Yesterday I finished six weeks of teaching Homer’s Odyssey to some very bright freshmen using @DAMendelsohnNYC’s translation, and I have to say it was exhilarating. Basically all said they preferred Mendelsohn to Fagles, whose Iliad they read. I did not expect this, to be honest, but it came to make sense. What struck me this time was the forthrightness of the Mendelsohn version: the remarkable inventiveness that shows off, not Mendelsohn’s own eloquence, but that of the original. If you read Greek you can feel Homer just under the surface of the English, and the students could trust that much of the clever detail they discovered in English was true to the Greek (pretty much every time we checked, it was). Excellent notes too. Also fwiw I started out yesterday choking up over the reunion with Penelope, and ended up an emotional mess over the walk with Laertes through the orchard. What a great poem. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books…