Translations of the Odyssey: Difference between revisions

 

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Most of the first poem in [[Ezra Pound]]’s ”[[The Cantos]]” is a partial translation of the ”Odyssey”{{‘s}} 11th part. Pound’s translation was based on Andreas Divus’ faithful word-for-word Latin ”Odyssey”.{{Sfn|Cè|2020|pp=33–34}} Massimo Cè writes that that Divus’ faithful Latin translation has led some scholars to conclude that “we can treat both equally as source texts, with Divus acting as a window onto Homer”, but Cè argues that, while Pound’s language, meaning and metre is indebted to Divus’ version, they differ substantially from the Homeric Greek ”Odyssey”.{{Sfn|Cè|2020|p=35}} Pound’s translation mingled the conventions of Latin and Anglo-Saxon poetry.{{Sfn|Hardwick|2025|p=46}} In the 1940s, [[E. V. Rieu]] set out to make Homer accessible to new readers. [[Odyssey (E. V. Rieu)|Rieu’s ”Odyssey”]] was written in English prose and produced as the first entry in the mass-market paperback [[Penguin Classics]] series,{{Sfn|Bassnett|2025|pp=30–31}} for which he was the founding editor.{{Sfn|Cronin|2012|p=379}} Bassnett describes this release within the context of diminished interest in formal study of classical languages.{{Sfn|Bassnett|2025|pp=30–31}} Rieu’s translations were very successful; his prose approach inspired others in the post-war period.{{Sfn|Cronin|2012|p=379}}

Most of the first poem in [[Ezra Pound]]’s ”[[The Cantos]]” is a partial translation of the ”Odyssey”{{‘s}} 11th part. Pound’s translation was based on Andreas Divus’ faithful word-for-word Latin ”Odyssey”.{{Sfn|Cè|2020|pp=33–34}} Massimo Cè writes that that Divus’ faithful Latin translation has led some scholars to conclude that “we can treat both equally as source texts, with Divus acting as a window onto Homer”, but Cè argues that, while Pound’s language, meaning and metre is indebted to Divus’ version, they differ substantially from the Homeric Greek ”Odyssey”.{{Sfn|Cè|2020|p=35}} Pound’s translation mingled the conventions of Latin and Anglo-Saxon poetry.{{Sfn|Hardwick|2025|p=46}} In the 1940s, [[E. V. Rieu]] set out to make Homer accessible to new readers. [[Odyssey (E. V. Rieu)|Rieu’s ”Odyssey”]] was written in English prose and produced as the first entry in the mass-market paperback [[Penguin Classics]] series,{{Sfn|Bassnett|2025|pp=30–31}} for which he was the founding editor.{{Sfn|Cronin|2012|p=379}} Bassnett describes this release within the context of diminished interest in formal study of classical languages.{{Sfn|Bassnett|2025|pp=30–31}} Rieu’s translations were very successful; his prose approach inspired others in the post-war period.{{Sfn|Cronin|2012|p=379}}

In the twentieth century, several definitive translations appeared in languages that had already provided experiments in translation. Linguist {{ill|Luis Segalá y Estalella|es}} produced a new prose version in Spanish (1912), which remained highly popular, while a “careful” rendition into [[Catalan language|Catalan]] verse was completed by [[Carles Riba]] in 1919.{{sfn|García Gual|2015|p=131}} The first full version in Romanian, done by the [[Aromanians|Aromanian]] scholar [[George Murnu]], appeared in print in 1924,{{sfn|Tanașoca|1973|p=118}} the same year that [[Józef Wittlin]] completed his [[Polish language|Polish]] rendition (Wittlin revised his own work in several editions, down to 1957).{{sfn|Pomian|1976|p=9}} [[Ahmet Cevat Emre]] began working on a [[Turkish language|Turkish]] translation in the 1930s, at the behest of [[Mustafa Kemal Atatürk]]; the result was a two-volume edition, published in 1941–1942 by the [[Turkish Language Association]].{{sfn|Berk Albachten|2017|pp=295–297}} {{ill|Gábor Devecseri|hu|Devecseri Gábor}} published his Hungarian text in 1947.{{sfn|Horváth|1957|p=1424}} Later in the century, the ”Odyssey” was translated into some languages for the first time. A complete ”Odyssey” in [[Serbian language|Serbian]] was published in 1966 by [[Miloš N. Đurić]], and was immediately regarded as a major stylistic accomplishment.{{sfn|Gabela|1966}} {{ill|José Manuel Pabón|es}} gave a new Spanish translation in verse. Published in 1982, this translation was influenced by [[modernist poetry]], and by Riba, in its use of “accentual hexametres”.{{sfn|García Gual|2015|p=131}}

