E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey

Rieu gives us the Odyssey as a story told in composed English prose. That sounds simple, but it was a consequential choice. His 1946 version launched Penguin Classics and addressed readers who did not know Greek and did not want a schoolroom exercise. The opening calls Odysseus “resourceful,” then moves through cities, suffering, and homecoming in one controlled paragraph.

The prose clears away one kind of difficulty and creates another. We can follow who speaks and what happens without adjusting to a long line or a recurring meter. We cannot hear where Homer placed the end of a verse, and repeated formulas settle into ordinary narrative. If you have tried two verse translations and found yourself reading around the sentences, Rieu may be the version that lets the poem become a book you finish.

Sun Kyoung Yoon’s study shows how deliberate that readability was. Rieu was reacting both to archaizing versions and to a culture of translation by scholars for scholars. He treated the Odyssey as an ancestor of the novel, then brought plot, character, psychology, and differentiated dialogue forward for readers used to modern fiction. The first Penguin Classic sold more than 100,000 copies within a few months and more than three million over its first fifty years. Ease was not a retreat from Rieu’s purpose. It was the purpose.

From the scholarship On Rieu's novelistic method

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His ‘novelisation’ of The Odyssey and The Iliad was not limited to the process of transforming poetic rhythm and metre into straightforward prose.

Yoon also helps us name the cost. Rieu sometimes omitted formulaic adjectives, turned them into adverbs or clauses, replaced repeated expressions with their effect in context, and removed anonymous divine interventions. Those choices make the story flow and the characters feel more individual. They also hide some of the repetition and divine machinery that make Homer’s poem unlike a modern novel. Yoon’s examples come from E. V. Rieu’s original text, so we use them to understand his project, not to attribute every individual phrase to the later revision.

The edition matters here more than usual. Our passages come from D. C. H. Rieu’s 1991 revision, the text Penguin sells in its current paperback. The younger Rieu removed some of the original’s elaborations and dated conversational touches while trying to preserve its narrative ease. When someone says “the Rieu translation,” they may mean two distinct English texts.

Our three passages show the revised method clearly. “Resourceful” gives Odysseus a useful but fairly settled virtue. “Nobody” makes the Cyclops exchange transparent in dialogue. At the reunion, Penelope’s knees tremble and her heart melts, a fluent prose rendering that retains both bodily signs but turns one into a familiar emotional metaphor.

Choose the revised Rieu if prose is what will keep you reading. Wilson is nearly as clear and keeps a strict poetic form. Butler is free but older. Rieu sits between them: more novel-like than Wilson, much less dated than Butler, and less revealing than either Lattimore or Mendelsohn when we want to see how a Greek line is built.