A friend’s reading group tried Homer a few years ago and it went badly, though not for the reason you would guess. Nobody found it boring. The problem was that six people arrived with five different editions, and for two hours they could not establish whether a particular scene was tender or brutal, because in one person’s book it simply was not there in the same words. That is the peculiar hazard of an Odyssey translation chosen at random. You are not all reading the same book.
I have been thinking about this because everyone suddenly is reading Homer. Nolan’s film opened to $263.7 million worldwide, and the knock-on effect in bookshops has been extraordinary: Emily Wilson’s version has passed a million copies in the United States, and in the first week of August it sat at No. 2 on the overall American bestseller list, with Robert Fagles climbing 93 per cent in the same seven days according to Publishers Weekly. A lot of book clubs are about to have this argument.
So here is what I would tell a group before they pick.
Agree on One Odyssey Translation, Even If It Is Not the Best One
This is the only genuinely important rule. Every Odyssey translation is an interpretation, and the interpretive gap between two respected versions is enormous: not just phrasing but tone, moral weight, and occasionally what a character seems to feel. If your group wants to discuss whether Odysseus is admirable, and three of you are reading a translator who makes him swagger while three are reading one who makes him calculate, you will spend the evening talking past each other.
Pick one. Put the ISBN in the group chat. Be slightly tyrannical about it. You can compare versions later, and comparing them is genuinely fun, but only once everyone shares a baseline.
What Each Odyssey Translation Actually Feels Like
Emily Wilson is the obvious default now, and deservedly. She writes in iambic pentameter, keeps to the same line count as the Greek, and uses a vocabulary so plain it can feel almost stark. Her Odysseus arrives described as complicated, a word that quietly sets up every moral question the poem raises. Hers is also the fastest to read by some distance, which matters enormously when you are asking eight busy adults to finish twelve thousand lines by the third Tuesday of the month.
Robert Fagles is warmer, longer and considerably more theatrical. If your group likes being swept along, he is the more pleasurable performance. He also pads, and readers coming to him after Wilson notice immediately.
Richmond Lattimore is the scrupulous one. He keeps the Greek word order and the repeated epithets, which makes the English feel strange and formal. Wonderful for a second reading, punishing for a first.
Robert Fitzgerald is the most beautiful and the most old-fashioned. Groups with poetry readers in them tend to love him. Groups that want to know what happens next tend not to.
Stanley Lombardo is the one to reach for if your members find verse itself a barrier. He is blunt and colloquial and reads aloud better than anyone.
The Practical Questions Nobody Asks Until It Is Too Late
How long will this actually take? Of the verse options, Wilson is the shortest Odyssey translation in practice as well as on paper. If your group struggles to finish anything, this alone should decide it.
Will anyone read it aloud? Somebody always wants to. Lombardo is built for it, Wilson works beautifully, and Fitzgerald is lovely but slow. Homer was performed before he was ever written down, and a group that reads the Sirens passage aloud will remember that meeting.
Is there an audiobook? Yes, and this is a legitimate route rather than a shortcut. Claire Danes narrates Wilson. Ian McKellen narrates Fagles. Either will carry a commuter through the whole poem, and members who listen rather than read will arrive with plenty to say.
Can people join late or cheaply? Samuel Butler’s Victorian prose is out of copyright and free everywhere, a fair fallback for anyone who cannot get hold of the chosen edition in time. It reads as dated, but it is complete and it is instant.
Where the Real Discussion Lives
Whichever Odyssey translation you choose, the conversation tends to land in the same three places, and they are worth flagging so nobody is blindsided.
The first is the ending, and specifically the twelve enslaved women hanged in the palace after the suitors are dealt with. Wilson renders this passage without softening it, and readers who were enjoying a cracking adventure story often stop dead. It is the single most productive fifteen minutes your group will spend on this book.
The second is Penelope, who in every Odyssey translation spends twenty years running a kingdom under siege from her own house guests and is remembered mostly for weaving. Almost every reader arrives underestimating her and leaves furious on her behalf.
The third is whether Odysseus is likeable at all, and here your choice will visibly shape the room’s answer. That is the moment to bring out a second version and read the same six lines twice. If your group has never done this, it is a small revelation.
A Shortlist of Odyssey Translations, If You Just Want Telling
- Nobody in the group has met Homer before: Emily Wilson.
- A group that reads for pleasure and hates homework: Robert Fagles.
- A group that will read passages aloud: Stanley Lombardo.
- A group with a classicist in it who will otherwise be insufferable: Richmond Lattimore.
- A group on a budget: Samuel Butler, free, with the warning that the English is a century old.
One More Thing
If your club is new to reading a classic together, the Reading Agency’s reading groups resources are a genuinely useful starting point for structuring a session around a long, old, intimidating text. And if the mythology takes hold rather than the Greek, our companion pieces on what to read before the film and where to go after Circe will keep the group fed for months.
The poem has survived because people kept arguing about it out loud. A book club is arguably the most historically appropriate way to read it, whichever Odyssey translation ends up on the table.