In the twentieth century, several definitive translations appeared in languages that had already provided experiments in translation. Linguist {{ill|Luis Segalá y Estalella|es}} produced a new prose version in Spanish (1912), which remained highly popular, while a “careful” rendition into [[Catalan language|Catalan]] verse was completed by [[Carles Riba]] in 1919.{{sfn|García Gual|2015|p=131}} The first full version in Romanian, done by the [[Aromanians|Aromanian]] scholar [[George Murnu]], appeared in print in 1924,{{sfn|Tanașoca|1973|p=118}} the same year that [[Józef Wittlin]] completed his [[Polish language|Polish]] rendition (Wittlin revised his own work in several editions, down to 1957).{{sfn|Pomian|1976|p=9}} [[Ahmet Cevat Emre]] began working on a [[Turkish language|Turkish]] translation in the 1930s, at the behest of [[Mustafa Kemal Atatürk]]; the result was a two-volume edition, published in 1941–1942 by the [[Turkish Language Association]].{{sfn|Berk Albachten|2017|pp=295–297}} {{ill|Gábor Devecseri|hu|Devecseri Gábor}} published his Hungarian text in 1947.{{sfn|Horváth|1957|p=1424}}

[[Luo Niansheng]] began translating the first [[Chinese language|Chinese-language]] ”Iliad” in the late 1980s, but he died before completing it; his student [[Wang Huansheng]] finished the project; [[Odyssey (Wang Huansheng translation)|Wang’s ”Odyssey”]] followed in 1997.{{Sfn|Zhang|2021|pp=353–354}} [[William Neill (poet)|William Neill]]’s translation of parts of the ”Odyssey” into [[Scots language]] (”Tales frae the Odyssey O Homer”),{{Sfn|Hardwick|2025|p=50}} published in 1991 by the [[Saltire Society]], was inspired by [[Gavin Douglas]]’ 16th-century translation. Hardwick uses Neill’s work as an example of a translation “enhancing the target language and culture”.{{Sfn|Hardwick|2025|pp=44–45}} [[Moshe Ha-Elion]]—a survivor of the [[Death marches during the Holocaust|death marches]] and [[Auschwitz concentration camp]]—translated [[The Odyssey (Moshe Ha-Elion translation)|the ”Odyssey”]] into [[Judaeo-Spanish]], a language with very few speakers. His hexameter composition was published in two parts from 2011 to 2014.{{Sfn|Armstrong|2025|p=2}}

[[Luo Niansheng]] began translating the first [[Chinese language|Chinese-language]] ”Iliad” in the late 1980s, but he died before completing it; his student [[Wang Huansheng]] finished the project; [[Odyssey (Wang Huansheng translation)|Wang’s ”Odyssey”]] followed in 1997.{{Sfn|Zhang|2021|pp=353–354}} [[William Neill (poet)|William Neill]]’s translation of parts of the ”Odyssey” into [[Scots language]] (”Tales frae the Odyssey O Homer”),{{Sfn|Hardwick|2025|p=50}} published in 1991 by the [[Saltire Society]], was inspired by [[Gavin Douglas]]’ 16th-century translation. Hardwick uses Neill’s work as an example of a translation “enhancing the target language and culture”.{{Sfn|Hardwick|2025|pp=44–45}} [[Moshe Ha-Elion]]—a survivor of the [[Death marches during the Holocaust|death marches]] and [[Auschwitz concentration camp]]—translated [[The Odyssey (Moshe Ha-Elion translation)|the ”Odyssey”]] into [[Judaeo-Spanish]], a language with very few speakers. His hexameter composition was published in two parts from 2011 to 2014.{{Sfn|Armstrong|2025|p=2}}

