Laudator Temporis Acti

Homer, Odyssey, tr. Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), p. 57 (from "A Note on the Translation"):

Wherever possible, I have tried to avoid words whose modernity would jolt readers out of the world that is the epic’s setting. In Book 11, for instance, the ghost of Agamemnon describes how he was murdered at the feast given to celebrate his return from Troy, a passage in which he uses the word eranos, often translated as “picnic.” But “picnic” is what my late friend and mentor Bob Gottlieb, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest editors of the twentieth century, called a “stopper”: given the strong associations that “picnic” has for an Anglophone reader, its presence in this passage would stop the reader, raising questions that would interrupt the flow of the reading experience. (Did the Greeks have picnics? What were they like? What kind of food did they eat? Were there blankets and sunscreen? Etc.) The Odyssey is certainly “modern,” in the sense that its themes are always with us; but the body it inhabits, its accoutrements, are very much of its own remote time. When all is said and done, the world of the epic, its heroes and heroines, villains and goddesses and monsters, is very distant from ours; that distance is, to my mind, an essential part of what the Odyssey is, and should be felt in translation. To cast Homer in up-to-the-minute, contemporary English speech might make it feel approachably modern for some readers, especially young ones; but it is worth remembering that Homer never felt “modern,” even in his own time.

"Did the Greeks have picnics?" There is a good example of a picnic in the Odyssey itself (6.96-97, they = Nausicaa and her attendants; tr. Mendelsohn):

Once they had bathed in the water and anointed their skin with rich oil
They took their meal right there along the bank of the river...

αἱ δὲ λοεσσάμεναι καὶ χρισάμεναι λίπ᾽ ἐλαίῳ
δεῖπνον ἔπειθ᾽ εἵλοντο παρ᾽ ὄχθῃσιν ποταμοῖο...

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Unfortunately I encounter stoppers, of one sort or another, on almost every page of Mendelsohn's translation, e.g.:

• No Accounting for Taste
• A Puzzle

Here is another example, from 5.103-104 = 5.137-138:

But it's utterly impossible for us other gods to thwart
Or void the intention of Zeus, he who bears the aegis.

ἀλλὰ μάλ᾽ οὔ πως ἔστι Διὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο
οὔτε παρεξελθεῖν ἄλλον θεὸν οὔθ᾽ ἁλιῶσαι.

As I construe the English translation of line 103 (= 137) , "he who bears the aegis" is in apposition to "Zeus," and "Zeus" is the object of the preposition "of". But "he who bears the aegis" is a nominative phrase in English, and how, therefore, can it be the object of a preposition? I would revise the translation as follows:

But it's utterly impossible for us other gods to thwart
Or void the intention of Zeus who bears the aegis.