Stephen Fry's Odyssey: the poem retold, not translated

Our pickBest retelling for newcomersThe vibe: warm and witty, Fry retelling the story like a friend who loves it.

There is a version of the Odyssey that skips the seminar entirely and just tells you the story, in the voice of the most reassuring narrator in Britain. That is this one, and the only thing you have to understand before pressing play is what it is not.

A retelling, not a translation

Every recording elsewhere on this site is Homer, carried into English by a translator and then read aloud. Fry’s book is a step further from the source: he takes the events of the poem and rewrites them as his own prose, with his own jokes, his own connective tissue, and the occasional footnote delivered as an aside.

It is Fry telling you about the Odyssey, brilliantly, rather than the Odyssey itself. On the shelf it sits nearer the adaptations than the translations, and the registry labels it exactly that way.

What Fry’s version does better than the poem

It removes every excuse. No epithets to decode, no patronymics to track, no wondering whether you were supposed to know who Eurycleia is. Fry front-loads the context, keeps the pace brisk, and makes the gods sound like a difficult family, which they are. As a first contact with the material, especially for a listener the film sent looking, it is close to frictionless, and it makes the eventual jump to a real translation far less daunting.

What the critics have not said about this one

An honest gap, and we would rather state it than dress it up. We went looking for professional criticism of this specific recording and did not find any. The trade magazine that judges narrators rather than books never covered this recording at all, and its back catalogue has since disappeared behind a redirect, so there is nothing to recover either. The lines you will see quoted around this book on retail pages are publisher-selected blurbs from The Guardian and The Times about Fry’s earlier Greek Myths narration, not about his Odyssey. They are real quotes about a real thing. That thing is a different book.

Which leaves the one credential that is not in dispute: Fry has narrated his own work for years, this is the fourth volume he has read himself, and nobody on any side of the argument has ever suggested he is bad at it. The genuine disagreement about this recording is not whether the performance is good. It is whether a retelling counts, and that one we can settle for you in the section above.

Who should take it, who should walk past

Take it if you want the story before the poem, if the verse translations have bounced you before, or if you would simply enjoy ten hours of Stephen Fry being amused by the Greeks. Walk past it if you want Homer’s actual words, if a class assigned you a specific translation, or if you have already read the poem and want the performance of the language rather than a summary of the plot. For those, the house pick and the translation head-to-head are the right doors, and students should match the recording to the assigned edition instead.

Do you need the earlier books first?

The fan sites rarely mention this: it is the fourth and final volume of Fry’s Greek Myths series, after Mythos, Heroes, and Troy, and it stands on its own. You can start here cold and follow everything. The one that quietly helps is Troy, since it covers the ten-year war Odysseus is trudging home from, and Fry wrote both. Taken in order you catch more echoes, but nobody is grading you on prerequisites.

Penguin Books UK posted three exclusive excerpts of Fry reading the audiobook. Hear them on YouTube.