Daniel Mendelsohn: THE ODYSSEY: A NEW TRANSLATION (with Virginia Jewiss)

Bird in Hand invites you to celebrate a truly groundbreaking development in the fields of Classics and Translation-- the landmark new translation of Homer's most popular epic by distinguished author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn.

On April 22, Daniel Mendelsohn visits Bird in Hand to discuss his new translation with Professor Virginia Jewiss, Director of Public Engagement at the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1961, the University of Chicago Press published Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer's The Iliad. For more than sixty years, it has served to introduce readers to the ancient Greek world of gods and heroes and has been one of the most popular and respected versions of the work. Yet through all those decades, Chicago never published a companion translation of the best-known epic in the Western canon, The Odyssey--until now.

Mendelsohn's translation is a magnificent feat, one that conveys the poetics of the original while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight, and powerful themes that make Homer's work continue to resonate today. Supported by an extensive introduction, notes, and commentary, Mendelsohn's Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent and enduringly influential masterpiece.

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Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, DANIEL MENDELSOHN is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

VIRGINIA JEWISS is the Director of Public Engagement at the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and a Teaching Professor in the Humanities. She joined Hopkins from Yale, where she served for many years as Assistant to the Director of the Whitney Humanities Center. A medievalist with extensive experience both within and beyond academia, she practices the humanistic teaching and scholarship that is central to AGHI’s mission. She designed and directed the Yale Humanities in Rome program, crafted numerous innovative, interdisciplinary courses, helped launch the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, and was a core faculty member for Directed Studies, Yale’s great books program. A noted translator, she helped launch the Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press and continues to serve on the advisory board. Her own translations include Dante’s Vita Nuova, Luigi Pirandello’s short stories, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, and Melania Mazzucco’s Vita. A longtime resident of Rome, she has collaborated with Italian directors Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone, adapting their screenplays in English for filming. Jewiss, who earned her Ph.D. in Italian at Yale, has also taught at Dartmouth College and Trinity College/Rome.

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