==See also==

==See also==

The Odyssey, an epic poem of ancient Greek literature attributed to Homer, has a long history of translation. The inaccessibility of Homeric Greek to most readers has driven continued interest in translations, which have played a crucial role in the epic’s cultural penetration through adaptation, selective reading, and linguistic transformation.

The earliest known translation of the text is Livius Andronicus‘s Latin Odusia (3rd century BCE)—it was one of the first Latin literary texts. Later notable translations include George Chapman‘s English versions in the early 17th century; Johann Heinrich Voss‘s influential 18th-century German translations that influenced development of the German language; Anne Dacier‘s French prose versions, published within the historical context of a French artistic debate; and Alexander Pope‘s 1720s English translation in heroic couplets. The 20th century saw innovations such as E. V. Rieu‘s accessible prose translation for Penguin Classics, and translations in minority languages, such as Moshe Ha-Elion‘s translation in Judaeo-Spanish or William Neill‘s in Scots.

Approaches to translation range from literal equivalence—attempts to replicate the formal meaning of the original text—to dynamic or communicative equivalence, which tries to translate the cultural context. The artificial literary nature of Homeric Greek presents some challenges for translators.

The language of the Homeric epics is inaccessible to the vast majority of readers, but interest in them, and related stories, remains quite strong. Susan Bassnett suggests that they owe their cultural penetration to adaptation, selective reading, and translation itself. Richard Armstrong argues that modern editions of the poems misled readers into believing there was a true “original” text—he says that in reality, translational reinterpretation is a central feature of the epic genre. Argentine essayist Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer in analyzing the translations of the Odyssey: in a 1957 essay, he defined the whole corpus as an “international library”, noting its particular relevance to the development of English literature. Formal translation studies appeared as an academic discipline in the 1970s, but interest in translational scholarship increased substantially in the early twenty-first century. Earlier academic work relied on individual case studies, but systematic analysis in the twenty-first century have opened new interpretations and theoretical frameworks.

Armstrong summarises the traditional understanding of translational approaches:

• Literal translation (or “literal equivalence”) is the replacement of source words with equivalent language from the target. Translator aim to replicate the expression and formal meaning of the original text. There are challenges with this approach. Firstly, Homeric Greek was never used by real people—it was an artificial literary language (Kunstsprache). Some words also lose connotative meanings that are lost when translated literally.^[a]
• Dynamic or communicative equivalence, or “sense-for-sense translation”, involves preserving the overall effect and purpose of the original text rather than finding direct analogues for words or maintaining sentence structure.

Spanish scholar Javier Franco Aixelá observed in 2012 that: “the Odyssey, or rhymed poetry in general, was translated mostly in rhymed verse in the past and mostly in prose or free verse today”, noting that this is due to “the conditions of reception of the society for which it is translated. […] translating the Odyssey into epic verse is not at all impossible, although it may be socially inconvenient in 21st-century Spain.”

The Odyssey has a translation history stretching back to antiquity. The ancient conception of translation differs our modern perspective,^[b] although the practices and customs were sometimes the same. In the period, the epics were named by their first lines—a practice that indicates their widespread fame. Livius Andronicus‘ Latin translation, Odusia, is one of the first Latin literary texts. He is widely regarded as the creator of the Latin literary tradition, and introduced a model of the epic to Roman society. He changed the metre of the Homeric Greek from dactylic hexameter to Saturnian, which may have been a calculation decision to foster interest in the epic among Roman readers. He may also have used his translation as a text in his own school.

