The Odyssey - tr. Emily Wilson

Lying Odysseus replied, I will
tell you the truth completely.

That's it, that's the book! Review over!

No, but seriously: I actually really, really enjoyed the Odyssey. This came as a bit of a surprise, honestly? Even with all the good things I'd heard about Emily Wilson's translation, there was a small suspicious part of me that remembered the one time I tried to read the Iliad in high school (I gave up almost immediately) and worried I might find the non-prose format too tedious; and given that I've read a couple of feminist, or at least female-centric, retellings of the Odyssey (Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Madeline Miller's Circe) in the past year, I also wondered if I would be too annoyed by the source material's treatment of its female characters* to enjoy it. Neither of these things turned out to be problems!

I found Wilson's translation really easy to read, while still being clearly not modern prose— one of the reviews quoted in the 'why you should read this book' summary bit (a review by Madeline Miller, in fact) described her language as "fresh, unpretentious, and lean... effortlessly easy to read and ... rigorously considered," which, yeah, that just about covers it. Clearly modern words/turns of phrase - kebab, tote bag, hustling - feel organic when they do appear. I was also delighted by Wilson's decision to slip in a few puns: "mercurial Hermes"; "Demeter with cornrows in her hair."

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