Emily Wilson’s name on the cover of a book is a likely sign that it will be a bestseller. But she isn’t an author, and the books are unlikely fan favorites. Wilson has made a name for herself translating classic Greek texts — most notably Homer’s “The Odyssey” in 2017 and “The Iliad” in 2023. Wilson’s translations have gained a cult following and opened up these classics to a new generation of readers. She joins us in front of an audience of Lincoln High School students.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you today from Lincoln High School in downtown Portland. We’re gonna spend the hour with the classics professor Emily Wilson, who has given us powerful new English translations of the Homeric epics, ‘The Odyssey’, and ‘The Iliad’. ‘The Iliad’, Emily Wilson writes, is the most gripping and heartbreaking work of literature that she knows. A manual for thinking about death and mourning, vengeance and forgiveness, violence and tenderness. It is epic in scale and scope, zooming out and up to the cloud so we can see from the immortal gods’ perspectives, and then down to battlefields where the dirt and sand is stained dark red with human blood. Wilson’s translations have been praised as cultural landmarks and bravura feats, renderings in English verse that breathe new life and bring new readers to these 3,000 year old Greek texts. Emily Wilson, it’s an honor to have you on the show.
Emily Wilson: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Miller: I thought we would start with a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Lincoln Student: My name is Aylan and I was wondering when you decided to start your hero’s journey as a classics scholar and why you chose to go down this path?
Wilson: Thank you for that question. So, I was lucky enough to go to a high school where they offered both Latin and Ancient Greek. So, I guess my journey started there with the excitement that I felt about getting to learn how to read these texts in the languages that they were written in, these poems that were written, as Dave said, 3,000 years ago. It’s like getting to go in a time machine and getting to go back to the past where things are both similar and so different from the world we know today. I mean, I guess even earlier when I was 8 years old, I got to be in an elementary school play version of ‘The Odyssey’. So maybe that’s another starting point for the ideology of the hero’s journey, yeah.
Miller: Did you always know though that you were going to be a translator? It’s one thing to study them, to be immersed in them, to love them. It’s not to say, I’m gonna take this from the original Greek, in this case, and make a new rendering of it. When did that become something that gripped you?
Wilson: For a long time, I was interested in the history of translation, and I’ve taught as a professor in a university for decades. So I’ve used lots of different translations in my classrooms. So I was aware of translation as the means to enable engagement and serious study of these poems by people who don’t have time to learn Ancient Greek or were going to learn other languages, do other stuff. But they also want to be able to read ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ as I think should be for everyone, as they were in antiquity.
So for a long time I thought, ‘I’m gonna be a regular professor.’ I’ve written scholarly books about the history of ancient literature and its later receptions. I’d written various studies of different kinds of ancient philosophers, ancient literature. And it wasn’t until somebody asked me to consider doing some translations of Seneca’s tragedies from Latin that I thought maybe that would be an interesting thing to try. And I could try. There was something exciting about the idea that I would not just study how these poems have been reread and reimagined in later eras, but I could be part of the future for how my colleagues or my students, in the future, might read these poems, or general readers or people around the world could read these poems in a different version.
And I realized from doing it that it’s really fun and it really engages a different level of engagement with the text, a different kind of writing. Mostly I’d done academic prose kind of writing. I get to write poetry. I love that. I get to explore how I not just say what this text is about, but recreate the whole experience of what it is to be immersed in this poem or this play.
Miller: There are, I don’t know ‒ maybe you know ‒ the number of English translations of ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’ but I imagine maybe dozens at this point. What did you think was missing from the English translations that were already available?
Wilson: I thought about it a lot when I was first asked about whether there is anything missing, because the answer might have been ‘no.’ I mean, it might have been that I would have been approached by the publisher who have their own publisher economic reasons for wanting to put out a new translation that might not have anything to do with whether there is anything missing. So I spent a lot of time just meditating about my experiences in the classroom with using different translations of ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’ with my students and thinking about which elements of the original had been hard to get across in the classroom with the various translations that I’d used with my students.
And I felt from thinking about it in those ways that, yeah, there’s stuff missing. And it was partly that most of the 20th and 21st Century translations of Homer don’t have rhythm. They don’t have a regular poetic meter. The originals are poems, and they are designed for performance out loud. They’re designed for a single performer who was known in antiquity as a rhapsode, but they would get to be famous for being able to do their really cool performances of these gripping narrative poems. It has a regular rhythm. It has a poetic semantics. It sounds traditional in its rhythm, and yet it also sounds many, many voiced. I felt also that those proto dramatic elements of the characters don’t all sound the same. Part of the reason that sometimes my students, when I would prescribe a particular translation and would say, ‘how was the reading for you,’ they would say, how it was so boring. And I was like, ‘ahhh, how can you possibly think Homer is boring?!’ And then I would think, actually, it’s not the students’ fault. It’s because the translation was kind of boring. And that’s not Homer’s fault. It’s not the student’s fault. It was because there needed to be something else that conveys how exciting these poems are.
Miller: I mentioned in my intro that you write in one of your introductions that this is the most gripping and heartbreaking work of literature that you know. You also write in your translator’s note that after reading this, living with this for 35+ years, you still can’t read ‘The Iliad’ without tears or goosebumps or both. Why?
Wilson: I think this is a kind of magic to how ‘The Iliad’ is constantly making you forget what it’s then going to remind you of, which are things like, we’re gonna die. And we’re actually, through living our lives, constantly in that process of both forgetting and then remembering these sort of fundamental things about mortality, about how human societies work in terms of insiders, outsiders, who we welcome into our communities, who we let out? What does it feel like to be consumed by rage or by grief?
And the intensity of the emotions in these poems, I think, is overwhelming, and it comes about through these narratives that are both traditional and were already traditional by the time the poems were composed in the 7th century BCE or around then. There were already many, many familiar stories about the Trojan War and the homecomings of the warriors from the Trojan War. And yet these poems put those stories together in a way that’s extraordinary. It reminds you of just how direct the traditional narrative landscape can be and how much it can open up to when it’s reread in a new context.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.
Lincoln Student: Hello, my name is Jane, and my question is, did you ever feel intimidated by your work, translating one of the most renowned pieces of Western literature? What motivated you to keep going?
Wilson: Thank you for that question. I mean, doing a very, very long project, I took, you know, five years to do ‘The Odyssey’ translation. I took six years to do ‘The Iliad.’ It was long. And for the first two years or so after signing the contract, I was most days thinking, oh my gosh, this was a terrible mistake. I’m just stuck and stuck and stuck. I kept going because I’d signed the contract, but also because I loved the original so much and I felt that all the time I’m spending just trying and failing to do this, that’s worthwhile because I’m engaging with something that feels profound to me.
I really cared about this. I cared about this original poem. I cared about the process of trying to create a new way of hearing it in English. And if I can keep trying and get a little bit closer every day to whatever voice I’m trying to achieve, maybe I’ll still fail. But I felt motivated to keep going even though I felt that my first hundreds of drafts were no good. I still wanted to keep trying and maybe in the 200th draft, maybe I’ll get somewhere.
Miller: What, if for the first two years you were sort of stuck, what unstuck you?
Wilson: I think practice, practice, practice. I think that’s the case with almost any big task, that it can be broken down into smaller tasks. And I think that applies to things that aren’t writing as well as things that are, and things that aren’t translating as well as translation. That there can be a way that it’s huge, it’s epic, it’s 24 books, it’s going to be hundreds and hundreds of pages. And as the student just emphasized, this is a very long legacy, which can potentially be daunting. But also it’s always breakable down into, what can I do today? How can I think about this line, this phrase. How can I just maybe walk around my living room and repeat that phrase in Greek, in my head, 10 times or 20 times, and then maybe something will crystallize. And maybe it won’t come together today, but maybe, after I’ve repeated it more times, maybe it will. And just trusting that process, I think is part of it.
Miller: And when you say repeating it, sometimes this was out loud because the sound and the meter were important to you, that performative aspect of this? So you were alone in your room…?
Wilson: Muttering like a crazy person. Yes, yes, I do.
Miller: … muttering. But did it seem like that was necessary?
Wilson: It was absolutely necessary. Yes. And I would both read the original out loud and then also read my drafts in progress out loud to try and see if it sounded, quote unquote, “right.” But is the reader, whoever the reader will be ‒ I hope there will be many readers ‒ is the reader gonna get tripped up over this line? And if they are getting tripped up, is it the kind of tripping up they want? Is there a tripping up that’s happening in the original?
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Lincoln Student: I’m Laura and we noticed that in reading your translation of ‘The Odyssey’ against Fitzgerald’s, you chose to use more concise and direct language modernizing the poem’s style. How did you balance maintaining the epic qualities of Homer’s work while also making it more accessible for today’s readers?
Wilson: Thank you for that question. I like the Fitzgerald translations of the Homeric poems. I think that, in some ways, the Fitzgerald translations seem to me very different from the original in their poetic style, because the Homeric poems were based on a very long preexisting oral tradition. Greek speakers had no literacy. They didn’t have reading or writing for several hundred years, and that was the period during which this poetic tradition was developed.
So to me, when I read the Fitzgerald translations, they seem very literary. They’re full of quotations from Shakespeare. I think that’s fun, but it seems very, very different to me from the poetic stylistic qualities of the original, which is not full of literary quotations of earlier literature, because earlier literature didn’t exist in the 7th century. There was no early literature. These were poems based on oral tradition, and they were designed to be readily comprehensible by audiences who might not have been able to read and write in many cases. They’re not designed to be comprehensible only if you’re constantly looking at the footnotes.
And so it seems to me that there are ways that, to be more authentic to that experience ‒ the experience of a society that was transitioning from oral to literate ‒ and the experience of poems that are designed for oral quasi-dramatic performance, I needed to lean in to the possibilities in the English language of direct syntax, using finite verbs when possible. I love Shakespeare, but I didn’t want to put in fancy quotations from Shakespeare to try to make it seem more fancy than the original is. The original is traditional, poetic, grand in certain ways, but it’s not full of quotes.
Miller: I wonder if you could read us a little bit from about two thirds of the way through. We’re gonna hear some dramatic speeches by this sea nymph, this goddess Thetis, and her son, the great human warrior Achilles. Is there anything that we should know to help us understand this, given that this is 440 pages in, and we’re just gonna hear two pages in the middle of the action. What do we need to know?
Wilson: Yes, and I know the students have read ‘The Odyssey’, not ‘The Iliad’, so you probably do need a little bit of set up. So ‘The Iliad’ is set during the Trojan War, of which you will have heard tell if you’ve read ‘The Odyssey’. This is in the final year of the war, so it’s not the beginning or the end. And the premise of ‘The Iliad’ is that there is a big quarrel, not between the Greeks and the Trojans ‒ the war is between the Greeks and the Trojans ‒ but the primary narrative is about a quarrel between two Greeks: Achilles, who’s the best athlete, the best fast-running warrior on the Greek side, and Agamemnon, who’s kind of the Jeff Bezos character. He’s got the most money, the most resources. He’s got the most power, in that sense, but not the most power in the sense of being the best at actually doing the work of killing people.
So there’s a big quarrel at the start of the poem between those two characters over a particular woman that they’re both trying to enslave. And in the course of this quarrel, Achilles feels humiliated by Agamemnon and refuses to fight anymore. He’s going to wait it out until the Greeks have suffered so much in his absence that they’re all begging for him to come back, proving that they can’t do it without him. And Achilles has a particular advantage, not just his swift feet, but also he’s the son of a sea goddess.
So he asks his sea goddess mother, who has a close relationship with Zeus, the greatest of the gods, the sky god, to ensure that while Achilles is sitting out of the action ‒ just doing beach, not doing anything else, not moving his swift feet ‒ that while he’s not fighting, the Greeks will suffer terrible losses.
So it’s this paradoxical plan where usually Homeric heroes generate honor by killing people on the other side. Achilles generates honor by causing the deaths of people on his own side. And he generates this plan with his mom with the idea that Achilles is so angry at everyone on his own side that he doesn’t care if almost all of them die. He hopes that they will because that will generate more honor for him. It will show just how much they need him.
But of course in fact it turns out, these plans tend to not go so well. Like when you try to generate honor by causing the deaths of a lot of people, things can go badly wrong. Achilles realizes much too late, there was one person on his own side that he actually loves. And that’s his friend Patroclus, who goes out wearing Achilles’ armor to try to fight the Trojans off the ships because Achilles is refusing to do it.
So the passage I’m going to read is after Achilles is suffering this terrible grief of realizing that his dearest friend has been killed while he was refusing to fight, and kind of, because of him. And so this starts off with Thetis, Achilles’ mom, who’s a sea goddess, explaining how painful it is to have a mortal son. It’s always hard to be a mom, as your moms may have told you. It’s hard to be a mom, but it’s extra hard if you’re a goddess who lives forever, but your son is going to die. So this is the conversation between Thetis and her son. And all of her sisters, who are also sea goddesses, have come up from the depths of the sea to weep with her.
They filled the shining silver
cave, and all
pounded their chests, and Thetis
led the mourning.
“Listen, my sisters, fellow
Nereids,
so all of you may understand
my grief.
How I have suffered! What dis-
astrous luck!
Cursed with the best of sons, I
bore a child
who shot up like a sapling and
became
the strongest and the best of
warriors.
I raised him like a young tree in
an orchard,
then sent him in the
curving ships to Troy
to fight the Trojans. But now I
will never
welcome him home again
inside the house
of Pelleas. And while he sees
the sun,
while he is still alive, he is in
pain.
I can do nothing for him, even
if
I go to him. But I will go to see
him,
because he is my child and I
love him.
I will find out what suffering
has reached him
while he is staying back away
from war.”
With these words, Thetis
left the cave. The others
went with her weeping, and
around them crashed
the waves. They swam to Troy,
to solid ground,
then each in turn emerged
from sea to shore,
amid the fleet moored by the
Myrmidons,
where swift Achilles lay and
groaned in grief.
His goddess mother came to
him. She wept,
cradled her dear son’s head,
and through her tears,
her words flew out.
“My child, why are you
crying?
What suffering has hurt your
heart? Tell me,
do not conceal it. Through
the will of Zeus
your earlier request has been
fulfilled.
With arms raised high, you
prayed that all the Greeks,
confined beside the ships’
sterns, would endure
terrible suffering and mortal
danger
and yearn for you. So it has
been fulfilled.”
Swift-footed Lord Achilles,
groaning, answered,
“Yes, Mother, Zeus has granted
me that prayer.
But now what good to me is
any of it?
My friend Patroclus, whom I
loved, is dead.
I loved him more than
any other comrade.
I loved him like my head, my
life, myself.
I lost him, killed him. Hector
slaughtered him,
and stripped from him the
marvelous magic armor,
the lovely gifts the gods gave
Pelias
the day they led you, an im-
mortal goddess,
into a mortal’s bed. If only you
had stayed among the death-
less goddesses
under the sea, and Pelleas had
taken
a mortal woman as his wife!
Your marriage
brought never-ending
sorrow to your heart
for your dead child, whom you
will never welcome
home again now, because my
heart forbids me
to live or be with people
anymore,
unless my spear can strike
down Hector first
and take his life away and
make him pay
because he killed and looted
my Patroclus,
son of Menoetius.”
Thetis answered him,
with tears still pouring down
her cheeks, “My child,
what have you said? How fast
your fate runs out!
As soon as you kill Hec-
tor, you must die.”
Swift-footed Lord Achilles, in
despair,
told her, “I want to die right
here and now,
because I could not save my
slaughtered friend.
He died so very far away from
home.
He needed me to help him and
protect him.
And I did not go back to my
dear country,
nor did I save Patroclus. I
provided
no light to help him ,
nor no light or help
to him or anybody.
Many were overpowered by
glorious Hector,
while I sat here beside the
ships, so useless,
a burden on the earth,
although I am
superior to all the bronze-clad
Greeks
in war, though others may be
better speakers.
If only conflict were elimin-
ated
from gods and human beings! I
wish anger
did not exist. Even the wisest
people
are roused to rage, which
trickles into you
sweeter than honey, and inside
your body
it swells like smoke-just so,
Lord Agamemnon
enraged me. But that
happened in the past.
So let it go, though I am still
upset.
I must control the feelings in
my chest,
and go to look for Hector, who
destroyed
the one I loved the most, my
head, my life.
Thereafter, I will welcome
death whenever
Zeus and the other deathless
gods may wish
to bring it.
Miller: You know this so well. You’ve read it countless times. You’ve translated it painstakingly. I’m curious, just this time when you read it for us just now, what most stood out to you? What struck you from this section right now?
Wilson: I love this section so much, obviously. You chose it very well. It’s an emotional climax. This transition of Achilles’ rage, up to this point in the poem, has been focused on Agamemnon and focused on, in a way, an abstract kind of loss. It’s the loss of a woman who he doesn’t really care about and about a kind of loss of an abstract thing like honor and trust.
Miller: Some kind of status?
Wilson: A status thing. And now his grief is for something far more personal. It’s a grief for a person who he says repeatedly is his ‘head, as if he’s lost a body part.
Miller: He’d rather lose his father or his son, he says, than lose more than a friend?
Wilson: He’s more than a friend. They spent both day and night together for the last 10 years. They grew up together. It’s as if they’re intertwined together. He’s his second self. Yes. So, to me this has always been an absolute turning point, where the emotions have to really land in this passage. The way that it’s both about grief and about rage really stands out to me. It’s not that he stops being angry. He’s still extremely angry. And even when he’s saying ‘I wish conflict did not exist. I’m letting go of my rage.’ He’s not letting go of his rage. He’s transitioning rage against Agamemnon and all of the Greeks to this, in a way, huger more cosmic kind of rage, where he’s angry that he’s going to die. Patroclus is already dead. People are mortal, and therefore he’s going to go on a killing spree that will involve trying to obliterate everyone he encounters.
Wilson: Miller: Let’s take another question from one of our members of the audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Lincoln Student: I’m Lucas. My question is how did other translations of ‘The Odyssey’ or ‘The Iliad’ affect the writing in yours?
Wilson: Thank you for that question. I wouldn’t have done mine unless I’d had a sense that there was room to do something different from what had already been done in the existing translations that were available for students like you guys or general readers to read Homer in English.
I felt that while I was actually working on my translations, I didn’t want to be constantly looking at other translations. I wanted to be very closely engaged with the Greek and reading the commentaries on the translations, reading scholarship, reading dictionaries, rereading the Greek again. But not constantly looking at other translations, because I felt it’s not going to solve my problems. If I’m wrestling with something like Achilles’s saying, ‘I loved him [Greek]‘, he says in that passage. I loved him equal to my head. What do I do about that? It’s not going to help me if I then go and look at 70 translations into English and some others into other languages to see what other translators do with that passage, ‘cause I have to decide for myself. And then if I see somebody else has done that thing, then maybe I’ve ruined the possibility of copying that, because I don’t want to do exactly the same as what somebody else has already done.
Miller: Well, with that example, can you tell us the Greek again and then if you cared nothing at all about how it would hit English ears, what is a kind of word-for-word translation? And then I can read again what you actually came up with?
Wilson: So I loved it. It’s [Greek] ‒ equal to my head. I’ve actually looked at several translations of that line. Most translations that I’ve looked at don’t keep the metaphor, and obviously the metaphor is weird. Because mostly when we love someone very, very much, we don’t say I love you like my head, right? That would be weird to say to somebody you really love. But most translations have him say something like, I loved him like a second self, I loved him like my soul, I loved him like myself.
And so I wrestled with should have him say something like, ‘I loved him like a second self,’ or ‘I loved him like myself.’ And I felt that, actually, the metaphor of he’s like a head matters in a poem where we’ve had a lot of decapitation scenes on the battlefield.
Miller: Heads are falling all the time.
Wilson: Heads are constantly not falling, getting chopped off.
Miller: After they’re cut, then they fall off.
Wilson: After they get sliced through. So I felt I had to slightly spell it out. I loved him. I loved him like my head, my life, myself. Because I felt that I could do that ‒ I went through many different drafts of that line and that phrase because ‒ because I felt both I really want to keep the metaphor, and yet I want it to be legible or audible as it is in the original. A Greek person hearing that line is not thinking, what does he mean? I’m going to have to check the footnotes. They’re thinking, I fully viscerally understand both the metaphor and the connotations of the metaphor, which connotes that Achilles is going to be going back into battle as if he’s like a walking zombie. He’s lost something which was essential. It’s as if he’s decapitated.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Lincoln Student: Hi, my name is Emma, and my question is how did you choose between all the synonyms or the terms available to you when translating from Greek? Did you have a specific methodology?
Wilson: That’s a great question, and I have to admit I really didn’t. I mean, I felt that it had to be trial and error. I did use thesauruses quite a lot. As you probably know, there’s never an exact equivalent between a word in any language and any other, because languages all individuate the world in different ways. So even an ostensibly really simple word like the first word of the Odyssey is [Greek]. It means man. But it also, in Greek, means husband. So the connotations of starting ‘The Odyssey’ with “man”, ideally, I would want to say “man/ husband,” because it’s about both Odysseus as a man in relation to other men, but also Odysseus as a man in relation to the younger son Telemachus, and about Odysseus in relation to his wife Penelope, whom he’s going back to.
I felt it was impossible, in English, to come up with a word that means both man and husband. But I was constantly grappling with those kinds of issues about how there could be several different ways to convey the connotations of a particular word, and there’s never going to be an obvious right answer. And I felt I always had to just play with, if I make this choice with this word, can I get some of the connotations elsewhere in the sentence or elsewhere in the passage if I can’t do it all in a single word?
Miller: I love your description of the variety of languages that are present even in the Greek. You say this, ‘Homeric Greek is a mixture of dialects from different areas and periods never spoken simultaneously by any single person, just as no speaker would employ Chaucerian, Victorian, Glaswegian, Californian, and Australian phrases and forms of English together in any normal conversation.’
I had no idea. I mean, you’re talking about different times and different places. Chaucer, sometimes, it is so hard to understand for modern English because in some ways it doesn’t even seem like English. Victorian, 200 years ago. And then you have these different places: Glasgow, Australia, California. Would it have made perfect sense… would it have been intelligible to someone listening to some great rhapsodizer 3,000 years ago to hear all those different dialects from different times and different places? Would they have understood all of it?
Wilson: I think they would have understood the vast majority of it, even though it was a weird poetic language. We’re accustomed to the fact that different genres have their own languages and their own traditions. If you’re reading a Doctor Seuss book, you’re not thinking oh, the language of this is really weird. You’re thinking, this is just Seussical language, and that’s the tradition for this particular genre. And similarly, people in archaic and classical Greece had been hearing Homer since they were little kids. So on some level, it was both familiar and very strange, because it was its own literary language, poetic language. And the reason for that multiplicity, linguistically, is because it’s an oral tradition, because it had grown up in multiple different parts of the Greek speaking world where there were different dialects of Greek. So it incorporated phrases from different periods, different eras. There were certainly some words that would have been weird and maybe incomprehensible.
So for instance, there are epithets for the god Hermes. Scholars in antiquity didn’t quite know what this meant. He’s called ‒ and actually I translate that epithet two different ways because there were two different theories ‒ is he [Greek] because he was the slayer of the slayer Argos, or is it because he’s bright flashing appearing? And there were different theories by Homeric scholars in antiquity about that kind of thing.
That’s not the majority of the words in Homer. Most of the words in Homer would have been totally comprehensible, even if their form or that vowel sound would have been a little bit different from the dialect that they might have spoken. And the syntax is never very difficult in Homer. It’s easy and straightforward in terms of its narrative storytelling. But some of the vocabulary would have been weird to a 5th Century Athenian.
Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.
Lincoln Student: Hi, I’m Ebony. Did your translation take into account modern readers’ values? How did you balance being faithful to the original work while maintaining a connection with the readers?
Wilson: Great question. I think one of the values that I certainly have ‒ and I guess I’m a modern person because I’m alive right now talking to you ‒ one of the values I have is difference. I value antiquity in ancient literature partly because it’s not the same as modernity. I value getting to read Homer partly because it takes you to a different world where the values might be different from my values and I value that difference. I value diversity. So I don’t want to be presenting readers with a Homer where all diversity is flattened out into sameness, and you’re not going to discover anything you didn’t already know by reading that book. The whole point of reading books, especially books from cultures that are very different from ours, is that we learn something that’s going to expand our vision of what is human possibility. What could a society be like? What could we imagine about what Homer is, or what a Homeric journey is, or what a community is, or how we include people or leave people out, which are obviously themes of ‘The Odyssey’ itself, but are also engaged in that question about how we incorporate the ancient within our awareness of what the possibilities are without making ancient things seem exactly the same as modern things.
It might be that the questions I’m asking about the Homeric poems are informed by my cultural moment and by both modern Homeric scholarship, which obviously didn’t exist in antiquity, but also modern culture and modern values. But that doesn’t mean that I’m wanting to say, ‘let me present you with a Homer where all the slavery is taken out.’ I want to do the opposite. I want you to see the things that are alien about this society and the things that are going to be surprising.
And look, they’re doing animal sacrifice now. And within the world of this poem, this is normal. And you’re going to be taken to that world where the social practices and the social structures are totally different and even things like metaphors are totally different. I loved him like my head. There are things that are going to be weird, and I want you to see the weirdness.
Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.
Lincoln Student: Hi, my name is Sneha, and I was wondering if you could talk to us about your choice to translate Odysseus’ characterization in the invocation poem in ‘The Odyssey’ as a quote “complicated man”?
Wilson: Thank you for that question. Yes, so the first line of the poem is [speaks in the ancient Greek] and then it goes on. So [Greek], we’ve already talked about. Poluropon comes from the epithet [Greek] in Greek. Odysseus’ epithets in Homeric Greek very often have to do with multiplicity. So unlike Achilles, who’s always going straight, very fast to death, or straight, very fast to killing people, and straight, very fast to the point, even though I just read a very long speech by him. But he’s typically going very fast towards somewhere. Odysseus is usually going in circles and going around and never going straight to the point because he’s usually in disguise as someone else. And being many different people is part of who Odysseus is.
So that element of multiplicity is crucial. Unlike Achilles ‒ who’s usually swift-footed Achilles, swift-footed Achilles, swift-footed Achilles ‒ Odysseus also has many ways that the poet describes him. Poluthropos in the original is actually a very unusual epithet. So it seems to me that in Greek, it’s marked as defining something not just about the protagonist, but also about the poem itself that you’re going to encounter and about his journey. And we know from other extant ancient Greek that the words polytropos and polytropeia were used to describe situations as well as people. So it has a connotation of much turningness and also of complexity.
So it seemed to me that I wanted to try to find a word in English that would could potentially apply to Odysseus himself and to his journey and to the poem you’re about to read, and that would have a suggestion of twistingness or turningness, but without necessarily saying anything directly either positive or negative, because it’s the way that the poem itself is in disguise for a while. We don’t get the name of the protagonist until quite late. So there needs to be a sense of, it’s both, you understand it and you don’t. Then maybe there’s some mystery to the word complication.
I didn’t want to do what many translators have done with that word ‒ take a single word in the Greek and translate it with a whole subordinate clause in English ‒ like ‘a man who blah, blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah,’ or ‘man of twists and turns.’ I felt that that’s not being faithful to something that’s crucial in the original, which is the pacing. So if the original has a single four-syllable word, ideally, I want to find a single four-syllable word in English that I can use that echoes most of the semantics of the original. So, I felt that there actually were not that many choices once I’ve narrowed it down like that, beyond complicated.
Miller: I want to turn to the gods briefly. At one point, Zeus calls all the gods and goddesses to him and he says basically ‒ and I feel bad saying ‘basically’ and just summarizing this, since you spent so much time and thought for every single word ‒ but basically he says, ‘don’t defy my orders. I’m gonna grab you and hurl you to the deepest chasm there is. I’m the strongest. Let me do what I’m gonna do.’ And then Athena plays with him. She says, ‘Mighty Father, we know you’re invincible, and we’ll basically follow your directions, but please, I just wanna give the Greeks some good advice so your rage doesn’t destroy all of them.’ And then this is what happens next in your translation.
Smiling at her cloud gathering,
Zeus replied,
Dear daughter born of Triton,
do not worry.
I was not being serious.
I love you.
I want to treat you
kindly.
When I read that ‒ and this is just one example of so many where, the gods and goddesses are so flighty, so quick changing, so petty, so easy in their ways, that they just completely mess up human lives ‒ I wanted to throw the book across the room. I was so frustrated with these gods. What are we supposed to make of these immortal but inconstant beings?
Wilson: ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’, to some extent, present multiple different societies, right? And the society of the immortals is just another society. It’s a society in which the beings in this world have vastly more power than any mortal will ever have. But they’re also celebrities who’re just like us. There’s a way in which the divinities are not different in their emotions and in their desire for honor and their desire to get their own way, but also their ability to change their mind.
There’s something, sort of a running joke, in ‘The Iliad’ about how Zeus is the god of plans and strategy, and yet he’s always hiding behind the clouds. And in fact, we never know his plans because maybe he doesn’t know himself, and he’s just making it up as he goes along. I think there are ways that, of course, the divine society mirrors the human societies. On the level of the Greek society with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, there’s a quarrel between the elites. And the people are dying, and the enslaved women are getting enslaved, as a result of the quarrels of the elites. So there are these power structures and then power structures within the power structures.
I think the poem invites us to do what you suggested of wanting to throw the book across the room because don’t you understand that your tantrums are having the effects of huge numbers of lives depend on people getting in control of themselves, including gods getting in control of themselves. But also that we fully understand why you’re frustrated, in this moment, when we understand that about goddesses as well as about human beings.
Miller: Do you think that there’s anything close to the notion of Greek gods and goddesses in our society today, something that plays the role that gods and goddesses played in popular understanding of fate and life. I’ve been struggling to come up with an analogy and none of them seem to work?
Wilson: I’m not sure if there really is. I actually think fate is a pretty modern preoccupation, and not necessarily… Fate in the Homeric poems it’s about the moment of death. It’s not about everything being predetermined in the way that we tend to think about it. Obviously, we love superhero narratives. And everyone shows up for the latest Marvel blockbuster. But those tend, I think, to be a little bit more simplistic in terms of the characterizations because it’s so much more about the action, whereas ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ are about the action, but they’re also about the feelings and there’s the social ramifications of the actions as well. I don’t know. I’m not sure if there’s anything quite equivalent.
Miller: I wanna go back to what you were saying, that the audience more or less would have understood the language. But this is a written poem, but also most people would have taken it in as a piece of performance?
Wilson: Yes.
Miller: What did it mean to read at that time then?
Wilson: This is a difficult question. I mean, ‘at that time’ means several different times. Are we asking about whenever these poems were first created? Are we asking about 5th century Athens? Are we asking about the Hellenistic period when the scholars first started collating the text of the Homeric poems? All of those are different, and I feel like we actually need several more hours to go into those questions. So I’m not sure that we have time for all of that.
We certainly know that these poems were experienced orally in many different performance contexts. They were both part of competitions ‒ so, people would do poetry slam competitions and get prizes for being the best performer that day of a passage of Homer ‒ but then also performed at drinking parties for smaller groups of guys having their wine and we want to listen to something, and we want to listen to some music and some poetry and some drama.
Miller: Let’s listen to that episode again, essentially. Let’s hear the story we know so well.
Wilson: Let’s watch the replays of Friends, or let’s listen to that, yes, exactly, yes.
Miller: I don’t think I was prepared for the level of explicit violence that is throughout this work. Spears impale people between their shoulder blades, a blade transfixes someone’s bladder underneath the bone, spears going into the sides of someone’s forehead, the tip of the bronze pokes right out through the other temple, and on and on. There’s bones being stone crushed, someone’s tendons shatter, their legs, arms get sliced off. It’s like Tarantino levels of explicitness, except all verbally. How would this have been understood at the time, the ways in which the violence is depicted?
Wilson: It’s both horrifying and very exciting. You mentioned Tarantino because, of course, we love violence in our entertainment. I think that’s always been part of human culture includes violence as entertainment and also violence as something that can be a warning and a symptom of this is something horrifying. And if you can contemplate it when you’re not actually on the battlefield, maybe you can learn something about war for the next time you go back.
Of course, our society is really unusual in how few people go to war, and it’s unusual around the world in modernity. But it’s also unusual compared to the long span of human history where, in antiquity, there was far more direct experience of violence in far more people’s daily lives. And the violence in ‘The Iliad’ is, on some level, completely visceral, and also on another level, quite stylized. In real life, if you put a spear through someone’s eyeball, it’s not actually going to come out the ear. But that’s the kind of thing that happens all the time with ‘The Iliad’, because it’s entertainment as well, and the premise of ‘here’s the eyeballs popping. I that was was great. It’s gonna happen again because we love the eyeball popping stuff.’
And it’s shocking but it’s also a constant reminder of the fragility of the human body because there are so many different variations that the poet can run on. If somebody’s already died with the eyeball popping thing, then we’ve got to do the liver next time, and then we’ve got to have a spear through the groin the next time, and then we’re going to do the nipple next time. Every possible body part will be a path to death, and it’s this reminder that just having a body at all is going to mean you will die.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.
Lincoln Student: Hi, my name is Malcolm and I was wondering what caused you to have the most blocks, your writer blocks?
Wilson: Thank you for that question. Yes, it’s hard to talk about it because I tend to want to block out the painful experience of being stuck. Very often it was these kinds of questions that the other student was already asking about in terms of things like synonyms and things like... I think people who haven’t done translation, especially if it’s translation from a supposed to be difficult ancient language, people sometimes think the hard part is understanding the original. But that wasn’t the hard part in terms of blocks. Because I’ve been reading the original for decades, that wasn’t the issue.
The issue was if this line in the original sounds really clear and has a particular emotional effect or is clearly doing something that’s really important in the poem and it’s not difficult, and yet when I write it in English it sounds clunky and difficult and doesn’t have any of the emotional effect of what it was when I was reading in the Greek. So it was a constant question about how I can make it easy when the original is easy. How can I create that sense of fluency and how can I make the emotions land with the same symphony that they’re doing in the original.
Miller: Early on, a Trojan soldier is lamenting his bad luck, his decision to not bring his horses and his chariot to the fight the way his father said he should. He didn’t do it because he didn’t think his normally well-fed horses would have enough grain to eat, so he left them there. He brought a bow and arrow which has not really served him well. He’s shot two Greeks and neither of them really got injured. Then he says this in your translation.
If I ever come home
again
and see with my own eyes
my native land
and wife and a high roofed home,
I hope
some total stranger comes by
and instantly
chops off my head, unless
I smash this bow of mine
to pieces
with my own hands and hurl it
in the bright fire.
This stupid thing does not help me
at all.
I laughed out loud when I read that part. I wasn’t expecting... there aren’t a ton of laugh out loud parts in this. There’s more gore and unhappiness than laughter, but there was some. How did you try to bring out the humor or let the humor come out?
Wilson: I think a lot of the humor comes out as a function of just letting it, or trying to work very hard to make it be as clear as it is in the original. And if you’re clear about what this person is saying and this is this character’s complex of emotions, if you make all that be legible, there are some funny things because people are funny. People are complicated. People have so many different layers to them. But one of the things people are, in their interactions with each other, is always funny.
And Homer definitely has that, maybe more obviously with ‘The Odyssey’, which is more obviously… has more scenes of social comedy than ‘The Iliad’ does. But you’re absolutely right. ‘The Iliad’ has it too. I think it’s very funny when Paris has been scooped out of the battlefield with the duel, and he’s sitting in his tent with Helen fiddling with his beautiful equipment, and you can tell that he’s both very proud of himself for looking so hot and also a little bit embarrassed that he’s not actually… He looks better than he actually acts. There’s a lot of comedy in ‘The Iliad’ even though, primarily, the poem is deeply tragic. The whole seduction of Zeus by Hera, which maybe we don’t talk about in front of the ninth graders, is also very funny.
Miller: Is there a part of this book that, if you could assign readings to our nation’s leaders right now, is there a section or a chapter that you most wish current politicians would read and understand?
Wilson: Ah, that’s a great question. I wish that more politicians both had time to read very long ancient books and wanted to spend their time doing that, because I think more reading fiction, more reading poetry, especially reading fiction and poetry from very distant cultures, that would in itself be a good thing for our political discourse.
Miller: So that’s just the general inclination you wish that existed.
Wilson: More literature would be good. Maybe even just the opening sequence of the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, noticing that these trivial things can blow up into something which is going to cause devastation and plague and the deaths of enormous numbers of people, because these very powerful men have been more focused on their own egos than on thinking about their people. That seems like it’s an important thing to be thinking about.
Miller: What does ‘The Iliad’ have to teach us about forgiveness? There’s a lot of vengeance. There’s a little bit of letting go, but even in the example you read us before in that reading when Achilles is saying, ‘I’m done with conflict. I’m done with anger’, clearly he’s not. What should we take away from this, in terms of the possibility for forgiveness?
Wilson: I think forgiveness is a very Christian concept, and I don’t think it’s exactly the concept that Homer has in ‘The Iliad’. I think both these poems have a sense that… In ‘The Odyssey,’ homecoming is something that’s possible for one very privileged person with the help of a goddess. And his homecoming will involve the deaths, not homecomings, of huge numbers of other people. So, is it a happy ending? It’s a complicated story. And in ‘The Iliad’, there’s a possibility for Achilles ‒ who’s been alienated from all social institutions including supplication on the battlefield, where he’s killing people who are begging for their lives, and also including eating together with his comrades ‒ by the final two books, he’s able to participate in human institutions such as the funeral, the sporting events which is a way to have competition without killing each other, and he’s able also to have the amazingly powerful interaction with the father of Hector, who killed Patroclus, who comes to beg for his dead son back, from the man who killed him.
It’s a moment not exactly a forgiveness, I don’t think, but of a recognition across extraordinary difference that has to be temporary. They can only meet that one time and they’re going to kill each other and Achilles is going to destroy prime city [Troy] after this. It’s not that he’s going to be a pacifist after this. That doesn’t happen in Homer. He’s going to be able to recognize very, very briefly, ‘I’m mortal and you’re mortal, and we’re both suffering from intense grief. We’re human beings and we can see each other’.
Miller: Emily Wilson, thank you very much.
Wilson: Thank you.
Miller: Thanks as well to Lori Lieberman and Anne Wolfstone at Lincoln High School, Olivia Jones Hall, Literary Arts, and a huge thank you to our Lincoln High School freshman here.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.