Which translation of The Odyssey should you read?

Homer as a good English novel. Butler turned the Odyssey into plain, brisk prose, on the theory that ordinary readers wanted the story, not the metre. It is free, easy, and still a fine way in if verse puts you off, though you lose the poetry entirely and Butler’s Victorian idiom shows its age. His notes push his eccentric theory that the poem was written by a woman. A reliable, no-cost prose Odyssey.

Long a standard free prose version; the text T. E. Lawrence later set out to improve on.

One of the glories of English verse, if not quite Homer. Pope recasts the Odyssey in polished heroic couplets of astonishing craft; every line gleams. It is also unmistakably 18th-century, formal and ornate, and it smooths Homer’s plainness into elegance. Read Pope for the music of English poetry and the taste of an age, not for a transparent window onto the Greek. Free and public domain.

Produced with collaborators (Broome and Fenton); a landmark of Augustan literature.

The first complete English Homer, and a monument. Chapman’s long fourteener lines are dense, energetic, and thoroughly Elizabethan, the version that made Keats feel like an astronomer spotting a new planet. It is hard going for a modern reader, archaic and knotty, and freer with the sense than a scholar would like. Approach it as a great English poem of 1616 rather than a study text. Public domain.

Immortalised by Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

The grand modern standard. Fagles writes long, driving free-verse lines with real sweep and drama, and Bernard Knox’s superb introduction and notes make the Penguin edition a complete package. It is a touch elevated and expansive rather than plain, and it runs longer than the Greek, but it reads aloud beautifully. The Ian McKellen audiobook is many listeners’ favourite. A safe, rich choice for a full-blooded Homer.

The dominant classroom and general-reader Odyssey from the late 1990s onward.

The version that reset the conversation. Wilson writes a quick, clear, regular iambic pentameter and, remarkably, keeps to the same number of lines as the Greek, so nothing bloats. Her plain, precise diction strips away centuries of accumulated grandeur and makes the poem feel immediate and strange again; her introduction on translating gendered language is essential. Some readers miss the old sweep, but for a first Odyssey that you will actually read aloud, this is the one.

The first published English Odyssey by a woman; widely acclaimed and taught since 2017.