About this Event
Free and open to the public. Registration Required.
Daniel Mendelsohn will talk with Rob Cioffi about his landmark new translation of Homer’s most popular epic.
Widely known for his essays bringing classical literature and culture to mainstream audiences in the New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn eschews the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—in order to bring it to life in all its archaic grandeur. In this line-for-line rendering, the long, six-beat line he uses, closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each Greek line without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. The result is a magnificent feat of translation, one that conveys the poetics of the original while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight, and powerful themes that make Homer’s work continue to resonate today. Supported by an extensive introduction, notes, and commentary, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent and enduringly influential masterpiece.
Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.
Robert Cioffi is Associate Professor of Classics at Bard College. He is the author of Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Greek Novel (Oxford, 2024), as well as articles and essays on Greek literature, Egyptian archaeology, and the Roman world. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, where he wrote most recently about the newly discovered Euripides papyrus from ancient Philadelphia. His next book, After Cleopatra: Egypt and the Roman Empire, will be published by Profile Books.
Books will be available for sale at this event at there will be a booksigning following the program.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Weis Cinema, 30 Campus Road, Bard College, United States
USD 0.00