The Odyssey

Homer (author) Trans Emily Wilson

Specially bound paperback edition, with deckle-edging (rough-cut) pages and French flaps.

"...a new cultural landmark...The first version of Homer's groundbreaking work by a woman will change our understanding of it for ever...Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem." Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian

The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world.

This vivid new translation the first by a woman matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer's sprightly pace. Emily Wilson employs elemental, resonant language and a five-beat line to produce a translation with an enchanting "rhythm and rumble" that avoids proclaiming its own grandeur. An engrossing tale told in a compelling new voice that allows contemporary readers to luxuriate in Homer's descriptions and similes and to thrill at the tension and excitement of its hero's adventures, Wilson recaptures what is "epic" about this wellspring of world literature.

Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives.

He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey - are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.

Emily Wilson is a British-American classicist and translator. She is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, her translation of Homer's Odyssey was the first by a woman into English verse.