With Christopher Nolan’s film version of The Odyssey out now, Henry Eliot looks at which of the many adaptations of Homer’s epic tale to read before you watch

Each night during the Blitz, the rooftops of London were populated by an army of fire watchers, each manning a solitary and often precarious post amid the wail of air raid sirens and the terrifying whistle of falling bombs. These volunteers spent long cold nights looking out for fires caused by German incendiary bombs, ready to raise the alarm. On the roof of Birkbeck College, for example, on Fetter Lane near Fleet Street, a 53-year-old semi-retired classicist sat on duty, reminded no doubt of the night watch in Book 10 of Homer’s Iliad:

his entrails shook, as often as his view Admir’d the multitude of fires, that gilt the Phrygian shade, And heard the sounds of fifes, and shawms, and tumults soldiers made.

Emile Victor Rieu – he had a Swiss-French father and German mother – was born in London and studied classics at Oxford. By 1941, he had been working for Methuen, the educational textbook publishers, for 20 years. He had served as their educational manager and managing director but had stepped down in 1936 to take an advisory role.

On his rooftop night shifts, Rieu passed the time by translating Homer’s Odyssey. “I went back to Homer, the supreme realist,” he recalled, “[…] by way of escape from the unrealities that surrounded us.” Each evening he would read out his latest section to his family, until eventually his wife – as loyal and patient as Odysseus’s Penelope – encouraged him to submit his translation for publication. She suggested he approach Penguin Books, the paperback publishing house that had launched a few years before the war.

Rieu sent his Odyssey to Allen Lane, the founder and managing director of Penguin, who raised it for discussion with the editorial board. They were not impressed. In the first place, Rieu was neither an academic nor an established author: his only previous publication was a 1933 collection of nonsense verse for children. But more discouraging was that dozens of English translations of The Odyssey already existed. As the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had written in 1932 in his excellent essay “The Homeric Versions”: “English literature has always been amicable toward this epic of the sea.”

The first complete English translation of The Odyssey was made by the poet and dramatist George Chapman, a contemporary of Shakespeare. His Iliad and Odyssey were published in a 1616 folio that became the standard English edition for more than a century. Chapman’s earthily lyrical verse has been much admired by Alexander Pope, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and TS Eliot, and John Keats famously wrote a sonnet about the experience of “first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, marvelling at its splendours in the same way that Cortez, on seeing the Pacific for the first time, fell “silent, upon a peak in Darien”. The snippet of The Iliad after the first paragraph is from his translation.

(Incidentally, Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey formed the basis of Charles Lamb’s 1808 retelling, The Adventures of Ulysses, which was taught in schools, including Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, where it made a lasting impression on an 11-year-old James Joyce and later provided the title and structure for his novel Ulysses.)

Other translations followed. The cartographer John Ogilby translated The Odyssey in 1665 and the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes translated it in 1675. In 1725, Alexander Pope published a translation in thumping heroic couplets to match his popular Iliad, although half of his Odyssey was in fact written by others. William Cowper wrote a translation in blank verse in 1791, William Morris wrote one in the style of an Icelandic saga in 1887 and Samuel Butler wrote the first prose translation in 1900.

Translators are repeatedly drawn to Homer, not only because the Iliad and Odyssey are the foundation texts of Western literature, but also because Homer poses unique challenges. The epics were first written down in the seventh or eighth century BC, in “Homeric Greek”, an archaic form of Ionian Greek. Internal clues suggest strongly, however, that they originated much earlier. The rhythm of their dactylic hexameters and the repetition of stock epithets imply they are rare survivors of a pre-literate oral tradition that have managed to jump the gap into written literature.

Homer himself is an enigma. He could have been a blind minstrel, a Babylonian hostage or a Sicilian princess (as Robert Graves imagined) – or, more likely, there was no single author of these poems and “Homer” was a retrospective invention. The mystery of their origin makes it impossible to tease apart what is poetic inspiration and what are rhetorical or linguistic conventions, and “to that fortunate difficulty,” said Borges, “we owe the possibility of so many versions, all of them sincere, genuine and divergent.”

