The Odyssey

„A revelation. Never have I been so aware at once of the beauty of the poetry, the physicality of Homer’s world, and the moral ambiguity of those who inhabit it.“ -SUSAN CHIRA, New York Times Book Review, „New & Noteworthy“

„‘Each generation must translate for itself,’ T. S. Eliot declared. Emily Wilson has convincingly answered this call: hers is a vital Odyssey for the twenty-first century that brings into rhythmic English the power, dignity, variety, and immediacy of this great poem.“ -LAURA SLATKIN, New York University

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

Emily Wilson’s authoritative translation of Homer’s masterpiece, accompanied by her informative introduction, explanatory footnotes, and book-by-book summaries.

Four maps, created especially for this translation.

Contextual materials including sources and analogues by Homer, Sappho, Pindar, and others. Also included are carefully chosen passages from (mainly) ancient texts that provide insight into The Odyssey and its reception by Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Pseudo-Longinus, Lucian, Apollodorus, Heraclitus, Porphyry, Proclus, Hyginus, Dante Alighieri, Alfred Lord Tennyson, C. P. Cavafy, Derek Walcott, and Margaret Atwood.

Nine critical essays addressing key topics-composition; representation of religion and the gods; class and slavery; gender; colonization and the meaning of home; trickery, intelligence, and lying; and more- essential to the study of The Odyssey. Essays by Robert Fowler, Laurel Fulkerson, Barbara Graziosi, Laura M. Slatkin, Sheila Murnaghan, Patrice Rankine, Helene P. Foley, Egbert J. Bakker, and Lillian Eileen Doherty are included.

A glossary and a list of suggested further readings.

About the Series
Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format-annotated text, contexts, and criticism-helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Editorial Reviews

[Robert Fitzgerald’s translation is] a masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original.“ -The Nation

„[Fitzgerald’s Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer’s art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase.“ -The Yale Review

„[In] Robert Fitzgerald’s translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world.“
-from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney
– From the Publisher

McCrorie’s new translation can be recommended without reservation to the generations of students to whom it is bound to be assigned and to any reader who’d like to get as close to the original as is possible without reading the original Greek. It is refreshing, accurate, and direct.
– Bloomsbury Review – Jay Kenney

Edward McCrorie’s translation of the Odyssey into English hexameter has much to recommend it . . . I have developed an appreciation for the clarity and briskness of McCrorie’s verse.
– Bryn Mawr Classical Review – G.S. Bowe

Bold new translation.
– Classical Bulletin – Emily Anhalt

A lively and engaging version of Homer’s Odyssey that brilliantly blends pleasurable readability with fidelity to the original. . . McCrorie has simplified the choice of an English Odyssey even in a field of very skillful competitors (Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Mandelbaum, Fagles, Lombardo), providing the best available verse translation of the Odyssey for Greekless readers.
– Choice

McCrorie has produced an epic with its own rhythms, idioms and developing pleasures.
– Anglo-Hellenic Review

10/15/2017
The enduring character of the epic poem The Odyssey invites repeated attempts at translation, here most recently an energetic verse rendition by Wilson (classical studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania), who has authored books on the nature of tragedy, Socrates, and Seneca, as well as translations of plays by Euripides and Seneca. Wilson’s goal is for the work to sound natural to the modern reader without falling into contemporizing anachronisms, such as those found in the translation of Stanley Lombardo. Unlike Robert Fagles or Robert Fitzgerald, Wilson deploys a natural English syntax, while closely following Homer’s lines. Like Fagles and Barry P. Powell, she adopts iambic pentameter and seeks a diction that does not sound archaic, using the Latinate version of names and submerging many of the recurrent epithets. Thus Odysseus, „the man of many turns,“ becomes the „complicated man,“ or „bright-eyed goddess, Athena“ becomes „she looked him straight into the eye,“ true to the spirit of the text if not always the word. Wilson is particularly sensitive to the tone and description applied to the many women throughout the narrative, especially Helen and Penelope. VERDICT Wilson offers a fluent, straightforward, and accessible version of the Homeric epic; a solid reading edition.–Thomas L. Cooksey, formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah
– Library Journal

2017-09-04
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.Sing to me, O muse, of the–well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland „complicated man,“ the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as „of twists and turns.“ Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being „monstrous,“ meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus „showing initiative“ seems a little report-card-ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, „their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.“ In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging „allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,“ and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors „fell like flies,“ mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.
– Kirkus Reviews