Livius was translating a text of foreign origin, but it was easier for Romans to accept because it seemed Roman. Additionally, its genre was less likely to be embroiled in the Roman politics that a historical epic could cause. Not much is known about Odusia. The first line is faithful to the Homeric Greek, even matching its word order. He renders the adjective polytropon^[c] as versutus (lit. ‘clever‘), and invokes the Camenae instead of the Muses. Surviving fragments have a different tone to the Homeric Greek; Livius’ also translocated some imagery from the Iliad into his Odyssey. Some evidence suggests that he condensed the twenty-four constituent parts into one, which would mean it was not a full translation.

Michael von Albrecht says Odusia was “beaten into” a young Horace (65–8 BC) as part of his education. Horace’s Ars Poetica (lit. ‘Art of Poetry‘) relates how to translate properly, describing it as the process of making communal material private. He thought poorly of literal translation. Horace translated the opening lines of the Odyssey twice, with very different outputs. In Ars Poetica, he summarises the plot in a single line; in Epistles he uses nine. His Ars Poetica translation omits polytropon entirely—McElduff describes this choice as Horace “correcting” Livius and demonstrating how to make a Greek text into a Roman one.

There is a hexametric Odyssea that is a distinct from Livius’s Odusia. Entitled Odusia Latina hexametris non multo post Ennium exarata in its modern edition, it survives only in four fragments. It may represent an epitomization or more likely a set of excerpts of the Odyssey, which, unlike the Iliad, frequently circulated as selections of excerpts. Edward Courtney, calling it Livius Refictus, considers it a reworking of Livius into hexameters under the influence of Ennius (fl. c. 200 BC). All the fragments are quotes from Priscian, citing Livius in Odyssea (or Odissia). Neither the original Odyssey nor Livius’s Odusia were divided into books, but the hexametric Oydssea was. The citations of Festus and Charisius to an Odyssia vetus (old Odyssey) are attempts to distinguish the original work of Livius from its hexametric competitor. The Homeric translations of Polybius and Attius Labeo have not survived. Labeo’s translations are known from the scholia of Persius (32–62 BC), who mocked him for his literal translations of both epics.^[d]

Beyond classical antiquity and into the Byzantine era, the spread of the Greek language—and the consequent internal translation of the Homeric texts as it spread—played a central role in maintaining the Odyssey‘s relevancy and esteemed status. Armstrong says both epics may have dropped from knowledge otherwise, using Beowulf as an example of this fate.

The Odyssey may have been translated into Syriac, but the evidence is inconclusive.
The 13th-century historian Barhebraeus records that Theophilus of Edessa (fl. c. 780) translated the “the two books of the poet Homer about the conquest of the city Ilion”, which seemingly refers to the Iliad and Odyssey, since only the Odyssey mentions the fall of Troy. Syriac quotations from Homer are found in the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit of 825 and one might be from the Odyssey. The Kingdom of Georgia, located on the margin of the Byzantine cultural realm, also had its own translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey into its native language; these were completed in the eleventh or twelfth centuries by an anonymous author.

Nicholas Sigeros provided Petrarch with manuscripts of the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1354.^[e] Petrarch’s correspondent Giovanni Boccaccio persuaded the monk Leonzio Pilato to produce translations in Latin prose—he finished the Iliad, but only came close to finishing the Odyssey. In or about 1462, Francesco Griffolini made a new paraphrastic prose translation into Latin for Pope Pius II. The first printed edition of the Odyssey in Greek was published in Milan 1488 by Demetrios Chalkokondyles, a Greek scholar resident in the Republic of Florence. Other noted editions appeared for the Latin version, beginning with that printed by Johann Schott of Strasbourg; new Latin versions or adaptations were put out by Andreas Divus and Raffaele Maffei. Divus’ translation was in a simplified version of Latin, and did not include with it the Homeric Greek text. A word-for-word rendition, it remained highly popular during those decades, although other writers had produced similar translations in the decades preceding Divus’ version.^[f]

