The Most Famous "Odyssey" Translation Is Inaccurate

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When I first began to read Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, I had high expectations. An attractive, colorful cover showing three young Minoan women adorned the book. Scores of people had hailed Wilson’s version of Homer as ground-breaking, radically innovative — the best translation of the Odyssey ever written. What was not to enjoy? Yet, as I read, I was at first bewildered, then annoyed, and, finally, shocked.

A paradox lies at the heart of translation. A translation of a literary text — Homer’s Odyssey, say— into English from Ancient Greek is obviously meant for readers who do not know the original language. (Why else would they want a translation?) Yet it is only people who do know Ancient Greek and the world where it developed that can judge the accuracy of the version and its closeness to the original. Additionally, because a translation of Homer faces both towards a distant, foreign past and towards a familiar present, to evaluate it one must have a good grasp of contemporary literary English.

What qualifies the writer to make a case against Emily Wilson’s Odyssey? Well, I do know Ancient Greek thoroughly (including the particular dialect used by Homer), as I studied it at both Oxford and St. Andrews, and have taught Homeric epic for decades at the University of Cape Town. As for English, I have always been a voracious reader of its prose and poetry and have wide experience of translating from several languages, among them Ancient Greek, into different literary registers of English. In 2012, I published a translation, directly from the original Greek, of Homer’s Iliad into English (with a South African flavor) and a companion translation of the Odyssey in 2017 — the same year that Wilson’s version was first published by Norton. Having then just spent five years in intimate contact with the Greek text, wrestling it into suitable English, I was fully primed to examine Wilson’s version, which I did at some length in a 2020 academic review, “Homer’s Odyssey Three Ways: Recent Translations,” and more informally in a recent podcast interview.

Since I shall later say something about renderings of a Classical text that depart from the original and give the translator’s own creative, contemporary take on it, I should mention up front that I have very recent experience also of doing that kind of translation (my African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues, with images by artist William Kentridge).

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In his famous sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” John Keats touched on epic translation. The poet reacted with wonder and admiration to Chapman’s version of Homer, writing:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;Round many western islands have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.Oft of one wide expanse had I been toldThat deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken . . .

But my first reading of Wilson’s Odyssey was not rapturous: it filled me with dismay. I found that the translator misrepresented and distorted the way that Homer depicts his chief character, Odysseus, and other major figures of the epic; that she imposed ill-fitting, anachronistic, contemporary values and judgements on the millennia-old poem; and that she was careless and over-hasty in her translation, leading to scores of elementary, sometimes embarrassing blunders. All these things are matters of fact for which I give exhaustive evidence in my scholarly review.

In the introduction to her translation, Wilson thanked “a team of classicist readers whose eagle eyes saved me from innumerable infelicities.” But here is a curious thing. After reviewing the 2018 printing of Wilson’s Odyssey, I emailed her editor at Norton a list of about seventy further errors that needed attention, copying the translator in. Wilson acknowledged receipt of my list. This was in late 2019. Then, in mid-2020, Norton published a new “Critical Edition” of the Wilson Odyssey. Having become aware of this later publication only in 2026 — thanks to a video podcast by “Lady of the Library,” Cinzia DuBois — I went through the “Critical Edition” and checked its text against my list of errors. In fifty-seven places my corrections had been silently made. Yet, even in spite of the updates, as we will soon see, the latest version is still not an accurate rendering of the original.

Much of the recent online chatter about translation in the context of Homer’s epic has been off register. The reason is that “translation” is a slippery term and does not mean one thing. In relation to an original text, “translation” might mean a close, accurate rendering; or one that is mainly, but not always, close; or a creative adaptation; or someone’s “take” on, or complete rewriting of, that text. To further complicate things, an original text may also be “translated” into an entirely different medium — into an opera, a film, a painting, or a sculpted frieze.

So, it is vital that you ask of any translation: what is the context in which it is produced, and for what purpose? The answers will tell you what category of translation is under consideration. It will also guide you when you try to judge whether the translation succeeds or fails.

Let’s get specific. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a sort of translation of Homer’s Odyssey, as is Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, which views Homer’s Odysseus from the perspective of his wife and enslaved household women. Critics could legitimately praise Joyce for creating a new, humble, quotidian Odysseus in his figure of Leopold Bloom, and Atwood for her critical, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant feminist take on the characters of Homer’s epic. But it would never be legitimate to criticize either writer for being unfaithful to the original and misrepresenting the values and worldview of Homer’s Odyssey, or for showing the characters of that epic in a different light than Homer. Though they take their starting point from the Odyssey, the respective works of Atwood and Joyce are “creative translations,” independent fictions that must be judged by criteria appropriate to such forms.

