Translations of the Odyssey

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 artificial literary nature of Homeric Greek presents some challenges for translators. 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; translators also differ in their preferences for prose or rhyme schemes, with some opting for intermediary variants such as free verse and blank verse.

The earliest known translation of Odysseus' travels is Livius Andronicus' Latin Odusia (3rd century BCE)—surviving only in fragments, it was one of the first Latin literary texts. Threatened with disappearance during the literary hiatus at the end of the classical age, the Odyssey was cherished and preserved in the Byzantine Empire, as a Greek text; translations were made into Georgian and possibly Syriac, but Homer was left out of the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement. The Odyssey was rediscovered by Renaissance humanists, who worked on new Latin translations. The earliest known version into any post-classical vernacular may have been Simon Schaidenreisser's German one (1537). Later notable translations include George Chapman's English versions in the early 17th century; Johann Heinrich Voss' 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.

Criticized by both neoclassicists and romantics for its perceived imperfections, the Odyssey was nevertheless widely circulated, and functioned as a long-term project for noted authors in their respective national vernaculars—in the 19th-century, complete translations were made by Manuel Odorico Mendes (Portuguese), Federico Baraibar (Spanish), and George Coșbuc (Romanian); Iakovos Polylas produced a retranslation of the epic into Modern Greek. The 20th century brought a mixture of translation and modernist reinterpretation, as with Ezra Pound's Cantos; translations in classical form were also encouraged, as samples of cultural prestige, by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes on the right and left. The same period also produced 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.