Emily Wilson’s fresh take on this ancient Homeric epic is both scholarly exacting and a pleasure to read. Rendered into a colloquial iambic pentameter that matches the same number of lines as the Greek hexameters, her buoyant rhythms and fresh, vivid imagery weave a gripping, brisk-paced narrative that is hard to put down. Wilson’s efforts can also be considered an intervention to slough off the anachronistic biases and oversimplifications found in many previous translations. The result is a work that is crisp, forceful, daring, and nuanced, a monumental rendering of a monumental text, “an old story for our modern times.”