The same goes for Christopher Nolan’s movie. It is a translation of Homeric epic into a completely different medium: a contemporary, huge-budget, popular film. The legitimate purpose of Nolan’s version was not to mirror the ancient Odyssey, but to entertain vast numbers of twenty-first-century cinemagoers and, perhaps, make them think a little about civilizational change and the responsibilities of leaders towards their followers. Criticism of Nolan for having changed the way Homer represented Odysseus, his wife Penelope, and their son Telemachus, or for having left out or rearranged certain episodes of the original Odyssey, are simply beside the point.

Which brings us back to the Odyssey by Emily Wilson. In my view, Wilson’s translation fails because, from the start, the translator was confused about her purpose; hence, she tried to achieve too many incompatible goals. She wanted to produce what I would call an “academic” translation (more on this in a moment). She also wanted to write her own creative take on Homer’s Odyssey, as Margaret Atwood did. And she wanted her translation to critique the ancient epic through theories of deconstruction, allowing readers, as she writes in her 2018 introduction, “to see the cracks and fissures” in the Odyssey’s “constructed fantasy.” But can one and the same translation achieve these all aims without becoming incoherent and confused? I think not.

Academic translations of Homer’s Odyssey are legion. To name just a few: Over the last sixty years, Richmond Lattimore (1965), Green (2018), and Daniel Mendelsohn (2025) in the USA, and Shewring (1980) and Verity (2018) in the UK, have produced versions of this kind, all published by university presses. The purpose of academic translations of Homer’s Odyssey is to present the text to undergraduate students for study, and to introduce the epic to non-university readers who want an accurate version of the original. Such translations strive to carefully render the whole text of the epic, to reflect the original Greek as accurately as possible, and to represent truly the millennia-old values and worldview of Homer and the characters he created. An academic translation should be, in the well-worn phrase, “faithful to the original.” (A striking fact: Brilliant creative adapters of Homeric epic need such versions. Both James Joyce in his Ulysses and Christopher Logue in his War Music – a superb twentieth-century riff on the Iliad – used academic translations and not looser, poetic versions, as their starting point.)

In the introduction to her Odyssey, defending her individual, idiosyncratic take on the epic, Emily Wilson writes:

My translation is, like all translations, an entirely different text from the original poem. Translation always, necessarily, involves interpretation . . .

This is tendentious and misleading. Yes, of course, the academic translations I have mentioned are “different” in the sense that they are in modern English, not ancient Greek, and they are printed in a book or published electronically, not written in ink on papyrus scrolls. And though they are “interpretations,” they are in no way “entirely different” from the original. Each of them is much more similar to the others, and to Homer’s Odyssey, than Wilson’s translation is, which is “entirely different” indeed.

Wilson also states in her 2018 introduction:

The gendered metaphor of the “faithful” translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.

But this is simply nonsense. In the phrase “faithful translation” the italicized word means precisely what it means in “a painted portrait that is faithful to its subject” — not in the words “a spouse who is faithful to their spouse.” Extending the metaphor, I would add that the gender of the person here who “paints” should not make a difference to whether their oil or acrylic rendering is recognizable as a likeness of their sitter.

Though she explicitly states her divergence from the original, Wilson’s Odyssey is without doubt meant to be an academic translation. The website of Norton — Wilson’s publisher and a major producer of college textbooks — places her translations of the Odyssey and Iliad in the category of “Classroom Favorites.” And let’s not forget the 2020 “Critical Edition,” which explicitly includes new material suited to “the purposes of teachers and students encountering the poem for the first time, in translation.”

But Wilson’s 2018 error-ridden Odyssey does not meet the required standards for an academic translation, which rarely displays more than a few mistakes. From scores of examples, let me give you just a sample. Wilson mistranslates “five hundred” as “fifty,” “moldy” as “spacious,” “spear” both as “sword” and “dagger,” “today” as “tomorrow,” “men slaves” as “slave girls,” “snowy” as “cloudy,” “uncles” as “cousins,” “that ox hoof you flung” as “that kick you gave,” and so on. She fails to translate one or more lines of Greek in at least six passages. At later points in the story, she forgets characters who appeared earlier and designates them differently, so that the reader cannot identify them from the original reference. Once, she puts a speech into the mouth of the Suitor Antinous instead of Eurymachus. And here are just two of Wilson’s factual mistakes: In the first printing of her Odyssey she quotes a Greek scholar’s date for Homer as “about 10,000 BCE” (in later printings this was corrected to “1,000 BCE”). Additionally, she locates an island, Homeric Samē (later known as Cephalonia), east of Greece, “in the Aegean,” instead of west of Greece, in the Ionian Sea. While any translator of a text as long and complex as the Odyssey is going to err, Wilson makes so many mistakes that, collectively, they begin to sap the reader’s confidence in her capacity to produce an accurate translation.

