Bookmoot: The Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn

The Rabbit Room’s Bookmoot selection for the month of August is The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Grab the book and join us at North Wind Manor on August 17th @ 7pm where we’ll discuss it together. (You are welcome to join for the discussion if you have read a different translation of The Odyssey.)

With this edition of Homer’s Odyssey, the celebrated author, critic, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic to vividly poetic new life. Widely known for his essays on classical literature and culture in the New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn gives us a line-for-line rendering of the Odyssey that is both engrossing as poetry and true to its source. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, he artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. Mendelsohn’s expansive six-beat line, far…