Which Translation: The Odyssey

Robert Fitzgerald

1961 · Free verse

Features

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2,340
Holdings
3
Reviews

Biography

Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (1910-1985) was an American poet, literary critic, and translator. He served as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Fitzgerald translated the Odyssey into flexible free verse with a loose iambic pentameter base. He aimed for an open, immediate poetic English that captured the music and narrative momentum of Homer without being bound to a rigid metrical scheme.

Fitzgerald won the first Bollingen Award for translation in 1961 for this work. It is widely considered among the finest literary translations of the Odyssey into English and has been the standard verse translation for several generations of students and general readers. It has sold over two million copies. Fitzgerald’s translation is the basis for a standalone commentary by Ralph Hexter, which provides additional context and clarification regarding various aspects of the poem.

Robert Fitzgerald on Wikipedia ↗

Publication History

  • 1961 — Doubleday, The Odyssey, Homer; translated
  • 1962 — William Heinemann, The Odyssey; translated
  • 1963 — Anchor Books / Doubleday, The Odyssey; translated
  • 1965 — Houghton Mifflin, The Odyssey [of] Homer; translated; with an introduction by Dudley Fitts; suggestions for reading and discussion by Frederick A. Peterson
  • 1969 — Anchor Books, The Odyssey; translated; with drawings by Hans Erni
  • 1976 — Franklin Library, The Odyssey [of] Homer; in contemporary verse
  • 1984 — Oxford University Press, The Odyssey; in contemporary verse; illustrated by W. T. Mars
  • 1985 — Collins Harvill, The Odyssey [of] Homer; translated
  • 1990 — Vintage Books, The Odyssey [of] Homer; translated (with Jackie Schuman illustrations)
  • 1992 — Everyman's Library / Alfred A. Knopf, The Odyssey (intro. Seamus Heaney)
  • 1998 — Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Odyssey; translated; introduction by D. S. Carne-Ross ★
  • 2026 — Picador, The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation

Reviews

The proem

1.1–11
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Helios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell us in our time, lift the great song again.

Penelope's weaving trick

2.96–111
‘Young men, my suitors, now my lord is dead,
let me finish my weaving before I marry,
or else my thread will have been spun in vain.
It is a shroud I weave for Lord Laërtês,
when cold death comes to lay him on his bier.
The country wives would hold me in dishonor
if he, with all his fortune, lay unshrouded.’
We have men’s hearts; she touched them; we agreed.
So every day she wove on the great loom—
but every night by torchlight she unwove it;
and so for three years she deceived the Akhaians.
But when the seasons brought the fourth around,
one of her maids, who knew the secret, told us;
we found her unraveling the splendid shroud.
She had to finish then, although she hated it.

Calypso's double standard

5.118–131
“Oh you vile gods, in jealousy supernal!
You hate it when we choose to lie with men—
immortal flesh by some dear mortal side.
So radiant Dawn once took to bed Orion
until you easeful gods grew peevish at it,
and holy Artemis, Artemis throned in gold,
hunted him down in Delos with her arrows.
Then Demeter of the tasseled tresses yielded
to Iasion, mingling and making love
in a furrow three times plowed; but Zeus found out
and killed him with a white-hot thunderbolt.
So now you grudge me, too, my mortal friend.
But it was I who saved him—saw him straddle
his own keel board, the one man left afloat

Weeping on Calypso's shore

5.151–159
in his stone seat to seaward—tear on tear
brimming his eyes. The sweet days of his life time
were running out in anguish over his exile,
for long ago the nymph had ceased to please.
Though he fought shy of her and her desire,
he lay with her each night, for she compelled him.
But when day came he sat on the rocky shore
and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet
scanning the bare horizon of the sea.

Nausicaa finds Odysseus

6.127–141
He pushed aside the bushes, breaking off
with his great hand a single branch of olive,
whose leaves might shield him in his nakedness;
so came out rustling, like a mountain lion,
rain-drenched, wind-buffeted, but in his might at ease,
with burning eyes—who prowls among the herds
or flocks, or after game, his hungry belly
taking him near stout homesteads for his prey.
Odysseus had this look, in his rough skin
advancing on the girls with pretty braids;
and he was driven on by hunger, too.
Streaked with brine, and swollen, he terrified them,
so that they fled, this way and that. Only
Alkínoös’ daughter stood her ground, being given
a bold heart by Athena, and steady knees.

War-widow simile

8.521–532
The splendid minstrel sang it.
And Odysseus
let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks,
weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord
on the lost field where he has gone down fighting
the day of wrath that came upon his children.
At sight of the man panting and dying there,
she slips down to enfold him, crying out;
then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,
and goes bound into slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:
but no more piteous than Odysseus’ tears,

Cyclops eats the men

9.287–299
Neither reply nor pity came from him,
but in one stride he clutched at my companions
and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies
to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.
Then he dismembered them and made his meal,
gaping and crunching like a mountain lion—
everything : innards, flesh, and marrow bones.
We cried aloud, lifting our hands to Zeus,
powerless, looking on at this, appalled;
but Kyklops went on filling up his belly
with manflesh and great gulps of whey,
then lay down like a mast among his sheep.

