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Where Fitzgerald gives you lyric elegance and Mendelsohn gives you archaic fidelity, Fagles gives you momentum: his lines move like the sea Odysseus can't escape, and his rendering of the poem's violence and homesickness hits with contemporary force. It's the translation most often read aloud, most often taught, and most often quoted as the audiobook read by Ian McKellen became a classic in its own right.
Where Fitzgerald gives you lyric elegance and Mendelsohn gives you archaic fidelity, Fagles gives you momentum: his lines move like the sea Odysseus can't escape, and his rendering of the poem's violence and homesickness hits with contemporary force. It's the translation most often read aloud, most often taught, and most often quoted as the audiobook read by Ian McKellen became a classic in its own right.
