Much-travelled
The man carried through many places and turned by circumstance.
πολύτροπος · a study in translation
Tell Me About a Complicated Man
Five words into the Odyssey, Homer already refuses to settle his own question. Polytropos can name a man who turns the world to his purpose or a man the world keeps turning against his will. No single English word holds both at once.
Follow the wordπολύτροπος
The word that begins everything
Homer does not say whether Odysseus does the turning or has it done to him: whether he is cunning, or simply battered by circumstance until he learns to bend. Polytropos combines poly-, “many,” with tropos, connected with turning, way, manner, and character. The ambiguity is not a defect in the dictionary. It is the word’s energy.
Adaptable
The man of many means, capable of changing his tactics.
Wily
The twisting man, difficult to contain within a single identity.
One Greek word, eleven different men
Every translator has to pick a direction
These eleven versions are a historical selection, not a census of English Odysseys. Choose a name and watch the same sentence remake its hero, one century at a time.
“a complicated man”
Wilson declines to choose between the admirable hero and the man who is difficult to judge. The first woman to publish a complete English Odyssey uses iambic pentameter and keeps the same total of 12,110 lines as the Greek text of her edition.
The instrument changed before the words did
Rhyme. Then no rhyme. Then no metre at all.
Homer composed in dactylic hexameter, a quantitative six-foot line with no natural equivalent in English. Every translator must choose an instrument before playing the first note, and the instrument argues almost as loudly as the epithet.
Pope’s heroic couplets ruled English Homer for a century, until Cowper decided rhyme itself was the lie: Homer had not used it, so an English Homer should not either. The Victorians answered with prose deliberately aged into antiquity. The twentieth century tried several middle ways: Fitzgerald’s elastic verse, Lattimore’s long line, Fagles’s oral speed. Wilson returned to strict metre and an exact economy of lines; Mendelsohn chose amplitude again.
YearTranslatorFormChoice for the epithet
1615
George Chapman
rhymed verse
“many a way / Wound with his wisdom”
1675
Thomas Hobbes
rhymed verse
[epithet omitted]
1726
Alexander Pope
heroic couplets
“wisdom’s various arts”
1791
William Cowper
blank verse
“genius versatile”
1879
S. H. Butcher & Andrew Lang
archaizing prose
“ready at need”
1900
Samuel Butler
prose
“ingenious hero”
1961
Robert Fitzgerald
accentual free verse
“skilled in all ways of contending”
1965
Richmond Lattimore
loose six-beat verse
“the man of many ways”
1996
Robert Fagles
free verse
“the man of twists and turns”
2017
Emily Wilson
iambic pentameter
“a complicated man”
2025
Daniel Mendelsohn
expansive six-beat line
“so many roundabout ways”
The women who were finally named
One word changes who can be seen as a victim
Translation’s stakes do not stop at the opening line. Near the poem’s end, enslaved women in Odysseus’s household are killed. The English terms chosen for them can expose or blur the relation of power structuring the scene.
δμῳαίdmoai · enslaved women in the household
When translation names slavery
Many older translations prefer “maids” or other domestic terms. Emily Wilson consistently uses words such as “slaves” and “house girls.” The choice cannot prove what any individual woman could refuse, and it does not resolve the poem’s violence. It does make it impossible to forget that these women are property in a household, not employees free to leave.
The same attention appears in smaller details. Where some versions describe Penelope’s hand as “thick,” Wilson chooses “muscular”: the gesture does not change, but the physical competence of the woman opening the bow’s storeroom moves into view.
A translator does not only choose words. A translator chooses who receives the reader’s moral attention.
The reviews did not agree either
Clarity to some, lost ceremony to others
Charlotte Higgins called Wilson’s translation a cultural landmark. Its admirers heard a Homer telling a story at speed, not a professor delivering one from a lectern.
The modernising objection begins in the same place: clarity can thin out ceremony. Chapman, Pope and, more recently, Mendelsohn wager that grandeur is not merely the dust of old English but one of the experiences verse ought to save.
The fact that Wilson was the first woman to publish a complete English Odyssey sometimes eclipsed discussion of her metre and diction. Yet every translator’s identity leaves a trace. For a long time, the difference was that the male trace could pass as neutrality.
What translation brings home
The Odyssey is about homecoming. So is every translation of it.
Penelope spends three years weaving a shroud by day and unweaving it by night, buying time against the suitors by refusing to let the cloth finish. The image also describes the poem’s life in other languages. Each translator inherits the previous generation’s cloth, pulls the threads that no longer hold, and reweaves the same shape from thread they trust more: Cowper unweaving Pope’s rhyme, the moderns unweaving Victorian archaism, Wilson unweaving domestic euphemism, Mendelsohn unweaving Wilson’s austerity in turn.
None of these translators produced the Odyssey. Each produced one hand’s Odyssey. The poem itself is obsessed with the gap between a person and the story told about them: Odysseus moves through much of it under changing identities, and Penelope refuses to recognise her husband until he passes a test only he could pass. Translation asks the same patience of its reader. The English on the page is never quite Odysseus. It is a very old story wearing this century’s clothes, waiting to see whether we recognise it anyway.
What remains
Every English Odyssey is already an argument
The dates, forms and phrases can be checked. What cannot be checked is which translator got Homer finally right, because the question assumes a single English Homer is there to be found. Each version chooses what the reader is allowed to feel first; the next will contradict it in its own way.
The only choice left to the reader is whether to know whose argument they are reading.
Sources checked 23 July 2026 Texts and sources
The excerpts were checked against digital editions, publishers’ pages, and translators’ commentary. Quotations from translations still in copyright are deliberately brief.
Homer, Odyssey 1.1 — Greek text
The Greek text of the opening line in the Perseus collection.
Open source ↗LSJ, πολύτροπος
The lexicographic entry: “much-travelled,” “versatile,” “wily,” and related senses.
Open source ↗George Chapman, The Odyssey (1615)
The Early English Books Online digital edition at the University of Michigan.
Open source ↗Thomas Hobbes, The Odyssey (1675)
The Early English Books Online digital edition at the University of Michigan.
Open source ↗Pope, Cowper, Butler — public editions
Full texts of the historical translations in Project Gutenberg.
Open source ↗Butcher & Lang, The Odyssey of Homer
Open Library record with access to the Internet Archive scan.
Open source ↗Robert Fitzgerald, opening of Book I
The opening reproduced by A Public Space for its collective reading of the poem.
Open source ↗Robert Fagles, The Odyssey
The Penguin Random House edition page, including the opening line.
Open source ↗Richmond Lattimore, The Odyssey (1965)
Edition record and opening line in the comparative register of English translations.
Open source ↗Emily Wilson, opening of Book I
The Paris Review excerpt containing the translation’s opening line.
Open source ↗Emily Wilson, “On ‘complicated’”
The translator’s account of polytropos, turning, and ambiguity.
Open source ↗Daniel Mendelsohn, The Odyssey (2025)
University of Chicago Press page with the formal description and opening excerpt.
Open source ↗Charlotte Higgins, review of Emily Wilson
Context on translation history, polytropos, and the vocabulary of enslavement.
Open source ↗Judith Thurman, “Emily Wilson’s Odyssey”
Profile of the translator’s lexical choices, including “slaves” and “house girls.”
Open source ↗Method: the comparison follows the opening line of Book I and the dominant form of each version. The notes describe the English choices rather than ranking the translations. Checked 23 July 2026.