Printed translations for modern European languages surged in popularity in the sixteenth century; the inaugural book of this category was probably Simon Schaidenreisser [de]‘s German print of 1537. Many of this group were only partial translations; parts eight through twelve of the poem (Odysseus’ account of his adventures) were the most commonly translated, which Jessica Wolfe says indicates that they were “read for recreation and not serious study”. Most of these were written in Latin. Renaissance readers particularly emphasised elements of colonial expansion and sea travel. In 1550, Gonzalo Pérez, a high-ranking bureaucrat of the Spanish Empire, published in Salamanca his draft of the poem, which in all ran at 21,944 verses; named Ulixea (rather than the updated Odisea), it is viewed as the first translation of that poem not just in Spanish, but in any Romance language. The first completed Italian Odyssey, written by Girolamo Baccelli [fr] in free verse, was published in 1582. The first completed French translation was composed in Alexandrine couplets by Salomon Certon [fr] and printed in 1604. It lost public favour following the Académie Française‘s language reforms in the 1630s and 1640s.^[53]

Arthur Hall was the first to translate Homer into English: his translation of the Iliad‘s first 10 books, which was published in 1581, relied upon a French version. George Chapman became the first writer to complete a translation of both epics into English after finishing his translation of the Odyssey. These translations were published together in 1616, but were serialised earlier, and became the first modern translations to enjoy widespread success. He worked on Homeric translation for most of his life, and his work later inspired John Keats‘ sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816).

Johann Heinrich Voss‘ eighteenth-century translations of the epics are among his most celebrated works,^[g] and profoundly influenced the German language. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called Voss’ translations transformational masterpieces that initiated German interest in Hellenism. Anne Dacier composed her Iliad and Odyssey in French prose,^[h] appearing in 1711 and 1716, respectively;^[53] it was the standard French Homeric translation until the late eighteenth century.^[64] Antoine Houdar de la Motte, who could not read Ancient Greek, used Dacier’s Iliad to produce his own contracted version, criticising Homer in the preface. His argument that he had improved upon Homer angered Dacier, who penned a 600-page rebuttal.^[66]

Dacier’s translation of the Odyssey profoundly influenced the 1720s translation by Alexander Pope, which he produced for financial reasons years after his Iliad. Dacier did not speak English and used a poor translation to read Pope’s translation; she condemned it in a prefatory note a new version of her Iliad. Pope, an admirer of Dacier, was hurt; she died in 1720 before he could respond.^[64] Pope translated twelve books himself and divided the other twelve between Elijah Fenton and William Broome; the latter also provided annotations. They were composed in heroic couplets—paired rhyming lines of iambic pentameter. This information eventually leaked, harming his reputation and profits. Armstrong describes a “battle of English poetic forms” following Pope’s translation: William Cowper translated rendered the epics in blank verse, the non-rhyming schema used by John Milton for Paradise Lost. Armstrong describes this battle continuing into the nineteenth century.

Pérez’s Spanish translation was the only such version of the poem until 1837, when Mariano Esparza of Mexico published his own—followed fifty years later by more professional version, the work of Spanish classicist Federico Baraibar. The first Portuguese-language Odyssey was translated by the journalist and politician Manuel Odorico Mendes [pt] (1799–1864), who also produced the first Portuguese versions of the Iliad, the Aeneid, and Virgil’s entire poetic corpus. Odorico combined the approaches of preceding Portuguese poets. The metre used was the decasyllable—an analogue to iambic pentameter―also employed by the sixteenth-century poet Luís de Camões in Os Lusíadas. One controversial feature was the use of composite words, borrowed from Ippolito Pindemonte, for the translation of epithets and other adjectives. According to Leonardo Antunes, the metre, together with the use of composite words, “created a translation that was harder to read than the actual Greek and Latin texts”.

