Anyone who reads the Odyssey carefully feels the great distance of space and time from its text. Nevertheless, slowly emerges the awareness that the poem, while traveling, comes and goes, approaches and departs, sometimes smiling with sympathy and other times with irony.

The most significant translation problem in this case has to do with the reformulation of the original rhythm, which is both steady and alternating. The stability is imposed by the continuity of the epic narrative, measured in dactylic hexameter from the first to the last line. It resembles a giant snake that, as it unfolds, never changes its articulated shape anywhere.

However, the unpredictable maneuvers that transform the external rhythm into an internal one now, as the movement of the narrative voice slows down elsewhere, is temporarily suspended. This internal rhythm of the epic sought its own liberation, and thus emerged the unfree verse of the translation.

The reader now holds in their hands a self-sufficient translation; without the support of the original text and the Afterwords, which in turn have become autonomous and circulate in a separate volume. At the same time, they read a revised translation, sometimes subtly, other times more overtly. Searching, as we say, for its definitive form - an elusive yet comforting and encouraging dream.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]