The Odyssey: (Illustrated Edition with Commentary) Paperback – December 5, 2025

This is not your grandfather’s Odyssey.“Solot’s translation . . . breathes and bleeds. I have read many versions of the Odyssey, but when I read the Solot version I felt as if I were reading it for the first time.” —Brian Yapko, award-winning poetHomer, when he came to tell the story of the peace that followed the war in Troy, chose to focus on Odysseus—hardly the most glamorous hero in his Iliad, but the wiliest, a man who does whatever it takes to win, survive, and get what he wants. Homer chose well. Thanks both to the character of Odysseus, a fully modeled if not always admirable man, and to the instinctively cinematic storytelling of his creator, the Odyssey is not only one of the two foundational works of European literature, it remains one of the most entertaining of all time. This masterpiece of adventure, longing, and return is now reborn in a fresh translation by Michael Solot—fresh, because for him the Odyssey isn’t a subject of academic study, a precious relic to be handled by experts who know just what they’re looking for as they turn it this way and that. In Solot’s hands the epic is revealed as the robust, living work of art that it is. Homer’s poetry is often thought to be hard; it isn’t. The Odyssey is easy, and if you don’t already know what you’re looking for it’s full of surprises, and often very funny. The Odyssey’s ease, its surprises, and its humor are all brought to light in Solot’s translation and in his commentary.Solot looks first to the story. So, to make it as easy to enjoy in English as it is in Greek he rejected the restrictive line-for-line approach often found in academic translations, a constraint that helps the student trying to construe his text, but does nothing for the reader trying to follow the tale. Likewise, Solot steered clear of both blank verse and any attempt to imitate Homer’s metrics directly, the two most common ways of versifying Homer in English. Instead he has developed a supple five-beat line, as consistently scannable as Homer’s own hexameter, but with a length and a cadence far better suited to the task of recreating the distinctive flow of Homer’s poetry. Solot’s verse—dactylic here, anapestic there—everywhere seeks to embody the endlessly varying and propulsive rhythms of the original.Aedan Kennedy brings the Odyssey to life as never before with more than eighty pen-and-ink illustrations drawn especially for this edition. Other illustrated versions offer only a small number of drawings set off against the text on separate pages; here each of Kennedy’s illustrations is placed precisely within the text to depict a particular moment in the story, a unique achievement in the history of Homeric translation.The commentary serves several purposes, among which are: to give readers a basic understanding of ancient Greek religion, geography, and culture; to see the Odyssey in the context of the Iliad; to reveal subtleties of Homeric characterization; to point out connections between different parts of the Odyssey; to explain the translation of certain passages; to note some of the many instances of humor; to unpack the intricacies of the Odyssey as a work of art designed to be heard rather than read; and to underscore the unfailing naturalism of an epic which, for all its impossibilities, portrays the world as it is.Also included: “Reading the Rhythm,” a guide for those unfamiliar with metrical verse; a pronouncing glossary; and three maps by Bailey Bellavance covering the geography of the Homeric world. Read more