# Tell Me About a Complicated Man — Polytropos One Greek word, eleven English translations, and a hero remade before the opening line is over. ## 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. - **Much-travelled:** The man carried through many places and turned by circumstance. - **Adaptable:** The man of many means, capable of changing his tactics. - **Wily:** The twisting man, difficult to contain within a single identity. ## 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. - **1615 — George Chapman:** “many a way / Wound with his wisdom”. Form: rhymed verse. The first complete English Odyssey makes the hero wind through many routes by means of wisdom. Published while Shakespeare’s contemporaries were still alive to read it, Chapman’s version held the field for a century and later gave Keats a sonnet. - **1675 — Thomas Hobbes:** [epithet omitted]. Form: rhymed verse. Hobbes, then in his seventies, declines to choose an adjective at all. He begins with the man’s adventures; Odysseus arrives without the epithet that troubles the other translators. - **1726 — Alexander Pope:** “wisdom’s various arts”. Form: heroic couplets. Pope shifts the epithet toward intellectual art and rhetorical control. The Odyssey published under his name was a collaborative enterprise: William Broome and Elijah Fenton translated a substantial part of the poem. - **1791 — William Cowper:** “genius versatile”. Form: blank verse. Cowper regarded Pope’s rhyme as an ornament Homer had never used and chose blank verse. His Odysseus is defined by mental mobility, while his English gives up the couplet’s satisfying closure. - **1879 — S. H. Butcher & Andrew Lang:** “ready at need”. Form: archaizing prose. The two Victorian scholars choose deliberately archaizing prose. “Ready at need” makes Odysseus the man who finds the answer circumstances demand; the biblical register also makes him sound more remote. - **1900 — Samuel Butler:** “ingenious hero”. Form: prose. Butler presents him directly as an ingenious hero and writes in plain prose. Three years earlier, in The Authoress of the Odyssey, he had argued that the poem was composed by a young Sicilian woman. - **1961 — Robert Fitzgerald:** “skilled in all ways of contending”. Form: accentual free verse. Fitzgerald moves the word from character toward ordeal: Odysseus is skilled in every way of contending. His version became a classroom Odyssey for a generation in the United States, prized for sounding like a living poem. - **1965 — Richmond Lattimore:** “the man of many ways”. Form: loose six-beat verse. The compact phrase “many ways” preserves an unusual amount of the Greek openness: ways of travelling, thinking, and escaping. Lattimore’s long line follows hexameter’s movement at a distance without pretending English is Greek. - **1996 — Robert Fagles:** “the man of twists and turns”. Form: free verse. Fagles makes the turn visible: route, mind, and story twist inside the same phrase. The free verse is quick and oral; the epithet almost performs its meaning for the reader. - **2017 — Emily Wilson:** “a complicated man”. Form: iambic pentameter. 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. - **2025 — Daniel Mendelsohn:** “so many roundabout ways”. Form: expansive six-beat line. Mendelsohn makes indirection a property of the man, the journey, and the narrative. His expansive six-beat line restores a ceremonial amplitude that more compact translations deliberately sacrifice. ## 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. ## 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. 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. ## 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. ## 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. ## 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. ## Texts and sources - [Homer, Odyssey 1.1 — Greek text](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0135%3Abook%3D1%3Acard%3D1) — The Greek text of the opening line in the Perseus collection. - [LSJ, πολύτροπος](https://atlas.perseus.tufts.edu/dictionaries/entry/urn%3Acite2%3Ascaife-viewer%3Adictionaries.v1%3Alsj-n85454/) — The lexicographic entry: “much-travelled,” “versatile,” “wily,” and related senses. - [George Chapman, The Odyssey (1615)](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A03515.0001.001?view=toc) — The Early English Books Online digital edition at the University of Michigan. - [Thomas Hobbes, The Odyssey (1675)](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/a44271.0001.001) — The Early English Books Online digital edition at the University of Michigan. - [Pope, Cowper, Butler — public editions](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3160) — Full texts of the historical translations in Project Gutenberg. - [Butcher & Lang, The Odyssey of Homer](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7032133M/The_Odyssey_of_Homer_done_into_English_prose_by_S.H._Butcher_and_A._Lang.) — Open Library record with access to the Internet Archive scan. - [Robert Fitzgerald, opening of Book I](https://apublicspace.org/aps-together/detail/the-odyssey-day-1-february-5-book-1-line-1-444) — The opening reproduced by A Public Space for its collective reading of the poem. - [Robert Fagles, The Odyssey](https://penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com/book/?isbn=9781101221846) — The Penguin Random House edition page, including the opening line. - [Richmond Lattimore, The Odyssey (1965)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Homer) — Edition record and opening line in the comparative register of English translations. - [Emily Wilson, opening of Book I](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/07/redux-emily-wilson-robert-fitzgerald-robert-fagles/) — The Paris Review excerpt containing the translation’s opening line. - [Emily Wilson, “On ‘complicated’”](https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated) — The translator’s account of polytropos, turning, and ambiguity. - [Daniel Mendelsohn, The Odyssey (2025)](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo243090734.html) — University of Chicago Press page with the formal description and opening excerpt. - [Charlotte Higgins, review of Emily Wilson](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review) — Context on translation history, polytropos, and the vocabulary of enslavement. - [Judith Thurman, “Emily Wilson’s Odyssey”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/emily-wilson-profile) — Profile of the translator’s lexical choices, including “slaves” and “house girls.” 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.