Back in 1944, the editorial board at Penguin Books pointed out to Allen Lane that no fewer than eight new editions of The Odyssey had been published between the wars, including five new translations. Only two of them had sold more than 3,000 copies. But Lane was famous for his impulsive decisions. After reading just two chapters (apparently), he not only accepted Rieu’s translation for publication, but also appointed him general editor of a new Penguin series: a “Translation Series from the Greek, Roman and other classics”. And thus the Penguin Classics series was born, in January 1946, with the publication of EV Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey.

“Something important has happened,” reported Reynold’s News. “[…] There is a new translation of The Odyssey, a very contemporary translation, and it costs only one shilling. This is revolutionary.” Rieu’s Odyssey was a surprise bestseller. It sold over three million copies, bankrolled the nascent Penguin Classics series and in fact became the bestselling of all the Penguin Books titles until it was overtaken two decades later by Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1951, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote “On Looking into EV Rieu’s Homer”, in which he told Rieu: “Like Achilles you had a goddess for mother. / For only the half-god can see / The immortal in things mortal”.

What was the secret of its success? It was partly that it cost one shilling: Penguin presented The Odyssey as an affordable paperback, the same size and format as a novel, and it was available in WH Smiths and Woolworths rather than specialist booksellers. No edition had ever seemed so accessible. Its success was also down to timing: the lack of alternative entertainment during the Second World War had encouraged an increasingly literate UK population to develop increasingly ambitious reading tastes. Moreover, The Odyssey is the story of a weary soldier returning from a long war – exactly what the reading public was experiencing in January 1946. Finding oneself reflected in a 28-century-old text must have been sobering but also reassuring.

Today, 80 years later, even more English translations have been published. If you’re thinking of reading or rereading The Odyssey, for example, perhaps before you watch Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation, you’ll need to choose from the array of English translations available (assuming you’re not adept in the original Homeric Greek).

To make your decision, first you must pick a side in the Newman-Arnold debate. The poet Matthew Arnold published On Translating Homer in 1861, a set of lectures in which he criticised Francis Newman’s 1856 translation of The Iliad. Newman riposted in print and Arnold responded again in 1862. Their “beautiful” debate, as Borges describes it, laid out the two fundamental methods of translating Homer: a literal approach that retains the linguistic irregularities of the original; or an idealised approach that smooths out the language and focuses on readability. (Incidentally, there are several websites that allow you to compare different translations: one of the best is bibliothekai.ktema.org/texts/1/ which lets you read sample passages side by side.)

If, like Newman, you would prefer a translation that is as faithful to the original Greek as possible, I would recommend either the verse translation by Richard Lattimore (1965, Harper Perennial Modern Classics) or the more recent prose translation by Anthony Verity (2018, Oxford World’s Classics).

Alternatively, you might agree with Arnold, who believed that a translation is most faithful when it recreates the reading experience rather than a line-for-line correspondence. In this case, you have more options. For example, you might consider one of two mid-century translations that have become classics in their own right: the American poet Robert Fitzgerald’s elegant verse translation (1961, Vintage Classics) or, of course, EV Rieu’s prose translation, which is still in print with Penguin Classics; it was updated in 1991 by his son, DCH Rieu.

Usually, however, I would recommend reading a recent translation, so that the translator has had the benefit of the latest textual scholarship. Two frontrunners in this regard, both verse translations, are Robert Fagles (1996, Penguin Classics), which captures the drama and scale of the original, and Emily Wilson (2017, WW Norton), which is accessible and contemporary and, remarkably, the first complete translation of The Odyssey by a woman.

My top recommendation, however, would be the recent translation by the essayist Daniel Mendelsohn, who attempts to cover both bases: he reproduces some of Homer’s formal qualities – his metre, alliteration and assonance – while also trying to convey the expansive poetic grandeur of the original. His translation was first published in hardback by Penguin Classics last year and, in a lovely touch, to mark the 80th anniversary of that series, the paperback edition, published in April 2026, has been given a brown frame and typeface that recall Rieu’s 1946 paperback Odyssey, the original Penguin Classic.

This article is from the new issue of the Idler (#110) July 2026 – out now.

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