Courtesy of Whitney Humanities Center

Daniel Mendelsohn, a humanities professor at Bard College, gave a lecture Monday about his experience translating Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey.”

Mendelsohn’s translation of “The Odyssey” was published by University of Chicago Press in April, joining the list of the 29 English translations of “The Odyssey” that have been released since the end of World War II. 

In an email to the News, Megan O’Donnell, an associate communications director at the Whitney Humanities Center, which hosted Mendelsohn, praised the way his translation “offers future translators a model of how close attention to form, linguistic precision and cultural nuance can reinvigorate even the most familiar classical texts.”

Mendelsohn’s talk was a part of the Humanities Now lecture series, a new initiative created by the Whitney Humanities Center which “examines questions at the heart of the human condition and invites us to cross boundaries of geographies and disciplines,” Cajetan Iheka, a professor of English and the director of the Whitney Humanities Center said.

Chris Kraus, a Latin professor, introduced Mendelsohn to the audience. Kraus recounted that she first met Mendelsohn in 1994 when he was a graduate student at Princeton and said that he has since “turned a nascent academic life into a thriving freelance writing career.” 

Mendelsohn has been teaching “The Odyssey” and its many translations since 1989 — “all of which have something to offer,” he said. 

Mendelsohn had not planned on undertaking his own translation of “The Odyssey” until he had published a memoir titled “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic” in 2017. The memoir delves into the spring semester of 2011, when Mendelsohn’s then 81-year-old father decided to enroll in his first-year seminar on “The Odyssey.” 

Through this experience, Mendelsohn described “getting to know his father as a student through ‘The Odyssey’” and hearing his “grumpy reactions” to the book. After the class was over, Mendelsohn and his father discovered and boarded “a cruise that recreates the voyages of Odysseus.”

“Then, my dad fell ill and died not long after we got back, so the book was sort of an account of what turned out to be the last year of his life as weirdly prismed through ‘The Odyssey,’” Mendelsohn said. 

Mendelsohn included snippets of his own translations of “The Odyssey” in the memoir. A few months later, he said he received a phone call from an editor from the University of Chicago Press who read the memoir, liked the snippets of translation that he did and asked him if he wanted to translate “The Odyssey” in its entirety. 

“When you love a text, you have a sense of what it is in your head, and I wanted to bring that sense across to English readers who don’t know Greek,” Mendelsohn said. 

Mendelsohn described some of his choices and challenges when attending to the meter, syntax, language and form of the original work — demonstrating how his work differed from previous translations.

For instance, Mendelsohn opted to spell Calypso’s — the nymph who held Odysseus captive on her island — name as Kalypso in order to reflect the original Greek name spelled with the letter kappa. 

“I think it’s very important for us to experience these names in a way that slightly estranges them from what we think we know,” Mendelsohn said. 

Mendelsohn explained the challenges in translating the Greek word for “a meal to which many people contribute.” While previous translators have opted for the word “picnic” or “potluck supper,” Mendelsohn believed that those words are “stoppers” that “pull the reader out of thinking about what’s going on in the text.”

Mendelsohn eventually decided on the translation “neighborly feast” — a choice he attributed to his former professor Jenny Clay.

Additionally, Mendelsohn discussed his process of translating Homeric epithets, descriptive phrases that characterize a person or place in Homer’s epic poems. Seeking to “peel away the varnish” of previous translations, Mendelsohn said he took a different approach to translating epithets like “grey-eyed Athena.” 

Mendelsohn expanded upon previous translations that emphasized the “gleaming” quality of Athena’s eyes by drawing upon the Greek word for owl — which is related to the Greek word for gleaming — to come up with “she of the bright owl eyes.” 

“A brilliant translation reignites interest in a text, no matter how many times it’s been translated before,” O’Donnell wrote, reflecting on the role of translation across generations. “To me, that renewed excitement is the first step in connecting readers to a different period and culture.”

The Humanities Now lecture series was founded in 2023.