Author Talk: Daniel Mendelsohn in Conversation with Max Gabrielson
Celebrated author, critic, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn will join Wilton High School's beloved classics teacher Max Gabrielson in conversation about Mendelsohn's new translation of Homer's Odyssey, and other works. Don't miss this singular, extraordinary literary event.
With this translation, Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic to vividly poetic new life. Widely known for his essays on classical literature and culture in The New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn gives us a line-for-line rendering of The Odyssey that is both engrossing as poetry and true to its source. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, he artfully reproduces the epic's formal qualities and thereby restores to Homer's masterwork its archaic grandeur.
The result is the richest, most ample, most precise and most musical Odyssey in English. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Mendelsohn's Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative version of this masterpiece.
A magnificent feat of translation, hailed by classicists and poets alike as a "momentous achievement," "thrilling," "rich and rhythmical," "superb," "mesmerizing," "searingly faithful - yet absolutely original."
Daniel Mendelsohn , an award-winning author, critic, and translator, is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is editor-at-large. His books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; as well as a translation of the complete poems of C.P. Cavafy, hailed by The New York Times as "a work of art." His honors include the Prix Medicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy's highest honor for foreign writers. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.
Max Gabrielson has taught Latin and Ancient Greek at Wilton High School for twenty-five years. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in classics and is a former Deputy Attorney General for the state of NJ, where he served as a civil litigator for a decade before returning to teaching. In 2010 he received the award for Excellence in Precollegiate Teaching by the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies). He has twice been commended by the U.S. Secretary of Education for excellence in teaching and twice recognized by the University of Chicago as an outstanding educator. He is currently looking forward to participating in a five week summer study program at the American Academy in Rome.
Elm Street Books will sell copies of Daniel Mendelsohn's books, which he will sign after the program. A portion of the proceeds goes to Wilton Library.
Registration is required. Please register online at www.wiltonlibrary.org or call (203) 762-6334.