Choosing your Odyssey: which translation to read
The Odyssey has been carried into English more often than any other Greek poem, and the version you pick shapes the poem you read. This is a guide to the five translations Wine-Dark keeps in print: what each one does, and which reader it is for.
Nothing here ranks them. There is no best Odyssey — there is the one that answers the question you actually have, which might be speed, or the Greek, or a first reading, or a poem to read aloud. The differences between them are real, and they are the whole point.
A poem that came through whole
Almost none of Greek literature survived. Of the roughly ninety plays Aeschylus wrote, seven are left; Menander wrote over a hundred comedies and exactly one came back complete, on a papyrus, in 1952. Set against that record, Homer is the exception that makes the rest legible: both epics survive in full, all 27,803 lines of them, hand-copied and recopied for the better part of three thousand years.
The Odyssey is a little under half of that total — 12,110 lines in the standard text, twenty-four books, a ten-year voyage home folded inside about six weeks of actual telling. Every English version is measured against that line count, and one of the five below matches it exactly, to the line.
The shape of what you are choosing
The poem is not the sequence of monsters most people half-remember. It opens on the son, Telemachus, in a house overrun by suitors, and holds Odysseus offstage for four books before he appears at all — weeping on a beach, a war hero with no way home. The famous adventures, the Cyclops and Circe and the Sirens, arrive as a story he tells at a dinner party, past tense, already survived. The last third is not a voyage at all but a slow, cold homecoming that ends in a room full of bodies.
A translation has to hold all three of those registers — the domestic, the fantastic, the vengeful — in one voice. Where the versions differ most is in how much of the poem’s machinery they let you see while doing it.
Why the translator is the decision
A translation of Homer is not a transcript. The Greek runs in a six-beat metre no English line falls into naturally, and it is built from repeated epithets — the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn — that a translator can keep as fixed formula or vary away as mere repetition. Whether Odysseus is “much-enduring” every single time he is named, or only when the word earns its place, is decided line by line. It is the reader’s poem that changes.
So the useful question is never which translation is best. It is which trade each one makes: verse or prose, the Greek word-order kept or the English loosened, the names in their familiar Latin forms or their stranger Greek ones. Each of the five is honest about its own answer, and the honest answer is what you are buying.
The five we keep in print
Here are the translations we recommend, each named by its translator, with what it is and who it is for. Read the second line of each, not the first — the question a version answers matters more than any verdict on it.
Which translation
No ranking — they answer different questions. 5 in print:
- Emily Wilson · Norton
Iambic pentameter, and the same number of lines as the Greek — 12,110, kept exactly.
Choose it if you want the poem’s pace preserved, in plain modern English that never reaches for the archaic.
get the book - Robert Fagles · Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
Free verse in long lines, high rhetorical register, names in their familiar English forms.
Choose it if you are reading aloud, or you want the version most English readers mean when they say “the Odyssey”.
get the book - Richmond Lattimore · Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Six-beat lines that follow the Greek order closely, epithets preserved rather than varied.
Choose it if you want the literal standard, or you are reading it against the Greek.
get the book - Stanley Lombardo · Hackett Classics
Free verse in short lines and contemporary idiom, with the speeches set out as speech.
Choose it if you want it fast and spoken, or you are reading the whole poem inside one term.
get the book - E. V. Rieu · Penguin Classics
Prose, not verse — the 1946 Penguin translation, revised. The only prose Odyssey here.
Choose it if you want the story without line breaks in the way, or this is a first encounter with it.
get the book
Where to start
For a first encounter, Emily Wilson’s verse is the clearest way in and keeps the poem moving at the pace Homer set; if even verse feels like a wall, E. V. Rieu’s prose removes the line breaks altogether. If you have read the poem before and want to hear it, Robert Fagles is the version most English readers mean when they say “the Odyssey.” And if you are working with the Greek open beside you, Richmond Lattimore stays closer to it than any of the others here.
A film of the poem is on its way, and the poem will outlast it by the usual three thousand years. None of these translations is a wrong one. Buy the version whose description sounds like the book you want to be holding, and read that.