Author Finishes 3,000-Year-Old Odyssey After Years of Struggle, Using New Translation and Study Aids
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 16
Author Finishes 3,000-Year-Old Odyssey After Years of Struggle, Using New Translation and Study Aids
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 16
Summary
A recent film adaptation pushed the author to try Homer’s epic again, and this time they finished it after years of abandoning earlier attempts.
Advice from classicists led to a new method: build context first, then read Emily Wilson’s translation with footnotes, maps and book-by-book summaries.
Books 1–4 still proved difficult, so the author mapped characters and relationships on paper; audiobooks were also recommended to make the oral-poetry repetitions easier to absorb.
The payoff was a reading experience the author found surprisingly modern and fast-paced, with Books 9–11 standing out and the Argos scene in Book 17 landing as especially moving.
The finish did not close the project: the author now sees the Odyssey as a living text still shaping works from Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller to Derek Walcott and James Joyce.