Analysis · the Odyssey in English
One Word, Four Centuries
πολύτροπος
The very first thing Homer tells us about Odysseus is a compound adjective that English cannot hold: poly-, many, plus tropos, turn. It can mean the man who was turned — driven off course, knocked about by the world. It can mean the man who does the turning — versatile, resourceful, slippery. Every translator has to choose, and the choice gives away the century.
01Four hundred years of answers
These renderings are all out of copyright, so they can be set side by side in full. Read down the column and watch the meaning migrate.
| Translator | Form | Odysseus is… |
|---|---|---|
| Chapman, 1615 | rhymed pentameter couplets | “that many a way / Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay” |
| Pope, 1725 | heroic couplets | “The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd” |
| Cowper, 1791 | blank verse | “for shrewdness famed / And genius versatile” |
| Butcher & Lang, 1879 | archaising prose | “that man, so ready at need” |
| Butler, 1900 | plain prose | “that ingenious hero” |
| Murray, 1919 | Loeb prose crib | “the man of many devices” |
The drift is the finding. Chapman keeps the motion — his Odysseus is literally wound about, turned this way and that, which is the Greek's passive half. Pope converts it into reputation: the man is renowned, which the Greek never says. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turn it into competence — ready at need, ingenious, full of devices. Four hundred years of English quietly agreeing that the poem's first word about its hero is a compliment.
It need not be. “Shifty” is well inside the Greek's range. So is “devious”. The modern translations are where that possibility finally gets tested — several restore the physical turning, one settles on a single flat adjective that leans deliberately toward the unflattering reading, another goes back to plain resourcefulness. (Those versions are in copyright, so this essay describes their strategies rather than reprinting them; the renderings above are the ones anyone may quote.)
Figure 1 · What the word became
02What each translator was optimising for
Behind every rendering is a decision about what a translation is for — and those aims conflict, which is why there will never be a final Odyssey in English.
- Chapman (1615) wanted English poetry that could stand as literature in its own right. Keats wrote a sonnet about the shock of reading it — the most famous compliment ever paid a translation. Note that his Odyssey is in pentameter couplets; the loping fourteeners people associate with him are his Iliad.
- Pope (1725) wanted a poem an eighteenth-century gentleman could admire, and produced the most stylistically confident version in the language. The barb usually quoted against him — that it is a pretty poem but not Homer — was aimed at his Iliad, and survives only as a second-hand anecdote.
- Butler (1900), whose text this site publishes, wanted the story to move like a novel, and wrote plain prose to get it. He silently uses Roman names — Ulysses, Minerva, Jove — and, tellingly, nowhere in his preface explains why. Read him and you get speed and clarity; you lose the formulas, the metre, and some of the strangeness.
- Modern verse translators have mostly wanted the poem to be speakable again. Two recent versions impose a strict discipline: matching the Greek line for line, so that a hexameter becomes a single English pentameter. That constraint, more than any ideology, is what produces their famous plainness — there is simply less room in the line.
03Where translation changes the meaning, not the music
Style is the visible difference. The consequential differences are elsewhere.
The enslaved women of Book XXII. The clearest case, and the subject of its own essay here. The Greek calls them women and slaves; some celebrated English versions add contempt the original does not contain, while the plainest older versions — Butler, Murray — simply say women. There is no neutral rendering, and the choice reveals what the translator thought the scene was.
Roman names or Greek. Butler's Minerva is Athena; his Jove is Zeus. It changes the texture more than you would expect — a Roman name carries eighteen centuries of European painting with it. This site lets you switch the names on any reading page, so you can feel the difference without changing the translation underneath.
The formulas. Homer's rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark sea are not decoration; they are the joints of an oral composition. Prose translators tend to vary them for English readability, which makes the poem smoother and quietly deletes the evidence of how it was made.
04Which should you read?
An honest answer, given that this site has an obvious interest: Butler is a fine first Odyssey and an excellent free one — quick, clear, and complete, which is why it is here. It is not the best English poem made from Homer (Chapman and Pope are), and it is not the closest to how the Greek feels line by line (the modern verse translations are). Read Butler to find out what happens; read a verse translation to find out what it sounds like; read two of anything to see how much of what you thought was Homer was actually English.
05Sources and copyright
- Public-domain translations quoted above: Chapman (1614–15), Pope (1725–26), Cowper (1791), Butcher & Lang (1879), Butler (1900), A. T. Murray's Loeb (1919) — texts via Project Gutenberg and Perseus
- Translations still in copyright are described, never reproduced; where a single rendering is itself the subject of scholarly discussion it is referred to and attributed
- Critical discussion of the modern versions, including reviews in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review; Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816, public domain)
Research pass 2026-08-24: roughly 15 claims confirmed against two or more sources, 11 single-source, 2 disputed. Two received facts were corrected in the process — Chapman's Odyssey is not in fourteeners, and the famous jibe at Pope belongs to his Iliad and is second-hand.