Classically Trained

By Juan Fueyo-Gomez

Hoping Homer will forgive us, I start at the beginning, asking Daniel Mendelsohn when he first began thinking of publishing a translation of the Odyssey. Mendelsohn leans back, ‘Let me start by asking, have you read my book about the Odyssey?’, referring to An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic, the critically-acclaimed memoir he published in 2017. The book showcases Mendelsohn’s many talents as he draws parallels between the epic and his own relationship with his father. Besides his award-winning aptitude for narrative, the memoir featured Mendelsohn’s talent for translation, translating excerpts from Homer’s epic.

Acclaim for An Odyssey occasioned a serendipitous call. ‘I remember it very clearly. I was washing my kitchen floor, and the phone rang.’ The translated excerpts had caught the interest of the executive editor of University of Chicago Press. ‘It turned out that the University of Chicago Press, which is very famous for its translations of the classics, had the [Richmond] Lattimore Iliad… but they never had an Odyssey.’ Lattimore had moved with his Odyssey to another publisher, and Mendelsohn agreed to complete the series, with the translation due for release in April of this year. Reviewing translations has been central to his critical work from his start at The New York Review of Books, but this is only Mendelsohn’s second published translation, following his 2009 translation of the complete works of modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. The Odyssey came with a very different set of challenges, which only increased his interest.

Key to translating, Mendelsohn says, is the ‘mad, crazy, impossible project’ of ‘[imagining] the author well enough to think, “what would this person be doing if they spoke English in the 21st century?”’ In the case of Cavafy, Mendelsohn credits the rich biographical context for allowing a certain intimacy with the author. ‘With Cavafy, you can look at his correspondence and look at other people’s memoirs about him, and sort of imagine yourself into a space where you would know where, say, something in a certain poem came from.’

Beyond biographical distance, the more salient chasm is that between the modalities of two linguistic cultures, the obvious difficulty of translation with not so obvious solutions. This is especially the case in Ancient Greek; its grammar allows for a wealth of concisely layered meanings that is hard to replicate in English. For instance, Odysseus convinces the anthropophagic cyclops Polyphemus that his name is outis, Greek for ‘nobody’, so that when the monster later calls out for help, his neighbours hear ‘Nobody is killing me’ and do not come to his aid. In the original, the pun is ‘ten times more complicated’, as outis boasts many meanings, including cleverness. Translating such complexity into another language can be impossible, and Mendelsohn was aware that sacrifices would have to be made. ‘The whole business of translation is, you know, one of the babies is going to have to get thrown out of the lifeboat.’

Acknowledging that the English version could never account for the full breadth of this complexity, Mendelsohn resorted to extensive paratext. ‘My Odyssey has the fullest apparatus of notes and commentary of any modern Odyssey… It’s not just brief informational notes on this or that reference, but an ongoing commentary.’ The ‘nobody’ pun alone receives two long paragraphs in the over seventy pages of footnotes. In addition, he included a translator’s note that places readers in the translator’s shoes. ‘The whole point of doing a translation, I think, is that you want your reader to have the same kind of experience, or a comparable grasp of crucial things going on in the text.’

Part of this challenge is that the epic is written in a literary Greek that no one ever spoke. Like Odysseus, the translator must sail carefully between Scylla and Charybdis, between the risk of illegibility that comes from too closely replicating the original language on the one end and the opposing danger of straying into colloquialisms with ‘a short shelf-life’ on the other. ‘To “Joe Greek”, say, in Periclean Athens, the Odyssey registered in the mind of the listener the way that, for us today, the diction of the King James Bible feels: archaic and yet familiar. At the same time, it has tremendous authority, not only literary, but cultural and even religious… That’s how it felt to them, familiar and strange at the same time. So I developed this arsenal of ways to sort of make you sit up every now and then.’

