The Robert Fitzgerald Translation (1961)
Skilled in all ways of contending.
The Odyssey is a poem before it is a plot, and Fitzgerald translates the music first.
You read for the music. You want the strange, beautiful, lyric-poet version, even where it wanders from the literal.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the whole story, rendered in a lyric poet’s English that follows sound as much as sense.
Changes: almost nothing structurally and everything tonally. Of the mid-century translations, this is the most self-consciously literary one.
Whose story is it?
Odysseus’s, filtered through a lyric sensibility.
Who's here
How each character in this version compares across the whole catalog:
- Odysseus — Skilled in all ways of contending, his cunning rendered as music.
How much time does it ask?
≈11–12 hrs.
His opening: “that man skilled in all ways of contending.”
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org →
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon ↗ · Kindle — Amazon ↗
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby ↗ · Find at your library — WorldCat ↗
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More ways home: The Emily Wilson Translation (2017) · The Robert Fagles Translation (1996) · The Richmond Lattimore Translation (1965)
Compare on one axis: How much of the gods do you actually get? (present, as written)