed marketing of my translations was misleading, but then dashed a little way down that rabbit hole nonetheless.
But that’s a minor niggle that doesn’t detract from your fine essay. It’s a nice overview!
Thank you so much for reading my post and taking the time to leave this thoughtful comment! I’m truly honored to have you reading my humble blog.
I had previously seen that you mentioned on Twitter recently that Pope’s translations are your favorite of the others. As I said in my post, my disliking of his translations is a matter of personal taste; the main features I personally dislike are the use of rhyming couplets throughout both epics and the replacing of Greek names with Roman, both of which, of course, are fairly standard, unsurprising features for poetry of Pope’s time. I always personally thought that Pope’s translations would have been better in blank verse à la Paradise Lost or your translations, rather than in heroic couplets.
You’re absolutely right that “feminist sensibility” was perhaps the wrong turn of phrase on my part and I apologize for that phrasing. A major part of the reason why I discussed specific examples of the translation choices you made that were being labeled “feminist” is because I wanted to make it clear to my readers that these choices were just as much (if not more) about accuracy and following the current scholarship on what Homeric expressions meant in their original context as they were about feminism.
As you are well aware, a lot of critics have (quite ludicrously) asserted that your translations impose modern, ultra-left-wing, feminist ideology onto the Homeric epics. In my discussion of your translations above, I was trying, without directly addressing those critics, to use examples to make the point that, if your translations are feminist, it’s not in the sense of trying to shoehorn the Homeric epics to fit a modern ideology, but rather in the sense of in some cases not following the examples of earlier translators who, through their assumptions about ancient Greek language and society, have imposed additional layers misogyny onto them. The reason why I didn’t make this argument more explicitly is because I didn’t want to come across as too polemical or confusing for readers who are just here to find advice about reading Homer and aren’t highly in tune with the culture war nonsense. Unfortunately, it seems that my implied argument didn’t entirely come through, so I perhaps should have been clearer.
I cannot contain my excitement at you showing up here.
My professor said your Homer translations had gotten flack for being too feminist and ahistorical or something, but I doubt the people who say that are right.
This has been a tremendously informative and helpful overview for me. I have a passing familiarity with a number of these editions, and especially remember the Fitzgerald and Lattimore translations since these were the ones assigned as books in my college classical studies classes. I’ve since let those go — needed to cull the library for a series of house moves — and only retained my Fagles and Lombardo versions, the first for the beauty of the language and the second for the vividness and dynamics — I will note that I’ve had several friends/family members, much younger than I, tell me that my gifts of the Lombardo books were the first time Homer really cut through to them. So I think his approach has much to recommend to modern readers.
I recall reading my first full Iliad in a prose translation in a Ballentine Books (?) publishers paperback volume by… Auden? Rouse? something like that — in the very early 70s and it was a hard slog for a 13-year old and a lot of difficult Greek names and phrases transliterated in ways strange to me at the time, coming off Rex Warner and Olivia Coolidge myth books for younger readers. I do still retain my little paperback edition prose translations that aren’t named in the above essay: Iliad by Alston Chase & William Perry (Bantam Books, 1960) and Odyssey by Samuel Butler (rev. Malcolm Willcock; Washington Square Press, 1969). I will probably let these go before my next house move. They don’;t really seem to be up to snuff. Be interesting to read about some of these forgotten translations sometime?
This post only reviews the Homeric translations that are most widely read and that readers are most likely to come across. It does not by any means pretend to address every available Homeric translation, of which there are far too many to discuss them all.
Of the specific translations you mention, I do address Butler’s translation in my post above. I haven’t read enough of most of the more obscure translations to give opinions on them, though.
Fine article as always Spencer.
In Serbia/Ex-Yugoslavia, we also have an epic poetry tradition, complete with live performance, stock-phrases, formulaic epithets and epic retardation. I know it’s not about the action but the build-up to it, the descriptions, the drama etc. It’s like the tragedies in a way. We know Akhilleus kills Hector, we know Oedipus accidentally married his mother etc. The poet’s job isn’t to tell us what happened, but to vividly depict how it happened, so “getting to the action” is completely missing the point. So, to a degree, I have a tolerance for the parts of the Illiad many others may find boring.
