I joked about starting an Odyssey book club in my Discord server because I was so fed up of people complaining about the Odyssey without having read it. To my surprise, people liked the joke enough that it turned into a real book club! We’re all bringing along the translations by E. V. Rieu, Robert Fagles, and Emily Wilson so that we can compare and contrast.

To avoid everyone’s brains melting from reading too much, we are reading one book (chapter) of the poem every week. This will take a long time. I am looking forward to the journey.

Having read Rieu’s translation when I was much younger, I chose to read Wilson’s translation first and follow up with the Fagles. Homeric Greek is a fiendishly difficult language. The Iliad and the Odyssey together use about 9,000 unique words – nearly twice as many as the 5,000 unique words an English speaker might use over the course of a day. Homeric Greek uses a grammar far different from English and every word might be laden with some ambiguity.

A complicated man

In the very first line of his poem, Homer describes Odysseus as polytropos: a man of many twists and turns, like his story. Polytropos is justifiably difficult to translate into modern English. Fagles translates it as “a man of twists and turns”; Wilson translates it as “complicated”. So already we find divergence, which is to be expected! Still, both translations are more lyrical and readable than the Rieu (sorry).

Although I picked out three translations for us to discuss, I personally hold the view that there should be no canonical translation of the Odyssey and we should treat them all as different interpretations.

Father and son

Book I of the Odyssey starts out by mentioning Odysseus and his deeds, but it does not introduce us to the man himself. Instead, it introduces us to his son Telemachus, now about 20 years old and growing up being eaten out of house and home by his mother’s suitors. They are terrible houseguests. Hospitality is a huge theme in the Odyssey.

The goddess Athena, disguised as Odysseus’ old family friend Mentes, crashes the court of Ithaca and spends some time talking to Telemachus about how awesome his dad is. It made me itch to get to the part where we actually see more of Odysseus. We also see the introduction of the story-within-a-story format that gets reused in later Books with the songs of the bard Phemius. (Personally, it’s not my favourite volume. The Odyssey is a slow burn.)

The value of the classics

I was raised on classic literature, including Greek and Roman myths. As a teenager, I translated Latin poetry and prose (and even wrote some of my own). I am no stranger to the following:

• arguments about the value of the literary canon
• arguments about representation in the literary canon
• arguments about dead white males
• arguments about how you can’t expect people to read any more

So I was taken aback by the appetite people have for reading and discussing different translations. At the moment we have people from five different continents, all reading and discussing the same work of ancient literature, all taking different things from it, all connecting over one book with its many twists and turns.

I think this is the real power of the classics and the literary canon: bringing people together to enjoy something made by people who could never imagine the world their descendants live in. I am delighted that we get to go on a journey through the ancient world together.