Daniel Mendelsohn *94 to deliver Fagles Lecture

Princeton Classics is delighted to welcome author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn (*89, *94) back to campus as Princeton’s 2024–2025 Robert Fagles Lecturer for Classics in the Contemporary Arts. One of the nation's premier public intellectuals, Mendelsohn serves as Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust promoting nonfiction writers, teaches literature at Bard College, and lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey will be published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2025.

Born in New York in 1960, Mendelsohn was educated at the University of Virginia, where he received his BA in Classics in 1982, and at Princeton, where he received his PhD in Classics in 1994. His 11 books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017) and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006); a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (2009); and three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2018). His most recent book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2020), was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020, and was named Best Foreign Book of the Year in France. During the past 30 years, Mendelsohn has contributed more than 300 essays, reviews, articles, and translations to numerous publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and has been a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, and BBC Culture. His writing for mainstream publications covers a wide range of subjects, from Classical civilization to contemporary literature, as well as film, theater, opera, and television. 

Scheduled for September 17, Mendelsohn’s lecture is titled “What’s the Ancient Greek for ‘Picnic’?: Adventures in Translating the Odyssey.” Beginning with the dauntingly enigmatic adjective that Homer uses to describe his hero in the first line of the poem—polytropos, “of many turns,” about which no two translators have ever agreed—Mendelsohn will present a series of case studies in translation culled from his own experience during the past six years working on his Odyssey. In so doing, he allows the audience to watch the translator at work as he grapples with the distinctive technical challenges posed by Homer’s verse: its meter and rhythms, diction and tone, the poet’s use of line-breaks, alliteration, and assonance, and the real meaning of famous phrases such as “gray-eyed Athena” and “wingèd words.” (Hint: they don’t have wings.) 

The Fagles Lectureship joins Princeton University's James Madison Medal for distinguished graduate alumni as one of Mendelsohn's many honors. Others awards include the National Jewish Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Style, the Society for Classical Studies Presidents’ Medal, the Prix Médicis and Prix Méditerranée in France, and the Malaparte Prize in Italy, that country’s highest literary honor for foreign authors. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. 

Established in memory of classical translator and University professor Robert Fagles, the Fagles Lecture brings to Princeton distinguished writers or artists whose work engages with classics. The event is hosted by Princeton’s Classics Department and will be open to the public in person and online. Support for the project is provided in part by Princeton's Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, the Humanities Council, Princeton University Public Lectures Committee, Program in Humanistic Studies, and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. The inaugural Fagles Lecture was delivered in 2017 by poet Alice Oswald, since followed by such luminaries as poets Ishion Hutchinson and A.E. Stallings, novelist Kamila Shamsie, and playwrights Mary Zimmerman and Luis Alfaro.