July 28, 2026
Epic poem, epic comment war
Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
Readers crown one Odyssey king while the comments fight over vibes vs faithfulness
TLDR: Robert Fagles stayed on top in a blind reader vote comparing eight English versions of The Odyssey, even after the number of voters more than doubled. But the real battle in the comments was over whether “most enjoyable” matters less than being true to Homer, with jokes and eye-rolls flying too.
A blind taste test for The Odyssey just turned into a full-blown literary food fight. More than 1,500 readers clicked through mystery passages from eight English translations, and Robert Fagles kept winning even after the sample more than doubled. Not only did he top the early results, he stayed there when the votes piled up, with Lattimore and Mendelsohn hanging around as the respectable also-rans. Scholars praised the project, one translator reminded everyone Homer was meant to be heard, not just skimmed on a screen, and the internet did what it does best: immediately started arguing about what this contest was really measuring.
That’s where the comments got spicy. One camp basically said, “Cool poll, wrong question.” User npinsker complained that judging by “how much you enjoy the prose” misses the point if the goal is faithfulness to the Greek. Another commenter begged Greek speakers to weigh in on whether Lattimore or Fitzgerald feels closer to the original, turning the thread into a mini classics seminar. Meanwhile, others were wonderfully unserious: Chinjut dropped the deadpan winner of the day with, “Homer’s original won a blind writing test.” And in peak internet fashion, one reader admitted the article had “too much data” and pivoted into anxiety about a movie adaptation ruining their memories of the book. In other words: Fagles won the poll, but the comments won the drama.
Key Points
- •The blind test compared eight English translations of the *Odyssey* using anonymized passages and reader pairwise choices.
- •In the initial analysis and the expanded July 26, 2026 snapshot, Robert Fagles ranked first across major measures.
- •The July 26 dataset included 1,524 readers and 17,973 head-to-head comparisons after excluding under-90-second completions.
- •All eight pairwise ranking positions were unchanged between the initial and later snapshots, even as the sample more than doubled.
- •The article states the test does not measure fidelity to the Greek original or the experience of reading a complete translation and is based on a self-selected, mostly American social-media sample.