A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of the Odyssey, made directly from the Greek. The source is the text printed by A. T. Murray in the Loeb Classical Library (1919), in the digital transcription of the Perseus Digital Library. Murray’s English was not used. Samuel Butler’s public-domain prose version of 1900 was consulted only where the Greek is in doubt, and none of its wording is kept.

Homer composed in verse; this translation is prose, meant to be read the way a novel is read. It keeps what prose can keep. Every one of Murray’s 1,186 paragraphs appears here as one paragraph, and each opens with the number of the Greek line where it begins, so that a reader can find any passage in a Greek text or another translation. Nothing is summarized or left out: every scene, speech, simile, and name is here.

The fixed epithets and repeated lines are the music of Homer’s style, and the English keeps them fixed. Athena is always “gray-eyed,” Dawn is always “rose-fingered,” the sea is “wine-dark,” and a line that the Greek repeats is repeated here in the same words. Where Homer’s narrator turns to speak to the swineherd Eumaeus as “you,” the English does so too. In Books 9 to 12 Odysseus tells his own story to the Phaeacians, and that long tale is printed as his narration rather than inside quotation marks.

Names are given in their familiar English forms (Telemachus, Achilles, Ithaca), and the gods always by their Greek names. The nineteen notes are the translator’s. They explain a title, a custom, or a play on words that the English cannot carry, and offer no commentary.