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.

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

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The History of Literature · 817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

So I think I'm an Odyssey person.

I love teaching the Iliad.

I love the Iliad, but I would never

If you paid me a million dollars, which no one is gonna do, I would not want to translate the Iliad because I don't feel I have the requisite

Degree of

sympathy for it.

I don't feel I own it the way I feel I own the Odyssey, so to speak.

Yeah, I think that's a great observation.

I mean, you know, as you mentioned because you know, as we know, the Odyssey consists of

twenty-four sections, or books as we call them, and the first four books of the Odyssey out of twenty-four, Odysseus isn't even present.

Homer waits until Book Five to introduce his main

character and so on in in a certain sense I think

You're right.

It's a kind of a daring and risky gesture on the part of the storyteller to hold off giving you the main character.

But I would say to

Counter that a little bit.

We keep hearing about him during the first four books.

You know, it's really focused on his son, Telemachus, who goes on this fact-finding mission to find out what happened to his long-lost father, who's been gone for twenty years.

And he's sort of nudged into that by Athena, who decides it's time to bring back Odysseus.

And so

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