An odysseyDaniel Mendelsohn
An odyssey
by Daniel Mendelsohn · first published 2017
4mentions
1recommended by
3HN commenters
2017–2025first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
Presents the story of a father and son's transformative shared journey in reading in the wake of the father's late-in-life enrollment in his son's undergraduate seminar, where the two engaged in debates over how to interpret Homer's classic masterpiece. "When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey that his son Daniel teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this retu
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…written in specialized language. I'm reminded of Cal Newport's advice to ease into challenging books by first reading a secondary source which explains the nuance of the primary source. Something like An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn before reading the Odyssey itself. It's been somewhat disappointing researching the reading habits of people who read many books a year. For the reader…
on “Short Little Difficult Books” ↗…even more from this literary character: they want her to fit the ideal of an empowered woman. It is comforting to subscribe to the notion—as Daniel Mendelsohn does in his recently published memoir, “An Odyssey,” and as Robert Fagles does, in his translation of the poem—that the marriage between Odysseus and Penelope is a partnership of intellectual equals, based on true love and a shared outlook on life. Odysseus…
on “A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey” ↗Daniel Mendelsohn the authour of this article, has a new translation of Odyssey which came out recently.
on “Why Catullus continues to seduce us” ↗Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation of Odyssey came out in April this year. He claims to have taken a more litteral approach following on the footsteps of Lattimore. Did anyone here read it?
on “"English Translators of Homer": A Review” ↗