Stopper

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…