113: Translations of the Proem – The Odysseiana Series 03

In classical literature, the appeal to the Muse and the ensuing brief summary of the poem’s contents (1.1–10 in the Odyssey) is known as the Proem, from the Greek prooimion—literally, the “before-song.”

In this session we will read various translations of these first 10 lines, from translators across time and continents. (There will be a ppt!).

To prepare read Mendelsohn's A Note on the Translation on pp. 41-62. If you have access to a second translation see whether the translator comments on the challenges of translating The Odyssey.

Emily Wilson has a Substack on her work. (And look around for videos showing her impressive tattoos.)

To be floored by the number and variety of translations into English peruse the Wikipedia page English translations of Homer (French, German, Dutch).

Matthew Arnold, a 19th c. Professor of Poetry at Oxford, published an essay On Translating Homer in which he gives four essential qualities of Homer to which the translator must do justice. Read the Wikipedia page or the full text.
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For this series on Homer's Odyssey we will be using the new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn: Homer: The Odyssey. Translated, with Introduction and Notes. University of Chicago Press, April 9th, 2025.

Sessions devoted to Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation will alternate with meetings focused on a broader range of “Odysseiana,” materials that illuminate the transmission, reception, and interpretation of Homer’s poem across time. These companion materials will include ancient textual witnesses, archaeological and visual evidence, and modern thematic and analytical work that together situate the Odyssey within its cultural, historical, and performative contexts.

Textual materials
• Early manuscripts on papyrus and parchment from as early as the third century BCE, along with later medieval codices, show how the text of the Odyssey was copied, stabilized, and annotated over many centuries.
• A clay tablet from Roman-era Olympia, inscribed with verses from Book 14, offers one of the earliest substantial epigraphic attestations of the poem and illustrates its circulation in public and sacred spaces.
• Later printed editions, informed by Alexandrian scholarship and modern textual criticism, will serve as points of comparison for issues of wording, lineation, and commentary.

Archaeological and visual materials
• Vase paintings and other images from Greek pottery that depict scenes associated with the Odyssey—such as shipwrecks, supplication, or women at the loom—will be used to explore how ancient artists visualized narrative moments and social practices found in the poem.
• Museum collections, such as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provide objects like armor, textiles, and domestic furnishings that help reconstruct the material world of Odysseus and his contemporaries.
• These artifacts will help connect specific passages in Mendelsohn’s translation to ancient views of the gods, warfare, hospitality, and poetic performance.

Thematic and analytical materials
• Scholarly discussions of themes such as cunning and intelligence, homecoming and estrangement, and the tension between order and disorder will frame close readings of selected episodes.
• Attention to the Odyssey’s origins in oral performance, including formulaic language, meter, and narrative framing, will complement Mendelsohn’s effort to reproduce the poem’s formal features in English.
• Companion texts from later epic and narrative traditions will be brought in to show how Homeric patterns are adapted, challenged, or echoed in subsequent literature.

Mendelsohn’s translation is also available on Kindle and as an Audible audio book. About Daniel Mendelsohn read here.