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 keeps both the admirable hero and the difficult man in view. She also wanted “complicated” to carry a shadow of “problematic.” 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. For Wilson, strict metre is also a test of the voice: she recites her lines aloud, seeking a pentameter that enters memory through rhythm. In Judith Thurman’s profile, she condenses the method to five words: “I write for the body.”
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”
One Greek word, three Romanian Odysseuses
In Romanian, cleverness wins the opening
Three important twentieth-century Romanian translations read polytropos through iscusință, a blend of skill, cleverness, and resourcefulness. Each places it differently: Murnu beside bravery, Lovinescu beside the idea of “many,” and Slușanschi in the mind.
1924George Murnu
„viteaz și iscusit”hendecasyllabic blank verse“Brave and resourceful”: bravery enters the first portrait of the hero. The Greek ἄνδρα simply names the man; Murnu adds heroic stature from the start.
1935Eugen Lovinescu
„bărbatul mult iscusit”prose“The greatly skilled man”: mult keeps poly- in view, but tropos resolves into competence. Wandering and change recede behind it.
1997Dan Slușanschi
„bărbatul cu gând iscusit”dactylic hexameter“The man with a resourceful mind”: skill moves into thought. Odysseus enters the poem as a strategist, defined by the way he thinks.
Romanian calls the hero both Ulise, after the Latinized form Ulixes, and Odiseu or Odysseu, which preserve the Greek name more visibly.
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
In the execution scene, many translations add insults such as “sluts” or “whores,” although neither appears in the Greek; others obscure the women’s status under domestic terms such as “maids.” Emily Wilson consistently uses “slaves” and “house girls.” Those words name their legal status. The poem leaves uncertain what any individual woman could refuse. In Wilson’s English, their status as property and their lack of freedom remain in view.
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.
Richard Whitaker moves the objection from tone to fidelity to the Greek. Comparing Wilson with Anthony Verity and Peter Green, he argues that she sometimes turns recurring epithets into verdicts: polymētis, rendered by the others as “resourceful” or “of many wiles,” becomes “lord of lies”; polytlas, “much-enduring,” is at times “hardened” or “ruthless.” The examples do not cancel Wilson’s reading, but they expose its risk: repeated local choices can morally settle a hero whom polytropos had left open.
The fact that Wilson was the first woman to publish a complete English Odyssey sometimes eclipsed discussion of her metre and diction. Every translator’s identity leaves a trace; for a long time, the male trace could pass as neutrality. Wilson goes further: even the ideal of a “faithful” translation strikes her as a gendered metaphor, casting the translator as a subordinate helpmeet to a male-authored original.
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.
In Wilson’s version, Penelope meets reunion by sitting opposite her husband in silence. For a moment, homecoming remains a question: after twenty years, can this still be the home either of them remembers? Thurman’s profile opens a deeper sense of nostos: longing for a home that has vanished or survives only as the ideal place where those you love recognise you.
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 24 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, “Mother Tongue”
Profile of “complicated,” Wilson’s oral method, the vocabulary of slavery, Penelope, and the meaning of nostos.
Open source ↗Richard Whitaker, “Homer’s Odyssey Three Ways”
A critical comparison of Anthony Verity, Emily Wilson, and Peter Green, with examples concerning epithets, diction, and fidelity to the Greek.
Open source ↗Laura Câlțea, comparative openings of the Odyssey
A comparison of the opening line in Murnu, Lovinescu, and Slușanschi, including the excerpts used here.
Open source ↗Ioana Costa, “Câteva considerații asupra retraducerii”
A history of Romanian versions and their forms, from Papacostea to recent retranslations.
Open source ↗Homer, Odysseia, trans. Dan Slușanschi
Humanitas’s edition page for the translation in dactylic hexameters.
Open source ↗Radio România Actualități, “Codul lui Homer”
Context for the two Romanian names, Ulise and Odiseu, including the Latin form Ulixes.
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 24 July 2026.