116: Odyssey Book 5 and 6 – The Odysseiana Series

Read Books 5 and 6 in the Mendelsohn translation of the poem. If you can find a quiet space read it outloud, imagine yourself to be a bard.

As you read, mark passages you would like to discuss together. Practise reading selected sections aloud so you are ready to contribute and can help one another appreciate the poem more fully during discussion.

Book 5 – Kalypso and the Raft
The gods assemble again; Athena presses her case, and Zeus sends Hermes to Kalypso’s distant island, Ogygía. Hermes orders the nymph to release Odysseus, though she protests divine double standards in love affairs. Kalypso reluctantly obeys, helping Odysseus build a raft, provisioning it, and giving navigational directions. After seventeen days at sea, Poseidon spots him, unleashing a storm that shatters the raft. With aid from the sea-goddess Ino and Athena’s guidance, Odysseus survives, swims for shore, and crawls naked and exhausted into a bed of leaves on the island Skhería, the land of the Phaiêkians, finally reaching safety.

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Book 6 – Nausikáa
Athena appears in a dream to Nausikáa, daughter of King Alkínoös and Queen Arétê, urging her to wash clothes at the river to prepare for future marriage. There she and her maidens play ball and sing, awakening the shipwrecked Odysseus. He emerges, naked and caked in brine, covering himself with a leafy bough. Nausikáa shows composed courage and tact, offering clothing and instructions but maintaining modest distance. Odysseus supplicates her with careful, flattering speech. She directs him toward the city, advising him to seek favor from her mother. Odysseus prays gratefully that his long-desired homecoming may finally unfold.
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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.