The Nobody trick

9.364–371
‘Kyklops,
you ask my honorable name? Remember
the gift you promised me, and I shall tell you.
My name is Nohbdy: mother, father, and friends,
everyone calls me Nohbdy.’
And he said:
‘Nohbdy’s my meat, then, after I eat his friends.
Others come first. There’s a noble gift, now.’

Circe recognizes Odysseus

10.325–336
‘What champion, of what country, can you be?
Where are your kinsmen and your city?
Are you not sluggish with my wine? Ah, wonder!
Never a mortal man that drank this cup
but when it passed his lips he had succumbed.
Hale must your heart be and your tempered will.
Odysseus then you are, O great contender,
of whom the glittering god with golden wand
spoke to me ever, and foretold
the black swift ship would carry you from Troy.
Put up your weapon in the sheath. We two
shall mingle and make love upon our bed.
So mutual trust may come of play and love.’

Anticlea's shade

11.204–215
I bit my lip,
rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,
and tried three times, putting my arms around her,
but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable
as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.
Now this embittered all the pain I bore,
and I cried in the darkness:
‘O my mother,
will you not stay, be still, here in my arms,
may we not, in this place of Death, as well,
hold one another, touch with love, and taste
salt tears’ relief, the twinge of welling tears?
Or is this all hallucination, sent
against me by the iron queen, Persephone,
to make me groan again?’

Achilles in the underworld

11.488–501
‘Let me hear no smooth talk
of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.
Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
Tell me, what news of the prince my son: did he
come after me to make a name in battle
or could it be he did not? Do you know
if rank and honor still belong to Peleus
in the towns of the Myrmidons? Or now, may be,
Hellas and Phthia spurn him, seeing old age
fetters him, hand and foot. I cannot help him
under the sun’s rays, cannot be that man
I was on Troy’s wide seaboard, in those days
when I made bastion for the Argives
and put an army’s best men in the dust.

The Sirens' song

12.184–192
This way, oh turn your bows,
Akhaia’s glory,
As all the world allows—
Moor and be merry.
Sweet coupled airs we sing.
No lonely seafarer
Holds clear of entering
Our green mirror.
Pleased by each purling note
Like honey twining
From her throat and my throat,
Who lies a-pining?
Sea rovers here take joy
Voyaging onward,
As from our song of Troy
Greybeard and rower-boy
Goeth more learnèd.
All feats on that great field
In the long warfare,
Dark days the bright gods willed,
Wounds you bore there,
Argos’ old soldiery
On Troy beach teeming,
Charmed out of time we see.
No life on earth can be
Hid from our dreaming.

Hyperion's cattle

12.341–352
All deaths are hateful to us, mortal wretches,
but famine is the most pitiful, the worst
end that a man can come to.
Will you fight it?
Come, we’ll cut out the noblest of these cattle
for sacrifice to the gods who own the sky;
and once at home, in the old country of Ithaka,
if ever that day comes—
we’ll build a costly temple and adorn it
with every beauty for the Lord of Noon.
But if he flares up over his heifers lost,
wishing our ship destroyed, and if the gods
make cause with him, why, then I say: Better
open your lungs to a big sea once for all
than waste to skin and bones on a lonely island!’

Argos recognizes Odysseus

17.324–328
Eumaios crossed the court and went straight forward
into the mégaron among the suitors;
but death and darkness in that instant closed
the eyes of Argos, who had seen his master,
Odysseus, after twenty years.

Sleepless Odysseus

20.25–34
as a cook turns a sausage, big with blood
and fat, at a scorching blaze, without a pause,
to broil it quick: so he rolled left and right,
casting about to see how he, alone,
against the false outrageous crowd of suitors
could press the fight.
And out of the night sky
Athena came to him; out of the nearby dark
in body like a woman; came and stood
over his head to chide him:
“Why so wakeful,
most forlorn of men? Here is your home,

Stringing the bow

21.404–412
But the man skilled in all ways of contending,
satisfied by the great bow’s look and heft,
like a musician, like a harper, when
with quiet hand upon his instrument
he draws between his thumb and forefinger
a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly
Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.
Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it,
so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang
a swallow’s note.

Odysseus reveals himself

22.1–8
Now shrugging off his rags the wiliest fighter of the islands
leapt and stood on the broad door sill, his own bow in his hand.
He poured out at his feet a rain of arrows from the quiver and
spoke to the crowd:
“So much for that. Your clean-cut game is over.
Now watch me hit a target that no man has hit before,
if I can make this shot. Help me, Apollo.”

The disloyal maids

22.465–474
He tied one end of a hawser to a pillar
and passed the other about the roundhouse top,
taking the slack up, so that no one’s toes
could touch the ground. They would be hung like doves
or larks in springès triggered in a thicket,
where the birds think to rest—a cruel nesting.
So now in turn each woman thrust her head
into a noose and swung, yanked high in air,
to perish there most piteously.
Their feet danced for a little, but not long.

The olive-tree bed

23.181–190
With this she tried him to the breaking point,
and he turned on her in a flash raging:
“Woman, by heaven you’ve stung me now!
Who dared to move my bed?
No builder had the skill for that—unless
a god came down to turn the trick. No mortal
in his best days could budge it with a crowbar.
There is our pact and pledge, our secret sign,
built into that bed—my handiwork
and no one else’s!

Shipwrecked sailor simile

23.233–241
as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.