Now, you could object that, despite their large number, these are local mistakes that could be corrected to create a faithful version. You would be right. In fact, following receipt of the list I sent her, Wilson did put most of them right. But I would argue that her corrected “Critical Edition” is still far too idiosyncratic in its presentation of Homer’s worldview and characters to be used as an academic translation.

The modern world expects a hero to be an individual you can look up to, a model of excellence. But the Odysseus of the Odyssey is a hero in the ancient sense, one who, like so many others in Greek mythology, is admirable in many respects, yet flawed in others. Odysseus is driven by a desire to return to his home and family; he is a fine orator, courageous, a survivor, intelligent and resourceful. However, he is also sometimes rash, irresponsible as a leader, too clever for his own good, and lies too easily when lying serves no purpose.

But we only need to look at the narrative structure of the Odyssey and at how its major characters regard Odysseus to see that the poet constantly works to have his audience admire and sympathize with the hero. Right at the start of the epic, Homer has Zeus, the greatest god of the Greeks, speak of Odysseus as “beyond all other men in mind” (Lattimore) or “beyond all mortals in understanding” (Verity), and of his piety towards the gods. The hero’s wife Penelope longs endlessly for his return, calling him “my noble lion-hearted husband” (Rieu) or “my husband — so noble, his heart like a lion’s” (Mendelsohn). Again, patently sympathetic characters, such as the king and queen of the Phaeacians, openly admire and honor their guest, Odysseus (even before his identity is known to them), and want him to marry their daughter and remain with them.

In its depiction of Odysseus, Wilson’s Odyssey ceases to be true to Homer’s poem (and no, not as in “true to a spouse,” but as in “close to the original perspective”) and instead veers off towards a creative reworking of the epic à la Atwood’s Penelopiad. But what is justifiable for a work of fiction is not for a work that purports to be an academic translation. Wilson has a clear agenda — one that is quite the opposite of Homer’s — which is to present Odysseus in the worst possible way, and his opponents and enemies in the best possible light.

Wilson’s most egregious misrepresentation of Odysseus comes at the very beginning of her Odyssey. At Book 1, lines 5-9, the poet asks the Muse to tell him about the attempted return home of Odysseus and his men. Here are the lines as rendered by a diligent academic translator (italics are mine):

[Odysseus] struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.But he did not save his companions even so, though he longed to,For their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else’s —Fools that they were, like children, who devoured the sun-god Hyperion’sCattle, and so he took from them the day of their homecoming (Mendelsohn)

This is a full and accurate translation of the Greek. But here is how Wilson rendered the same lines in her 2018 Odyssey:

[Odysseus] worked to save his life and bring his menback home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the godkept them from home (Wilson)

It is clear through the epic that Odysseus’ loss of his comrades is a fault for which the hero is partly to blame. But Wilson wants to make him solely responsible for the destruction (her term, where almost all academic translators have “loss”) of his men, intentionally painting him negatively from the poem’s opening lines. Above, my italics of Mendelsohn’s translation stress the strong desire of Odysseus to save his men and their own culpability for their deaths. But Wilson simply omits to translate the words “even so, though [Odysseus] longed to [ save them]” and astoundingly skips the entire line “For their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else’s.” (In her 2020 “Critical Edition” of the Odyssey, Wilson, presumably because of criticism of the 2018 version, does translate this omitted line, in a rather watered-down way: “and for their own mistakes, they died.”) And where the Greek says “and so” the sun-god actively “took away the day of their homecoming” (i.e. destroyed the men because of their recklessness), Wilson leaves out the important “so” in her bland and misleading “and the god kept them from home.”

Wilson does not try to hide her view on Odysseus as, in the introduction, she calls him, “this liar, pirate, colonizer, deceiver, and thief” within whose sphere “other people — those he owns, those he leads — suffer and die, and who directly kills so many people.” This might well be what many people would think of Odysseus were he a real person living among us in the twenty-first century. But, as seen in the original text, that is not how Homer directed his audience, or us, to think of his eighth-century BCE mythical hero.

