So a mighty burden falls on the brain of the Odyssey translator: not only to transmit the meaning of Homeric epic, but also to make readers understand that ancient magic which exists beneath the words themselves.Įmily Wilson – a classics professor at Pennsylvania University (and the daughter of writer AN Wilson and Oxford English don Katherine Duncan-Jones – planet-brained genes, then) has pulled off both tasks magnificently. As the greatest of the earliest surviving literary languages, Greek is so pure and underivative that it survives just this side of understanding in our corrupted, unoriginal, plagiarising, modern minds. Of course, the old Bloomsbury clever-clogs did know Greek – but her convincing point was that we can never really know Greek.
In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay, “On Not Knowing Greek”. But what are you supposed to do about them if you don’t read Greek? Emily Wilson provides the answer in her terrific new translation. Which is interesting, since The Iliad is all about status.The Odyssey – and The Iliad – are everything they’re cracked up to be: the great, early epics on whose shoulders Western European literature stands. I think about status very differently now as a result. Wilson: I was unknown before I published The Odyssey, and then suddenly I had a readership. Guernica: What impact did the success of your translation have on you? And yet I also recognize that a lot of the attention for the book was not unrelated to my being a woman. Which, of course, is absurd and rather pseudo-feminist. There’s also the issue of tokenism, as if you’d know absolutely everything you could possibly want to know about my interpretive and literary choices because of my sex. Like, if it doesn’t exist in English, it doesn’t exist.
Some of the media coverage has made me uncomfortable, because it reflects Anglophone hegemony. I should begin by clarifying that I’m the first woman to translate a complete edition of The Odyssey into English other women have translated the poem into other languages. Times referred to you as the first woman to translate The Odyssey, and I know many other outlets have really focused on this too. Guernica's Ben Purkert interviewed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson! "We discussed toxic masculinity, pseudo feminism, and which pronouns are most appropriate for Homer," says Purkert. "She explained what lessons we might take from The Iliad, and why the epic remains so compelling to the 'emo teenager' in all of us." From their conversation:
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