Class Description
The seminal 1965 translation of The Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore doesn’t dumb down. It’s challenging in its effort to reproduce in English the original Greek. But together we can see how it activates this veteran’s—and refugee’s, and ad man’s—tale, even as we consider other, especially more recent, translations, such as the pioneering feminist work of Emily Wilson (2018). In studying Homer’s epic both by returning home, Odysseus-like, to Lattimore’s faithful and beautiful rendering and by comparing that rendering to those in translations by Fitzgerald (1961), Fagles (1996), Lombardo (2000), Mendelsohn (2025), and particularly Wilson, we’ll do our best to honor the text’s problems and possibilities, to retrain our own capacities for close reading—and to see what it has to teach us about today.
Matt Laufer holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and has taught literature at Columbia, Barnard College, and various college preparatory schools, as well as The Newberry Library (2010-2018). He has lectured on the history of the novel and published articles on Nabokov, Melville, and Woolf.
What to Expect
Format: In Person
Class Capacity: 24
Class Style: Mostly discussion; participation-based
Materials List
Required
- Homer, Richmond Lattimore translation, The Odyssey. Harper Perennial, 2007. ISBN: 978-0061244186
- Homer, Emily Wilson translation, The Odyssey. Norton, 2018. ISBN: 978-0393356250
- Instructor-Distributed Materials
- Including selections from other translations, poetry, criticism, and scholarly texts.
First Assignment
- To be completed by the first session: Books 1-4 of the Lattimore Translation of The Odyssey.
A Brief Syllabus
- Introductions and The Odyssey, Books 1-4
- Books 5-8
- Books 9-12
- Books 13-16
- Books 17-20
- Books 21-24
Cost and Registration
6 Sessions, $270 ($243 for Newberry members, seniors, and students). Learn about becoming a member.
We offer our classes at three different price options: Regular ($270), Community Supported ($250), and Sponsor ($290). Following the models of other institutions, we want to ensure that our classes are accessible to a wider audience while continuing to support our instructors. You may choose the price that best fits your situation when registering through Learning Stream.
To register multiple people for this class, please go through the course calendar in Learning Stream, our registration platform. When you select the course and register, you’ll be prompted to add another registrant.
Having trouble signing up? Take a look at our step-by-step guide to registration by clicking here.
RegisterThe views and opinions expressed in this class and/or by the instructor are not necessarily representative of the Newberry. We aim to ensure that in our classes, participants can have respectful disagreement to foster critical thinking. This is a space to challenge and expand our own worldviews to work towards better understanding and appreciating humanity.
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