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Daniel Mendelsohn (Translator) 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, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. His honors include the Prix Medicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy's highest honour 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.
Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek… Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically... The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus’s heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I’ve ever read -- Edith Hall * The Telegraph * This may well be the best translation of Homer’s poem yet. Mendelsohn’s rendering is highly readable – monsters, thrashing swims and wine-dark seas churn to life – and yet, thrillingly, it stays faithful to the original metre. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation won’t rival this * Telegraph Best Poetry Book 2025 * Readers, especially students of the poem, looking for a version of the Odyssey with a learned introduction, insightful notes and a scrupulous adherence to the sound and sense of the original will find here the Mentor they they are looking for -- A. E. Stallings * The Times Literary Supplement * Daniel Mendelsohn has accomplished something that no recent translator has done so well: a translation that shows a striking fidelity not only to the poem’s language and thought but also to its formal properties * Deborah Roberts, Haverford College * Daniel Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is a majestic living poem, keenly responsive to the surge and subtlety of Homer’s Greek ... A momentous achievement * Rosanna Warren * The expertly crafted work of a true scholar-poet, Mendelsohn’s rich and rhythmical version hews closely to the Homeric verse-line – it feels like the original … this superb translation will entice new audiences to delight in the ancient epic * Richard P. Martin, Stanford University * Here is the timeless Homeric river remade with timely majesty, molecule by glistening molecule * Sebastian Barry * His knowledge as a renowned classicist, his ear and eye for sound and image, his acuity in rendering the circuitous yet also self-arresting syntax, and his ingeniously faithful line-by-hexameter-line rendering, make for what will surely be the edition for our time and beyond … [a] triumph * Jorie Graham * Daniel Mendelsohn's Odyssey is a vividly rendered experience that feels inward and mesmerizing … take[s] us deeply into the experience itself through an intense focus on speech and sounds, which are the essence of poetr * Joyce Carol Oates * Mendelsohn is gifted with a wonderful surefootedness of imagination, an almost mystic insight into both the homely and the terrible beauties of antiquity... He has given us a lithe, deft, psychologically nuanced Odyssey. Timeless, cadenced, thrilling, and humane * Michael Chabon *
