"Daniel Mendelsohn's 2025 translation [of the Odyssey] begins, 'Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways / to wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy's hallowed keep.' Fourteen words in Greek have become twenty-four in English, through the addition of words and phrases that correspond to nothing in the Greek, though they often draw on the phrasing of earlier English translations: 'the tale' is an addition also found in the 1929 translation of Herbert Bates; 'off course' is a nautical phrase, not corresponding to anything in the Greek but also found in Robert Fagles' version, and in tune with the modern misconception of the poem's subject as a set of maritime misadventures; 'ways' expands the original epithet polytropos and is also found in the Loeb translation and Lattimore. Following Lattimore in his courageous defiance of contemporary English idiom, Mendelsohn presents Odysseus as if he were enduring a journey very much like driving through Milton Keynes—a nauseating and banal passage through one traffic circle after another."
Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
