Translating from Troy to Ithaca | Daniel Mendelsohn, Lauren Kane

Is Today’s Ithaca Homer’s Ithaca? The Controversy Over Odysseus’ True Homeland

Ithaca island, Greece. Credit: flickr / Zhang Yu CC BY-SA 2.0 The Odyssey, composed by Homer in the seventh century BCE, tells the story of Odysseus on his journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The normal interpretation is that Homer’s Ithaca is the same as modern Ithaca, also called Ithaki. However, there is a lot of controversy surrounding this identification. Is Homer’s Ithaca really the same as modern Ithaca, or was it a different isl…

Translating from Troy to Ithaca | Daniel Mendelsohn, Lauren Kane

New translations of Homer are bound to revive millennia-old questions of authorship and ancient diction. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the introduction to his rendition of the Odyssey, published this April by the University of Chicago Press, the alluring paradox of the epic is that contemporary readers can come to it “with a bracing sense […]