Emily Wilson's translations of the Odyssey (2017) and the Iliad (2023) have become standard English versions, praised for their conciseness and fluency. Her fascination with Homer began at age eight when she played Athena in a school production, and that excitement persists. While some of her translation choices are debatable, her dedication to finding the 'least bad' compromises is undeniable.
Exploring Translation and Antiquity
Her new book, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, is a collection of essays on translation challenges and the joys of reading classics. Wilson examines intersections between ancient and modern worlds, referencing Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus, and Aristophanes alongside Spike Lee, Erica Jong, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves, and Boris Johnson, whom she calls 'an incompetent drunkard' who passed as an intellectual by parroting garbled Homeric Greek. She also critiques Silicon Valley's wealthy white men for embracing a watered-down Stoicism.
Wilson highlights continuities like war, cruelty, and political turmoil, but warns against viewing antiquity as a mirror that always reflects ourselves. She scolds those who seek only self-recognition in ancient texts.
Sappho and Feminism
Regarding Sappho, Wilson notes the challenge of reconstructing her work from scant fragments, comparing it to inferring a T. rex from one claw. She admires Anne Carson's version as 'performance art on the page' but criticizes its disembodiment and erasure of same-sex desire. Wilson explores how Lesbos was associated with blowjobs (the word lesbiazein means to fellate), yet Sappho shaped understanding of female homosexuality. While feminists have made her an icon, Wilson rejects the notion that male poets metaphorically rape Sappho while female poets sing with her. Instead, Sappho's poems emphasize individual isolation and exclusion.
Critical Eye on Translators
Wilson describes herself as a pedant and is tough on subpar translations, using adjectives like stilted, boring, sentimental, and nonsensical. She calls Robert Browning's Agamemnon 'arguably more difficult to understand than the Greek'. Edith Hamilton, a popularizer of classics, is guilty of racism for remaking ancient Greece as an idealized United States, ignoring disenfranchisement and slavery. Even Peter Green is sometimes 'oddly stiff'. Wilson criticizes 'armchair classicists' on television and in newspapers for snobbish gatekeeping.
Championing Unconventional Voices
Wilson rejects elitist associations of Latin and Greek as qualifications for gentlemanly status. She warmly praises Christopher Logue's War Music, a version of the Iliad by a man from a modest background with no Greek. Despite its 'grand larceny', Logue's jazzy rhythm and love of detail dispel prejudices against classics as musty. Wilson critiques his modernizing similes (blood 'like a car-wash', men 'like shoppers') and his failure to bring Helen of Troy to life, but appreciates his avoidance of slut-shaming.
The Vegetarian Controversy
Wilson briefly departs from classics to discuss Han Kang's The Vegetarian and its English translation by Deborah Smith, denounced as betrayal. This raises questions about translation: familiarizers prioritize accessibility, making the translator invisible; foreignizers argue for preserving strangeness, equating domestication with political conservatism. Wilson occupies the middle ground, rejecting both colonization and smoothing over shock. She believes tensions and complexities should remain legible, using iambic pentameter for her Odyssey in honor of Homer's dactylic hexameters.
Translating the Odyssey
In a long essay, Wilson examines translating the Odyssey, comparing her choices with predecessors. For the Sirens, she notes they are not sexy mermaids but 'cognitively tempting' bird-women promising knowledge, not sex. She uses 'mouths' instead of 'lips' to emphasize danger. For Odysseus's epithet polytropos, she chooses 'complicated', admitting it sounds stark and reminiscent of amateur psychology. She nearly dropped it after Isaac Hayes's 'He's a complicated man' in Shaft, but stuck with it, explaining her decision over 10 pages.
Wilson acknowledges no unanswerable right solution and hopes younger translators will offer new ideas. Her afterword presents 20 rules: 'If the original makes you laugh, cry, feel excited, get goosebumps, feel puzzled, get bored, be charmed, then the translation should try to create those effects.' She urges: 'Try to rethink everything. Offer something different. It's OK to experiment. Don't give up too soon. There is always another way to say it.'
