#420 - Translating Homer's The Odyssey: A Dialogue with Daniel Mendelsohn

Converging Dialogues

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Daniel Mendelsohn on his new English translation of Homer’s The Odyssey. They discuss the massive impact of The Odyssey, major themes in the Odyssey, authorship, and translation for our time. They talk about the lines and meter of the Odyssey in English, oral to written form, adapting the Odyssey, relevance for the 21st century, and many more topics.

Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. He is a professor of literature at Bard College. He has degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. He has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles in many publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He has also been a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic. In February 2019, he was named Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

He has received many honors including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harry Vursell Prize for Prose Style, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and Princeton University’s James Madison Medal. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France, and received the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association. He is also the author of many books including the new translation of, Homer’s The Odyssey.

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