By contrast, Homer’s epic invites us to see Odysseus’ worst, most deadly opponents — the monstrous cannibal Cyclops, and the arrogant Suitors who have taken over the hero’s home — as akin and parallel to each other. Both are among the very few figures in the Odyssey who violate the sacrosanct code of xenia (respect for, and hospitality towards strangers) by mocking its rituals and insulting and physically assaulting the vulnerable traveler and stranger. The poet repeatedly uses multiple negative epithets of Cyclops and Suitors: “monstrous,” “brazen,” “arrogant,” “lawless,” “outrageous,” “violent,” and so on.

Yet Wilson, pursuing her own re-evaluation of Homeric values, often leaves out these epithets, or mistranslates them, as she attempts to engage our sympathy for the enemies of Odysseus. She often calls the Suitors “young men,” “boys,” even “the murdered boys,” translating as if the Greek lays emphasis on their youth where it does not. Similarly, Wilson constantly downplays the Suitors’ wrongdoing, even in places where the Greek text powerfully condemns it. Where the original speaks of the Suitors’ hyperbion hybrin, which academic translators render “men of violent insolence” (Verity) and “so outrageous and arrogant” (Green), Wilson astonishingly translates “ungentlemanly suitors” (my italics). Elsewhere, she writes of the suitors having “behaved badly,” where the relevant line of the poem talks of men who “in their criminal folly … perpetrated a monstrous wrong” (Green).

The very title that Wilson gives to the episode of Odysseus and the Cyclops, “A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave,” tries to invert the pattern of sympathies of the Homeric text. Wilson wants us to view the Cyclops as a sort of prelapsarian pastoralist, an unworldly creature of the wild (though she does admit he has “the nasty habit of eating his human visitors”) who is brutalized by a devious, violent, proto-colonizing Odysseus. She refuses to use the Homeric Greek terms “monster” and “savage” that most academic translators apply to the Cyclops, instead omitting the adjectives or softening them. And when the Greek text calls the Cyclops “fool” and says “unrestrained in fury, he consumed your powerful comrades” (Od. 9.442 and 20.19-20), Wilson omits to translate any pejorative words. Compare the accurate translations of Od. 9.441-3, by Verity and Mendelsohn with Wilson’s version. The Cyclops is the subject here (italics are mine):

feeling along the backs of all the sheepwhen they stopped - not realizing, the fool, that men werelashed under the bellies of his thick-fleeced sheep (Verity)

kept feeling the backs of the rams with his handsAs they stood there before him. That fool - like a child! - never dreamedThat my men were tied beneath the chests of those woolly rams (Mendelsohn)

he felt the backof each ram as he lined them up - but missedthe men tied up beneath their woolly bellies (Wilson)

The same happens when Homer refers to the Cyclops much later in the poem, at Od. 20.20: “the savage Cyclops devoured those gallant men” (Rieu); “the Cyclops unleashed his violence and devoured / my mighty comrades” (Mendelsohn); “the Cyclops ate / your strong companions” (Wilson).

A final point. The Cyclops episode of Odyssey Book 9 demonstrates how, when Wilson neglects academic accuracy, creating her own fiction, the results are extremely confused. Even as she produces her sympathetic version of the Cyclops, one that attempts to soften his ferocious violence towards strangers, Wilson appears to forget that, for the whole of the Cyclops episode, Odysseus himself is the narrator. Why on earth, we must ask ourselves, would an unpleasant and unsympathetic Odysseus (in Wilson’s treatment) want to mitigate rather than intensify the monstrosity of his opponent? Oh, wait a moment: At the very start of Odysseus’ long narrative, Wilson had taken care to characterize the narrator as “Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies” (my italics), a pejorative rendering of the hero’s stock epithet polymetis (“resourceful”, “cunning”). So, in Wilson’s version, is Odysseus actually lying later when as narrator he softens the monstrosity of the Cyclops? And is this Wilson’s involuted way of implying that the Cyclops is in fact a far worse monster than any previous translator had realized? The truth is that Wilson’s version contradicts itself and collapses into incoherence.

I rest my case. This is my evidence and argument against Emily Wilson’s Odyssey. Let readers be the jury.

“fifty” (3.7), “spacious” (10.513), “sword” (16.441), “dagger” (21.340), “ tomorrow” (17.254), “slave girls” (19.79), “ cloudy” (19.339), “cousins” (19.414 and 464; 21.220), “that kick you gave” (22.290). All numerical references are, first, to Books of the Odyssey , then to the line numbers of Wilson’s 2018 edition, which are often different from those of the Greek.

Though not her having called the same individual in one place a “wine boy,” but when the identical Greek lines reappear later, the “right-hand man” of the king — both times mistranslating the Greek which actually designates him a “herald” — an item that I left off my list.