Daniel Mendelsohn

speaker

599 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Daniel Mendelsohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

So people know about the epithets, right?

When gods or mortals uh have these adjectives or phrases that keep cropping up whenever they're mentioned.

Zeus who gathers the crowds, Athena of the bright owl eyes.

Yeah.

Swift footed Achilles, you know, uh uh uh you know, the famous ones that have actually entered the English language, like Rosie Fingered Dawn.

So those are repeated verbatim every time those names come up.

And a lot of translators sort of translate them away, sort of find a way to smooth them out or vary them because the written

page is different from an oral performance and that repetition can strike the reader as being strange and artificial.

Whereas I think it's so intrinsic a part of Homer's style and gives you a real sense of the kind of archaic

cragginess of these wonderful works that I'm interested in reanimating those.

features for the sake of my audience because I trust my audience and I think they'll they understand that these are

Both.

as it were, ideologically and stylistically different from anything that we're used to.

And I'd like to emphasize that.

So one of the main

I think the main difference between mine and and most previous translations is that, you know, Homer's line is very long in Greek.

The verse line is an almost twenty-syllable long line with a strong six-beat pulse.

And

Most English translations of Greek and Roman classics actually are in what we call iambic pentameter or blank verse.

People might remember this from high school.

Showing 461–480 of 599 · page 24 of 30