Still in the eighteenth century, Bernardo Zamagna of Ragusa produced a widely circulated neo-Latin rendition of the Homeric poem. The early nineteenth century brought Homeric studies to other areas of East-Central and Eastern Europe. Possibly the first attempt to complete a Romanian version was that of Ioan Barac in Austrian Transylvania (a manuscript dated to 1816); Alecu Beldiman of Moldavia completed an all-prose translation at some point before 1837 (his remained a manuscript version, as was the fragmentary version done in 1852 by Wallachia‘s Alexandru Odobescu). The first Odyssey in the Russian language may have been Vasily Zhukovsky‘s 1849 translation in hexameter. Around that time, the first rendition into Hungarian was penned by István Szabó, followed by a succession of other translators—including Emil Ponori Thewrewk [hu] and János Csengery [hu]. Awareness of the Odyssey also spread about the Ottoman Empire, but no Ottoman Turkish translation was published—largely because the local intellectuals knew enough French to read it in French translations; by contrast, the Iliad had one such a rendition, presented in 1886 by Naim Frashëri.

Most of the first poem in Ezra Pound‘s The Cantos is a partial translation of the Odyssey‘s 11th part. Pound’s translation was based on Andreas Divus’ faithful word-for-word Latin Odyssey. Massimo Cè writes that that Divus’ faithful Latin translation has led some scholars to conclude that “we can treat both equally as source texts, with Divus acting as a window onto Homer”, but Cè argues that, while Pound’s language, meaning and metre is indebted to Divus’ version, they differ substantially from the Homeric Greek Odyssey. Pound’s translation mingled the conventions of Latin and Anglo-Saxon poetry. In the 1940s, E. V. Rieu set out to make Homer accessible to new readers. Rieu’s Odyssey was written in English prose and produced as the first entry in the mass-market paperback Penguin Classics series, for which he was the founding editor. Bassnett describes this release within the context of diminished interest in formal study of classical languages. Rieu’s translations were very successful; his prose approach inspired others in the post-war period.

In the twentieth century, several definitive translations appeared in languages that had already provided experiments in translation. Linguist Luis Segalá y Estalella [es] produced a new prose version in Spanish (1912), which remained highly popular, while a “careful” rendition into Catalan verse was completed by Carles Riba in 1919. The first full version in Romanian, done by the Aromanian scholar George Murnu, appeared in print in 1924, the same year that Józef Wittlin completed his Polish rendition (Wittlin revised his own work in several editions, down to 1957). Ahmet Cevat Emre began working on a Turkish translation in the 1930s, at the behest of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; the result was a two-volume edition, published in 1941–1942 by the Turkish Language Association. Gábor Devecseri [hu] published his Hungarian text in 1947.

Later in the century, the Odyssey was translated into some languages for the first time. A complete Odyssey in Serbian was published in 1966 by Miloš N. Đurić, and was immediately regarded as a major stylistic accomplishment. José Manuel Pabón [es] gave a new Spanish translation in verse. Published in 1982, this translation was influenced by modernist poetry, and by Riba, in its use of “accentual hexametres”. Luo Niansheng began translating the first Chinese-language Iliad in the late 1980s, but he died before completing it; his student Wang Huansheng finished the project; Wang’s Odyssey followed in 1997. William Neill‘s translation of parts of the Odyssey into Scots language (Tales frae the Odyssey O Homer), published in 1991 by the Saltire Society, was inspired by Gavin Douglas‘ 16th-century translation. Hardwick uses Neill’s work as an example of a translation “enhancing the target language and culture”. Moshe Ha-Elion—a survivor of the death marches and Auschwitz concentration camp—translated the Odyssey into Judaeo-Spanish, a language with very few speakers. His hexameter composition was published in two parts from 2011 to 2014.