Which Translation of the Odyssey Should You Read?

In brief: the Poetry Codex holds nine complete English Odysseys. For a first reading, Butler's plain prose or Butcher and Lang's are the quickest way into the story. For poetry, read Pope or Chapman. For close study, use Murray, and for the sound of Homer's hexameter, try Cotterill.

One opening, nine ways

Homer's Odyssey begins by asking the Muse to tell of a man: andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon. The difficult word is the last one. Polytropos means "of many turns": a man who has travelled many ways, and who has many ways of getting out of trouble. Every translator must decide which sense to keep, and the choice tells you a good deal about the whole translation. (Our Iliad article does the same for Homer's other epic.)

The verse translations

George Chapman (1614–15). Chapman's Odyssey is in rhyming couplets of ten syllables, not the long fourteen-syllable lines of his Iliad:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay

Chapman is free, crowded and energetic, and he adds as much as he translates. This is the Homer of Keats's sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", and it is still exciting to read aloud.

Alexander Pope, with William Broome and Elijah Fenton (1725–26). Pope took two collaborators for his Odyssey, who drafted half of the books between them. The verse is the polished heroic couplet of the Augustan age:

The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound

It is a great English poem in its own right, but it smooths Homer into eighteenth-century elegance.

William Cowper (1791). Cowper translated Homer into Miltonic blank verse to get away from Pope's rhyme. He is more literal than Pope, though often slow.

William Morris (1887). Morris, the poet and designer, uses long rhymed lines and a deliberately old, Germanic English:

Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty, the man who wandered afar,
After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war

"The Shifty" is a bold answer to polytropos. The style is an acquired taste, but nothing else sounds like it.

Arthur S. Way (1904) also writes long rhymed couplets, with a ballad swing. H. B. Cotterill (1911) is the most interesting experiment: he writes English hexameters, the six-beat line of Homer's own verse:

SING, O Muse, of the man so wary and wise, who in far lands
Wandered whenas he had wasted the sacred town of the Trojans.

The prose translations

S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (1879). For decades this was the standard English Odyssey. Its prose is accurate and archaic, with the rhythm of the King James Bible: "Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide".

Samuel Butler (1900). Butler, the author of Erewhon, wanted Homer in everyday English, and his version reads like a novel: "Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide". Two things to know: he uses the Latin names (Ulysses, Minerva, Jove), and he was convinced that the poem was written by a young woman in Sicily, a theory he set out in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). The translation is lively and very easy to follow.

A. T. Murray (1919). Murray made the first Loeb Classical Library Odyssey, printed opposite the Greek. His prose is the closest to Homer's sense and keeps the Greek names, which makes it the best version for study: "Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices".

Which should you read?

• Reading the Odyssey for the first time: Butler for speed, or Butcher and Lang, with the study guide book by book.
• Studying the poem, or reading the Greek: Murray.
• For English poetry: Pope, or Chapman for the Homer Keats discovered.
• To hear Homer's metre: Cotterill's hexameters.

All nine are complete, in the public domain, and divided into the poem's twenty-four books.