Among those tools were refusing to use Latinate renderings — relying on words with Anglo-Saxon roots — and employing a more capacious line, instead of the iambic pentameter frequently used in English translations. Recent translations have taken a different tack, especially the bestselling work of Emily Wilson, which favoured colloquialisms and was met with particular praise within the context of a booming industry of literary retellings of ancient myth. A famous example of such work is Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011), which romanticises the story of Patroclus and Achilles so central to the Iliad and recently reached new summits of popularity years after publication upon becoming a sensation on BookTok. Mendelsohn’s New York Times review at the time of the novel’s publication stressed that it abandoned the strangeness of Ancient Greek culture for ‘a modern tale of hormones.’

When I ask Mendelsohn about the suggestion that these novels afford a new perspective on ancient myths, he is unconvinced — Euripides did it first. ‘I get these books in the mail from publishers who want me to review them, and the pitch is always, “The women of Greek myth have been so neglected.” And I’m like, “Have you never fucking read a Greek tragedy?” You know, that’s all that Greek tragedy is: giving voice to the women of myth. So give me a break.’ As Mendelsohn speaks, he often raises his hand with two fingers held skyward, a movement that suggests the classical pose of Plato, as he readily draws on art, cinema, and literature to supplement his arguments. At the same time, he remains eminently conversational, mediating professorial erudition through his elegant yet stinging wit. In these moments, he is the Gore Vidal of Ancient Greek, as a charming sarcastic tone moderates his scholarly dictums. Later in the conversation, Mendelsohn begins to conclude that ‘anything that brings classics to people is good. I mean, it’s what I’ve been doing for the past 35 years, so why not?’ Yet, having conceded such virtues, Mendelsohn grins and adds, ‘But, you know, I always say that I’m going to make my fortune and retire on the proceeds from my planned novel about Medusa, as told from the point of view of her hairdresser.’

Mendelsohn balks at how these retellings prize ‘relatability’. To Mendelsohn, this ‘a low-level of connectedness to a work’. Finding something interesting, he claims, is more important than finding it relatable. ‘I get this on papers from students. They say, “It wasn’t relatable for me.” And I always think, “Who the fuck cares about you? You can’t relate to Madame Bovary. Well, duh. I mean, let’s hope not.”’ When I suggest that the centring of relatability may be a symptom of the wider dynamic of culture mediated through social media, I strike a nerve. Mendelsohn insists that technological demands on our attention risk damaging our ability to engage deeply with cultural objects. ‘If the minute you finish a book, you then have to announce to the world what you have read and what you thought of it, that’s corrosive, because part of a productive way to relate to things is to have time to think about them. ’ He presses on without my needing to ask follow-up questions. The problem, Mendelsohn tells me, is existential. ‘This has grave implications for the life of the mind, and I would say even the life of the self… where is the room for the private self, whose reactions and impressions are wholly private and not to be shared, which is an important part of how we ought to be responding to literature and art?’ Mendelsohn himself admits that his concentration no longer allows for the marathon sessions of Tolstoy from his college days. His eyes drift to the upper left corner of his screen, ‘I mean, just think of how many times my email has pinged since we started talking an hour ago.’

Perhaps because of this sense of his own distraction, Mendelsohn did not offer much in the way of solutions. ‘I do think it’s a critical moment in the history of how we relate to the products of culture. I don’t have an answer, but I’m certainly noticing the question.’ But when I shifted the conversation to Mendelsohn’s work as co-director of Robert B. Silvers Foundation, he assumed a more hopeful tone. ‘It’s a great way of getting a sense of who’s out there in terms of young writers working in criticism and intellectual essay. And the good news is there are a lot!’ For Mendelsohn, the foundation’s Silvers-Dudley Prizes are helping to raise the cultural profile of criticism as an art in its own right. ‘There’s no Booker for people like this, but there ought to be… It is its own genre, like fiction or anything else. It is not parasitic or ancillary… I do everything I can to keep reminding people that it’s a serious form of literature when carried on at a very high level, and that should be recognised.’

Indeed, though in enumerating worrying trends Mendelsohn can seem like Cassandra auguring Troy’s fiery end, his work — whether it be in translation, in criticism, or through the foundation — espouses a glowing optimism that his prophecies can be reversed.

JUAN FUEYO-GOMEZ is a second-year MPhil in International Relations. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Review of Books in Hilary 2025.

Art by Eloise Cook