There is no such thing as reading Homer. There is only reading somebody’s Homer, which means the translation of The Odyssey you pick up matters more than almost any other decision you will make about this book. The Greek has been carried into English for four centuries now, and every translator has struck a different bargain about rhythm, plainness, speed and strangeness. Choose badly for your taste and you will stall somewhere around the cattle of the Sun. Choose well and you will wonder why nobody told you a three-thousand-year-old poem could move like this.
The question has stopped being academic. Christopher Nolan’s film has sent readers back to the source in numbers nobody in publishing predicted. In the week of 3 August 2026, Publishers Weekly reported that Emily Wilson’s version reached No. 2 on the overall US bestseller list, while Robert Fagles’s rival edition rose 93 per cent in a single week. Wilson’s has now passed a million copies in the US alone.
So which one should you actually buy? Here is the honest comparison.
What Actually Differs Between Each Translation of The Odyssey
Translators of Homer are pulled between two poles. One is fidelity to the Greek: its word order, its formulaic epithets, its dactylic hexameter, its sheer foreignness. The other is fidelity to the experience: a poem performed aloud, at speed, to listeners who were never confused about what was happening.
Three practical things follow from where a translator stands on that line.
- Verse or prose. Verse keeps the line as a unit of thought. Prose reads faster and loses the pulse.
- Line count. The Greek runs to 12,109 lines. Some versions run half again as long, which tells you how much padding was added to make the English scan.
- Epithets. Homer calls Dawn rosy-fingered and Odysseus much-enduring over and over. Some preserve that repetition as ritual. Others vary it, because in English repetition reads as a mistake rather than a formula.
None of these choices is wrong. They just produce very different books.
Every Major Translation of The Odyssey, Compared
Emily Wilson (2017)
The one everyone is buying, and for good reason. Wilson was the first woman to publish an English translation of The Odyssey, and she made two decisions that changed the reading experience completely. She wrote in iambic pentameter, the natural metre of English poetry since Shakespeare, and held herself to exactly the same number of lines as the Greek. The result is fast, lean and unusually plain. Her Odysseus is introduced as a complicated man, which does more moral work in two words than most translators manage in a paragraph.
Wilson also refuses to soften the poem’s cruelty, particularly toward the enslaved women of Ithaca. If you have read an older version and remembered it as an adventure story, hers will feel like a different poem.
Best for: first-time readers, and anyone who wants the poem to move.
Robert Fagles (1996)
For thirty years this was the default recommendation, and it remains the most purely enjoyable performance in English. Fagles wrote in a loose, long-lined free verse with real theatrical swagger, introducing his hero as a man of twists and turns. It runs considerably longer than the Greek, and purists grumble that he heightens where Homer is level, but nobody has ever fallen asleep in it.
Best for: readers who want drama and momentum.
Richmond Lattimore (1965)
The most faithful of the well-known versions, and the one classicists still reach for when they want to know what the Greek actually says. Lattimore preserved word order, epithets and the six-beat line so scrupulously that the English sometimes goes stiff. That stiffness is the point. Set beside any other translation of The Odyssey, it shows you exactly what the others smoothed away.
Best for: students, and second readings.
Robert Fitzgerald (1961)
The most beautiful sentence by sentence, and for decades the American classroom standard. Fitzgerald is more interested in music than speed, and his Homer has a burnished, slightly archaic quality that some readers adore and others find airless.
Best for: readers who came to this poem through poetry rather than story.
Stanley Lombardo (2000)
Blunt, muscular and built to be read aloud. Lombardo strips the decorative layer away entirely and writes something close to spoken American English. Gods and heroes talk like people. Classicists are divided; workshop leaders and audiobook listeners tend to love it.
Best for: readers who bounced off the poem’s formality.
Peter Green (2018)
Published the year after Wilson’s and largely overshadowed by it, Green’s is a careful verse translation that keeps close line-for-line correspondence while still reading as poetry. A genuine middle path between Lattimore’s literalism and Fagles’s showmanship.
Best for: readers who want accuracy without stiffness.
E. V. Rieu (1946)
The very first Penguin Classic, and the reason millions of postwar readers met Homer at all. Rieu turned the poem into clear, unhurried English prose. It reads like a novel, which is both the appeal and the objection.
Best for: readers who find verse itself the obstacle.
Samuel Butler (1900)
Serviceable Victorian prose, and completely free. This is the translation of The Odyssey you will find on Project Gutenberg and inside most cheap ebook editions. The English has aged, and Butler had eccentric theories about the poem’s authorship, but it costs nothing and it is complete.
Best for: sampling before you commit money.
Alexander Pope (1725)
Homer in rhyming heroic couplets, and a magnificent English poem in its own right. It is not, by any modern standard, a reliable guide to what Homer wrote. Read it as Pope.
Best for: readers who already know the story and want to hear it sung.
George Chapman (1615)
The oldest still in print, and the version that made Keats feel like an astronomer discovering a planet. Difficult, thrilling, genuinely archaic. Nobody’s first Homer.
Best for: the second or third time around.
The Quick Answer: Which Translation of The Odyssey to Buy
If you want to be told what to do rather than handed a menu:
- Reading it for the first time, or before the film: Wilson.
- Want the most exciting performance: Fagles.
- Want to know what the Greek says: Lattimore.
- Want the most beautiful English: Fitzgerald.
- Struggle with poetry generally: Lombardo, or Rieu if you would rather have prose.
- Want it free tonight: Butler.
Hearing a Translation of The Odyssey Read Aloud
This poem was composed to be heard, so the audio question matters more than usual. Claire Danes narrates Wilson and matches its clarity and pace. Ian McKellen narrates Fagles, and it is exactly as good as that sounds. Either is a legitimate way to read the poem rather than a shortcut, which is not something you can say about most classics.
If you want to compare specific passages yourself, the Perseus Digital Library hosts the Greek with parallel English, which is the fastest way to see how much interpretation sits inside any given line.
Where to Go After Choosing a Translation of The Odyssey
Once you have settled on an edition, the surrounding shelf is unusually good right now. Our guide to the books worth reading before Nolan’s film covers the essential companions, and if it is the mythology rather than the Greek that has you hooked, we have rounded up the best Greek mythology retellings currently in print. Stephen Fry’s Odyssey also works well as a prose companion, particularly for readers who want the surrounding myths filled in.
The Last Word on Choosing a Translation of The Odyssey
The best translation of The Odyssey is the one you finish. That sounds like a dodge, but a million people did not buy Emily Wilson because a committee ranked her first. They bought her because she is quick, clear and unembarrassed, and because she treats a reader’s attention as something to be earned rather than assumed. Start there. If you love it, Lattimore will show you the bones underneath and Fagles will show you the theatre. Homer survives all of them.