Having said all that, while reading parts of the Illiad for high-school, I was bored to tears for the most part, with one exception. The parts about Hector and Andromache. The part where he is parting with his wife while she begs him to stay, where he hugs his son – who is scared of his dad’s big helmet, so he takes it off and this makes the toddler happy again – and he explains that it is better for him to die on the battlefield than to witness his family being either slaughtered or carted off into slavery… We know he’s going to fucking die, and that all of his worst night-mares are going to come true, we want to help him but we can’t…
Everything else is a blur of infinite boredom (a, son of b, killed c son of d, by piercing him in the side with a spear, his soul went down to Hades, and the darkness filled his eyes, e, son of f…), but the Hector and Andromache stuff is just an absolute clusterbomb of gut-punches and I still tear-up when I think about it today. It’s as heart-rending as any poetry can be.
Thank you again for another wonderfully informative piece, as always, Spencer! (Admittedly, it’s somewhat late, but ehh; Congratulations on receiving your master’s! 🥳)
That I can further extrapolate from the topic of this post actually, do you have a preferred translation into English of the Homeric Hymns? I’d imagine you’re familiar with that of Greek writer Apostolos N. Athanassakis, in 1977 (he’s produced a translation of the Orphic Hymns as well), and there’s the one by Prof. Susan C. Shelmerdine; both utilize an abundance of footnotes as give proper sociopolitical/economic & in-mythoverse context to the Hymns verse-by-verse, and I myself have Shelmerdine as my favorite.
Also, your book you’re writing on Kybele and her worship/the conducting of her rites by her Gallic priesthood; that you’re still working on it still, and if you need it/that I feel it’ll help — it being a text as dates to antiquity that attests to the goddess’ worship — here’s a link of mine to Athanassakis’ translations of the Orphic Hymns (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yMpp0f4VUPTQeqbdWsz76ECnQte5ZdYH/view?usp=drivesdk).
Do continue being a blessing to us, your fellow philHellenes/Hellenic mythology enthusiasts. 😋
Well drat! My personal copy is the Sam Butler translation!
At least, I found it serviceable and my Ancient Greek professor allowed me to use my personal copy in class.
The Butler translation isn’t the worst and, if that’s the translation you already own, you may find it serviceable, but I personally would not highly recommend it for the reasons I have outlined above.
Great overview! I’ve only read the Butler translations (I know exactly what deluxe B&N edition you mean, and the cover is indeed quite lovely), which I suspect didn’t do justice to the source material. As far as epic poetry goes, I liked the Metamorphoses and the Kalevala much better, but for those I was lucky enough to come across verse translations that tried to preserve the original meter. Even Heaney’s Beowulf, while not exactly on theme, was pretty enjoyable as poetry.
Spencer,
Sorry to put this unrelated comment here; I couldn’t find any contact information for you and the comments for the post I am talking about—Was Sappho Really a Lesbian?—are closed.
Anyway, that was truly a stellar post. You’re a fantastic writer. I just wanted to call to attention a possible mistake I found. You write the following therein: “The comic playwright [sic] Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilos, Ephippos, and Timokles, who all flourished in Athens during this period, are all known to have written and produced comedies titled Sappho.”
It should be “playwrights”, right? Feel free to delete this comment afterward. I probably won’t ever read your work again but I will remember you as a writer.
Yes, that is correct! Thanks for spotting my mistake. I will correct it!
It still doesn’t seem to be fixed.
I fixed it yesterday! Sorry for the delay!
Man I would love to check out the Gareth Hinds graphic novels (the Homeric poems can be confusing for me, especially the Iliad), but I’m not sure how much they cost.
My experience was reading Fagles in high school (Odyssey only) and Lattimore in college. I think Lattimore has stuck with me more, largely due to the reasons you describe: a translation which is less idiomatic in English can be more evocative of an alien world with truly different values and beliefs.