The Odyssey, in a translation your students can read
This is a translation, not an abridgment and not a summary. All twenty-four books, out of Homer’s Greek, with every load-bearing beat carried — the tale told to the Phaeacians, the underworld, the bow, the olive-tree bed. What is different is the register: plain modern English, easy enough to read aloud to a second-grader, for a fourth-grader to read alone, and for an adult meeting the Odyssey for the first time to finish in a few evenings.
It does not replace the verse translations — Wilson’s and Fagles’s poetry, or Homer’s own Greek — and does not try to. It is a gateway: the full narrative, at a readability that lets students finish it. In classrooms from fourth grade up it can simply be the Odyssey; in a ninth-grade room it can carry the assigned reading while chosen passages are set beside Wilson or Fagles for the fuller poetry, because a student who already knows the story can afford to study the verse.
The same page, twice
I am Odysseus, son of Laertes. The whole world knows my clever plans, and my fame reaches the sky. My home is Ithaca, the bright island.
Book 9, lines 19–21 — this translation beside Homer’s Greek.
The dotted line under Ithaca runs through the whole retelling. Names, places and customs a first-time reader meets without introduction carry it, and a tap opens a short background note from Simple English Wikipedia, with a longer passage to read on into. Each note names the article and the revision it was taken from, and is Wikipedia’s under its Creative Commons licence, not ours — there so a student is never stopped by a name.
What level it reads at
Volume one · Books 1–4
4.2
Volume two · Books 5–12
4.3
Volume three · Books 13–24
5.0
That is the ATOS book level — the Accelerated Reader scale on your library’s spine stickers. It is a grade scale, so this is a fourth- to fifth-grade reading level, rising as the story goes on — worth knowing when you plan a sequence.
What it costs your students
Free to anyone, no account
Books 1–5, and 9, 13 and 21 — the whole of volume one, plus the cyclops and the contest of the bow.
Every Odyssey a US high school actually assigns is in copyright — Fitzgerald, which is the one printed in the Holt and McDougal ninth-grade literature books, along with Fagles, Lattimore, Lombardo and Wilson. Every translation that is free is Victorian or older: Butler, Butcher and Lang, Cowper, Pope, Chapman.
So the choice a department is usually offered is to pay for each student to hold a modern translation, or to assign prose written in 1879. This is a third option.
Ask for your class
If you can’t buy a copy
Sign in and ask for a review copy. A person checks the school you name, then opens the whole translation to your account for 90 days — long enough to decide whether you want it for your class.
A person reads every one of these, so it is not instant.