Into the already well-populated world of English translations of the Odyssey arrives the new Oxford World's Classics translation by V., presumably a replacement for the 1980 prose version by W. Shewring. Where that version was presented in a straightforwardly prosaic format, V.’s translation preserves the line numbering of the Greek text, presenting the appearance of verse without adopting a consistent metrical scheme. This can make for awkward reading at times. Consider the following lines, taken almost at random:

The first line clearly captures something of the music of the dactylic hexameter, without insisting on that form in a way that might easily become pedantic in English. The third line more fleetingly captures aspects of a hexameter line – the spondaic ‘Trojans’ land’ at the beginning and the adonic clausula of ‘suffered such hardships’. But ‘excellent Odysseus’ crashes through the reader's attempts to read the line metrically. Since V. has explicitly announced that his translation ‘does not claim to be “poetic”’ (p. xxvi), there is not really anything very wrong with this – except that the fleeting hints of metre create unfulfilled expectations for the reader. The overall effect is odd. Equally odd is the enjambment in ‘in the // Trojans’ land’, which cuts harshly between the article and the phrase it governs, and neither contributes to the meaning nor corresponds to the Greek. Again the effect is of a strange juxtaposition of superficial aspects of verse and essentially prosaic language.

These factors, combined with the dense type of the paperback version (38 lines of text per page), make it unlikely that many casual readers of the Odyssey will choose to read V.’s translation for pleasure. Its primary audience (given the emphasis on fidelity to the original) may be expected to be students of Greek looking for a translation crib, though such readers do not lack for options. V.’s translation follows the Greek more closely than many recent translators, generally using the same English equivalent, for example, for a given Homeric epithet. But even here there are some unexpected choices. Take the ‘excellent Odysseus’ of 3.219 above. ‘Excellent’ is a usefully vague and colourless word in contemporary English, suitable for translating a Homeric epithet. But the epithet it translates – kudalimos – is more frequently used of Menelaus in the Odyssey, where V. consistently translates it as ‘renowned’. The phrase ‘renowned Menelaus’ occurs, for example, four times in the first 45 lines of Book 4, always at the end of the line in V.’s translation, as in the Greek, and the repetition here is a kind of folk-tale charm, lost in the versions of more creative translators. R. Fagles, for example, twice has ‘Menelaus in his glory’; once ‘illustrious Menelaus’, and the name Menelaus without epithet once, while R. Fitzgerald has the unadorned name three times and does without even the name the fourth. There is something to be said for maintaining the effect of the epithet through a consistent translation. But that being the case, why vary the translation when the epithet is used of Odysseus?

In other contexts, V. varies his translation of kudalimos still more widely, so that we have the ‘famous sons’ of Nestor (17.113), the ‘far-famed’ son Telemachus (22.238), and the arguably more necessary ‘proud heart’ of Eurymachus (21.247). This last example aside, it is unclear why a translation that deliberately reproduces the repetitive quality of an epithet in adjacent passages would choose to vary it elsewhere in the poem, especially to use close equivalents whose use adds little shading of meaning and obscures potential connections for the reader. Here, as in the other ways noted above, V.’s Odyssey is a curious compromise: deliberately prosy, literal and repetitive in the service of fidelity, and yet never quite as faithful, as unpoetic or as consistent as it aspires to be.