Does the translator have a thoughtful, comprehensive vision? Does she have the skill to sustain it? Does she chart a coherent course between often mutually exclusive virtues such as literalism, musicality, clarity, beauty and readability? And, most importantly, does she tell the story well? In the case of Emily Wilson’s smart and exciting new Odyssey, the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes … Wilson’s language is fresh, unpretentious and lean. Though there are plenty of finely wrought moments, she isn’t looking to gild the poetic lily but rather to emphasize the emotional arc of the story, engaging readers first and foremost with the plight and character of Odysseus. Relying on this forward motion, she is able to create real suspense where other translations make the reader glaze over … It is rare to find a translation that is at once so effortlessly easy to read and so rigorously considered. Her Odyssey is a performance well-deserving of applause.

Emily Wilson’s crisp and musical version is a cultural landmark. Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem … Wilson has set out her stall: clarity and cleanness are her watchwords; her epic voice is not one of grandeur or pomposity. This represents an important decision, since the actual language of Homer, drawing as it did on an old, oral tradition of bardic poetry, used a hodgepodge of dialects and vocabulary that was archaic even by the time the poem was written down … Wilson enjoys and attends to the poem’s ensemble cast, some of them intriguing women who can do great damage to men when they open their mouths...A woman’s voice: how beautiful to hear it.

The words are short, mostly monosyllables. Almost none have French or Latin roots. None is independently striking; their force comes from their juxtaposition with one another — pat pat pat, like raindrops on a metal roof … The general plainness of the language makes longer or unusual words stand out. Wilson doesn’t shy from colloquialisms: ‘fighting solo,’ ‘pep talk,’ ‘on day eighteen.’ And there are some daring choices … To read a translation is like looking at a photo of a sculpture: It shows the thing, but not from every angle. Like every translator, Wilson brings out some features more clearly than others. But altogether it’s as good an Odyssey as one could hope for.

'Tell me about a complicated man.' So this new Odyssey begins ... this single verse introduces both her take on the work’s hero and a poetics of reduction that she observes rather ruthlessly in order to make a poem that matches Homer’s line for line ... The result is a lean, wiry Homer, shorn of his more ornamental features. In this she is consistent, even to a fault ... to her credit Wilson knows how to craft her lines in the most flexible way, including a number of those ridiculously named 'feminine' endings ... The result pitches between the ancient and modern as any translation must if it chooses to pursue the vitality of storytelling over the archeology of poetic form ... Wilson strives quietly at moments for striking imagery ... when she faces the dilemma of Homer’s formulaic lines, part of the repetitive boilerplate of traditional poetic diction ... This lyricization of epic may restore the poetry through the backdoor, but it reveals the tension between Homeric and modern notions of poetry ... Her poem has the stamp of a clear and consistent vision, and brings Odysseus home to us again—cunning, eloquent, murderous; in sum, complicated.

Classicist Emily Wilson's brisk and understated new version sweeps away much of the nostalgic detritus from the story of Odysseus's wandering way home after the Trojan war. The original poem was not written, but oral, probably composed by many different poets, who passed it down performance by performance. Wilson's metre — friendly iambic pentameter — helps retain that storytelling feel … Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean.

Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translation lays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today … It is a version of the Odyssey that lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar.

From this first sentence we realise that this will be an unselfconsciously contemporary telling of Homer’s ancient classic, and that neither Odysseus nor any of the other characters will be spared … Perhaps the most radical shift in Wilson’s version comes from her willingness to dive deeper into the hierarchies of power in The Odyssey. Odysseus, on a long voyage home to his faithful wife Penelope, meets many different women...While remaining true to the original, Wilson seeks to scrape off the meanings assigned to them by previous translators, who may have seen non-Greeks simply as savages … Wilson translates as though translation is a moral choice — you owe fidelity not to the author, nor to the protagonist, but to the truth behind the words and the times. She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.

In her powerful new translation, Emily Wilson, a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, has chosen immediacy and naturalism over majestic formality. She preserves the musicality of Homer’s poetry, opting for an iambic pentameter whose approachable storytelling tone invites us in, only to startle us with eruptions of beauty … Dread of the alien thrums through The Odyssey, yet for its hero, canniness is not the only gift that is crucial to his happy homecoming. A deeper dimension of his much-praised intelligence—his gift for responding to like-mindedness—proves essential. And it ensures his full stature as a hero, earning him an altogether different order of honor than the city-sacking warrior can claim.

Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson chooses is the rather bland ‘complicated man,’ the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as ‘of twists and turns.’ Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support … More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.