The Odyssey

＂Joe Sachs’s translation brings the reader quickly and deeply into The Odyssey.＂--Nickolas Pappas

This new translation powerfully presents The Odyssey with a modern clarity that suits the vigorous narrative of Odysseus’s perilous ten-year voyage home to Ithaca. Joe Sachs, whose translations are known for being faithful to the original Greek, brings new layers of depth, understanding, and interest to the epic.

＂I have never met a translation of The Odyssey I didn’t like.＂ Thus Joe Sachs invites us to partake in his new rendering of Homer’s epic.

＂The poem appears in as many guises as Odysseus himself...There is so much power and grace in Homer’s poetry that a reader responsive to a few partial strands of it can find in them a wholly satisfying experience and every translator whose work I have read has detected and magnified something in the original that I had not found by other means...Any newly encountered translation of a poem is an opportunity to participate in a fresh reading through a new pair of eyes, and while those readings cannot all be taken in at one view, each one adds something to the sight that occupies the foreground at any moment. It is not because a new translation is needed that I now offer this one, but because every new translation is a contribution that enhances the self-revelation of a poem of boundless variety...The friction of one translation against another can be the quickest way for a path to light up for a reader’s own entry into the work. And this invitation to use the available translations not as rivals but in partnership gives license to any single translator to sacrifice part of the meaning and weight of any word or phrase to capture more effectively whatever seems to matter most in it...There comes a point when your best recourse is to rely on no one’s judgment but your own, to confront the intelligence, imagination, and heart we know as Homer on your own, and to join the fun.＂--from the Introduction by Joe Sachs

＂The transparent, natural language of Joe Sachs’s translation brings the reader quickly and deeply into The Odyssey. Behind that language, both intimate and clear, we sense his sure feel for The Odyssey’s people and places. And as much as the scenes of the poem vary, and the language with them, we detect the idea of The Odyssey that Sachs articulates in his valuable afterword: that Homer can begin his story in the middle of things because we are always in the midst of The Odyssey’s action no matter where we start reading--because the poem’s sub-ject is the discovery of what is essentially human, a discovery that humans are always, wonderingly, in the middle of.＂--Nickolas Pappas, Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

＂Joe Sachs’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics is to me the most vibrant version of a well-thumbed text that is still the screenwriter’s bible. So I am not surprised that he brings the same freshness to the world’s greatest long-voyage-home-to-a-lost-love story. This Odyssey is exciting reading for the general reader and essential reading for teachers and students who can now ’hear’ how Homer’s epic might have been heard by listeners in times past. Let’s hope Joe Sachs is now working on the Iliad.＂--Eoghan Harris, Irish National Film School (Dun Laoghaire Institute)

Joe Sachs taught for thirty years in the Great Books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated numerous works by Aristotle and Plato.

Joe Sachs: Joe Sachs taught for thirty years at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated numerous works by Aristotle and Plato.