Centuries of stodgy, numbing translations of The Odyssey have left it a bad classroom memory for generations, a classic enjoyed mostly through modernized retellings of one kind or another. But Emily Wilson isn't just the first woman classicist to publish a translation: hers is both radically contemporary and sharply attuned to the spirit and subtleties of the text.

Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men

back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,

they ate the Sun God's cattle, and the god

kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,

tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning. .

Even better than T. E. Lawrence's! But compare instead to the contemporary favorite, Robert Fagles' 1990s translation: