SAM DINGMAN: Mark, did you ever see the Coen brothers movie, “O Brother Where Art Thou?”
MARK BRODIE: Yes — I seem to recall a lot of old-timey mustaches and bluegrass music?
DINGMAN: That’s right! It was a very eccentric, character-driven movie, with a very distinct tone. And the fact that you remember it all is notable, because did you know, it was based on Homer’s “The Odyssey?”
BRODIE: I did not know that!
DINGMAN: It is, I would argue, one of the rare Homer adaptations that connected with modern audiences. Because unless you were a classics major in college, most people view Homer’s epic poems — "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" — more as academic curiosities rather than stirring works of drama.
Emily Wilson, Ph.D., has dedicated much of her adult life to changing that. Wilson is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a former MacArthur “genius” grant recipient for her work re-translating Homer. For "The Iliad" alone, Wilson spent six years with the original Greek text, in an attempt to create a version that channels the emotional intensity and narrative urgency of the original. Wilson will be giving the Arizona State University Humanities Institute’s Distinguished Lecture [on Tuesday] night, and when I spoke with her recently, she told me that she’s loved Homer since she first read his work in high school.
EMILY WILSON: I remember just being astonished by the representations of the gods. The omnipresence of the gods in the world of "The Iliad," I think, is extraordinary, combined with the omnipresence of mortality in the human realm.
SAM DINGMAN: Interesting. So there, there was something eternal and finite present in the text, if I'm hearing you correctly?
WILSON: Yes, both eternal and finite, finite and a kind of sublimity that's also constantly grounded in a very real feeling material world, and also grounded in very intense emotions.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes. Well, I'm curious to know not to, not to tarry too long in high school. But I am curious about this moment, because something that you have been so lauded for in your work on these texts is your ability to enliven them, to give them a life in recitation or oratory that that really lands with people and that they don't just feel like these dry, old classical kind of museum pieces. What was it about the versions that you read at that time that did that for you? Since you know, you weren't reading your own re-translations.
WILSON: I was reading Greek, I mean, so I started studying ancient Greek in high school, and it was the Greek text that was magical for me. So I imprinted not on a particular translation, but on the music and rhythm and sublimity of the original and the sounds of the original Greek.
DINGMAN: OK, well, so that gets me to the effort that you have made to try to honor what you've called the oral heritage of these works with a regular and audible rhythm and with a language that would invite reading out loud and come to life in the mouth, is what you've said in sitting down to confront that challenge, how did, how did you begin to do that like which of those imperatives came first?
WILSON: When I was first asked to consider doing a re translation. I spent a lot of time just reflecting on my many decades of teaching these texts to undergraduates, and I just meditated on, what have I not been able to get across? And to me, the hugest loss in all of the translations that I'd used was that none of them have a regular meter. Part of my training has been not just as a classicist, focused on ancient Greek and Latin verse, but also on, especially early modern English, metrical verse, Milton and Shakespeare, that era of Anglophone poetry, and I didn't realize at the time, you know, when I was obsessively reading "Paradise Lost" and Shakespeare, that that was, in a way, training for trying to create an epic poem in English without necessarily making it seem sort of retro in ways that were fake, but making it seem traditional, but also alive, full of energy, full of emotions.
DINGMAN: Could I ask you for a favorite line either from your version of "The Odyssey" or of "The Iliad" that you feel really accomplishes this, or illustrates this?
WILSON: I can just do the beginning of the Iliad.
DINGMAN: That would be wonderful.
WILSON: All right, so this is the poem of "The Iliad," which is, of course, is in dactylic hexameter, the meter used throughout in both Homeric poems. Many nightia, Theos, ulama Nan, her I'll do my translation goddess sing of the cataclysmic wrath of greater Kelly's son of Peleus, that caused the Greeks immeasurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades and made men the spoils of dogs a banquet for the birds, and so the plan of Zeus unfolded.
DINGMAN: Thank you very much. Dr. Wilson, that was such a wonderful illustration of what you're talking about. I mean the way that the syllables on the line landed on just the word cataclysmic and and the way that then there was a part where you said son of somebody, that that part of the line is sort of tucked in in the delivery and renders it more like informational rather than giving it the same weight as the other parts of that line, something that small to me, already makes the text feel so much more alive.
WILSON: Interesting. Yes, I mean, Homeric poetry has these formulas; it has many formulaic elements, including formulaic patronymics as well as epithets. So of course, Achilles is repeatedly son of Peleus, son of Peleus. And on some level, those things are tucked in. I mean, they're there repeatedly and over and over. They don't have the same kind of weight as the multi syllabic and also unusual term ulaman. Which, in the original, has an enjambment. I wanted to get something of the energy of that extra something extraordinary about this superhuman, cross eyed, divine kind of wrath. It is cataclysmic Roth. It's not regular human anger.
DINGMAN: Yes. OK, well, so help me make the connection between that and the fact that, as you have also pointed out, there are some things that inevitably are going to be lost when a translation takes place. There's just some essential context in the Greek that there's a gap there between that and present day English that can't be achieved. How would you characterize what it is that's lost? And do you feel like there's anything new that emerges when you put it in English?
WILSON: Yes, thank you for that question. I mean, I think it's important for any translator or any reader of translations to understand that a translation is always a completely different thing from the original. One of the hugest challenges is that the Hemari poems were based on centuries of pre-existing oral tradition. They were composed using this new technology, new and new in the seventh century BCE of writing, but drawing on many centuries when there was no writing in Greek. And so for a translator trying to think through, how do I create an equivalent experience? We can't make up a tradition from scratch that doesn't exist. You know, for the last two, 300 years, there's been no writing in English. I am inevitably writing for a very literate readership.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, in closing, Dr Wilson, I wanted to ask in an article from 2023 one of the things that you said that I found really compelling in the spirit of kind of where we began, and the power of the gods, you said that you prayed to the muse of heroic poetry, Calliope for aid, as you were creating your re-translations? Would you be willing to share anything about what was in those prayers and what you feel came of them?
WILSON: I mean, translation is actually very hard to talk about. I'm constantly reaching for something which I don't know what the words are, and so that, in a way, to me, is inherently a quasi spiritual quest. What's a little bit beyond what a mortal human being could do. And these epics, "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" are so consistently engaged with that question, too, that question of what slippage might there be between mortals and Immortals, and what would it be like to be the kind of mortal who could even for a moment, have an encounter with the divine.
DINGMAN: Wow. Well, Dr. Emily Wilson will be speaking about her work at the 2025 Humanities Institute Distinguished Lecture at ASU on March 25 and she's also, of course, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of Classical Studies. Dr. Wilson, thank you for this conversation.
WILSON: Sure. Thank you so much.
