Choose Emily Wilson for swift, modern clarity that pulls you straight into the story; choose Robert Fitzgerald for lyrical, lasting beauty that reads like a great English poem. Both bring Odysseus home — the question is which sea you want to cross to get there.
Read Wilson if you want a fast, plainspoken, contemporary Odyssey you can pick up cold and finish — the homecoming told in a voice that sounds like now.
Read Fitzgerald if you want the music: a richly poetic, interior rendering that has been a beloved American classic for over sixty years.
Emily Wilson (b. 1971) is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and, with her 2017 Norton translation, the first woman to publish a complete English Odyssey from the Greek. She set herself a strict discipline — iambic pentameter, English verse's oldest road, held to the original's length line for line, all 12,110 of them — and a plain, propulsive diction meant to move at the pace of the tale itself. (She went on to translate the Iliad in 2023.)
Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) was an American poet who served as U.S. poet laureate near the end of his life. His 1961 Odyssey won the first Bollingen Prize for translation and stood for decades as the standard American version. The roughly fifty-six years between them are not just a gap in time but a shift in the whole imagination of what a translation is for — Fitzgerald reaching for the numinous and elevated, Wilson for the clear and human. He also translated the Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid.
Listen to how each one calls the poem into being, and you already know which translator is yours.
Wilson begins: "Tell me about a complicated man." It is stripped bare — a single modern sentence, almost conversational, as if you had asked a friend about someone you both half-know. The famously untranslatable Greek polytropos (the "many-turned" man) becomes simply complicated, and the whole story tilts toward the human and the psychological from its first breath.
Fitzgerald begins: "Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending…" Here the invocation turns inward. The Muse does not sing to the poet but in him — the song rises from inside, the way a dream rises from the deep. The line is slower, grander, more ceremonious; it asks to be performed, not skimmed.
This is the whole difference in miniature. Wilson hands you the man directly and lets the strangeness emerge as you go. Fitzgerald summons a voice from somewhere below the waterline first, then lets the man appear out of it. Neither is more faithful to Homer's spirit — they are faithful to different halves of it. The Odyssey is both a plain story of a soldier trying to get home and a mythic descent into the unknown self, and each opening chooses which face to show you first.
| Emily Wilson | Robert Fitzgerald | |
|---|---|---|
| Form / meter | Iambic pentameter, line-for-line (~12,110 lines) | Unrhymed verse, freer line lengths |
| Tone | Direct, brisk, human | Elevated, lyrical, ceremonial |
| Diction | Modern, plainspoken | Poetic, richly textured |
| For a first-timer | Very high — easy to start, hard to put down | Rewarding but slower; asks more of you |
| Best for | New readers, modern ears, book clubs | Poetry lovers, re-readers, the long savor |
| Best read… | Silently at pace; reads aloud cleanly too | Aloud — it was made for the ear |
| Year | 2017 | 1961 |
First-time readers — Wilson. If you have never finished the Odyssey, her clarity and momentum are the surest path from Ithaca's shore to its hearth without getting lost in the swell.
Poetry lovers — Fitzgerald. If you read for the line itself, his version is the more openly beautiful poem, worth slowing down for and reading aloud.
Modern readers & book clubs — Wilson. Her contemporary voice sparks discussion and travels easily across a room of different readers; the clear diction keeps everyone on the same page.
Students & classrooms — either, and ideally both. Wilson's line-for-line accuracy and modern diction make her ideal for close reading and citation; Fitzgerald is the canonical version many courses still teach. Set the two openings side by side and the whole craft of translation opens up.
See how all the major versions stack up by reader type, or start with our recommended translation and the short companion first.
Compare every Odyssey translation →
Which is easier to read?
Wilson. Her modern diction and steady iambic pentameter make her the most approachable of the major Odyssey translations — most first-timers find they simply keep turning pages.
Is Fitzgerald outdated compared to Wilson?
No. His English has aged into a deliberately elevated register rather than a dated one, and his 1961 version remains in print and widely admired. It asks more of a modern reader, but it gives back music that Wilson, by design, does not chase.
Which is more accurate?
Both are scholarly and faithful in different ways. Wilson holds tightly to the Greek's length, matching it line for line, while Fitzgerald takes more freedom with phrasing to serve the poetry — and his transliterated names (Kyklops, Kalypso) actually stay closer to the original Greek sounds.
Which is better for a first read?
Wilson, for most people. If you want to be carried through the journey and finish it, start with her; come to Fitzgerald when you want to hear the same voyage sung rather than told.