{"id":1029517,"date":"2026-08-28T13:22:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T13:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1029517\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T13:22:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T13:22:22","slug":"emily-wilson-is-retranslating-the-odyssey-all-over-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1029517\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Wilson is retranslating ‘The Odyssey’ \u2014 all over again"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 If you\u2019re among the many readers who learned to love \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d<\/a> through Emily Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation, you might be surprised that she\u2019s going to translate it again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a complete retranslation. It\u2019s not a revision of the old version,\u201d Wilson told The Associated Press during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cI\u2019m about halfway through.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regarded as the first major English-language translation of Homer\u2019s epic by a woman, her book was already a bestseller and a culture-wars flashpoint before the release of Christopher Nolan\u2019s blockbuster adaptation.<\/a> But she says her translation methods have become more sophisticated and that enough time has passed for her to see some flaws in her work \u2014 as an example, she overused the word \u201cslave\u201d when ancient Greek had different terms for different categories of enslaved people. The new edition will be longer, she says, and will better reflect the differing social worlds of Homer\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n

Fiction writers and poets, from Henry James to Walt Whitman, have revised and reissued early works. But translators rarely start over on a full-length text \u2014 especially not within a decade of the original work\u2019s completion, and not when the translation has had the success of Wilson\u2019s \u201cOdyssey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t really come up with a previous example of this situation,\u201d says Kate Deimling, who oversees the literary division of the American Translators Association. \u201cIt\u2019s not unheard of for translators to go back and make some corrections or edits in subsequent editions, but that\u2019s not the same as a retranslation.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Matt<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Asked how her publisher responded, Wilson says her decision was \u201cvery controversial.\u201d She says she\u2019s \u201cvery much aware\u201d that having two recent editions by the same translator would be a challenge for teachers, and hopes they won\u2019t \u201ccurse\u201d her name. Her editor at Liveright Publishing, Peter Simon, said in a statement that since she \u201chas poured so much of her life and scholarship into \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 … her new approach is bound to be thrilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fame was of prime importance to the ancient Greeks, and Wilson is the rare classical scholar who has firsthand knowledge of a public life. Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation was praised by many critics for making \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d feel more modern and accessible, but also faced criticism online for making the story \u201cwoke.\u201d Her \u201cOdyssey\u201d has now sold more than a million copies, and Wilson has again become a reason to argue. <\/p>\n

Nolan had cited her translation and its opening sentence, \u201cTell me about a complicated man,\u201d as inspiration for his epic film. Wilson, who says she will \u201cprobably\u201d leave the line unchanged in the next edition, did not return his admiration. In interviews with the AP<\/a> and other media outlets, and in an assessment for the London Review of Books, she called the movie grandiose and superficial, and at times incoherent.<\/p>\n

Her reaction to the film has been extensively \u2014 even obsessively \u2014 defended and denounced, including by Joyce Carol Oates,<\/a> who faulted her \u201chaughty superiority.\u201d Nolan has yet to respond directly, although, while being interviewed by podcaster Zhong Shu, he did speak out against \u201camateur criticism\u201d for lacking the cinematic background essential for understanding the language of movies.<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s current prominence aligns with the release of her new collection of essays, conceived well before Nolan\u2019s movie came out: \u201cCrossing the Wine-Dark Sea,\u201d a book that arrives Tuesday with blurbs from Salman Rushdie<\/a> and \u201cSong of Achilles\u201d novelist Madeline Miller. It features a long section on translating \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d with tough assessments of modern editions by Daniel Mendelsohn and the late Robert Fagles<\/a>. Other chapters take on the \u201cslut-shaming\u201d of Helen of Troy, offer tribute to the Roman poet Catullus and point to how some of the most famous words ever spoken by Robert F. Kennedy \u2014 his quoting Aeschylus in the aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King\u2019s assassination \u2014 echoed author Edith Hamilton\u2019s mistranslation. <\/p>\n

During her interview, Wilson also discussed her feelings about celebrity, her disdain for Rick Riordan\u2019s \u201cPercy Jackson\u201d<\/a> books (Riordan, through a spokesperson at Penguin Random House, declined to comment) and her renewed appreciation for Stoic philosophy. <\/p>\n

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.<\/p>\n

AP: In your essay on translating \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d you write that Robert Fagles\u2019 translation is \u201cvery loud, lively and chatty, so it\u2019s not surprising that it has remained a bestseller in the U.S.\u201d As you are also a bestseller, what qualities do you think you were able to bring to your book?<\/p>\n

WILSON: I was going for the ancient idea of \u201cenargeia,\u201d vividness, that sort of emotional impact, emotional directness, the narrative pacing, the sense you can fully understand how does this character feel every time she or he is speaking.<\/p>\n

AP: One theme of your essays is how wrong we can be about the Greeks, like Robert Kennedy misquoting Aeschylus because he had been reading Edith Hamilton\u2019s popular writings, which themselves have many inaccuracies.<\/p>\n

WILSON: Part of the theme of the book is not just that we make mistakes \u2014 maybe we can fix them \u2014 but that the particular kinds of mistakes those scholars and translators and popularizers or teachers like Hamilton make are very much determined by their own time. Obviously, I make mistakes, too. I\u2019m obviously going to come to Homer and to the whole of antiquity with particular preoccupations which are going to be different from the preoccupations of a Homerist or a translator some 50 or 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

AP: In a lot of these essays, you\u2019re very conscious of bringing the ancient world into the present. In your essay on Stoicism (\u201cChill Out with the Stoics\u201d), you start out by writing, \u201cStoicism is having a moment.\u201d Are you more of a Stoic now than you were a month ago?<\/p>\n

WILSON: I\u2019m quite suspicious that through philosophy you can have security. The last few weeks have been a clear illustration of how I\u2019m not in control of the reception of my work. I can write an essay; people will do whatever they want. They will have their own opinions of me. I have zero control. I actually think in some ways there\u2019s a useful reminder about the powerlessness that comes with the awareness that \u201cI\u2019m going to be misunderstood. I\u2019m going to be misread. People are going to hate me.\u201d I\u2019ve got to accept that.<\/p>\n

AP: What is it about ancient Greece that made you study it, as opposed to Elizabethan England or 18th century France?<\/p>\n

WILSON: I see it as a kind of intellectual greed. Through studying ancient Greece and Rome, I\u2019m also interested in studying how did these cultures get reinvented, reimagined in each of these later periods.<\/p>\n

AP: In your book, you criticize Rick Riordan\u2019s \u201cPercy Jackson\u201d books. You find an ideology that puts you off.<\/p>\n

WILSON: Many of my students love them so much. I think if I had read them as a child, I might have been a fan. They\u2019re not designed for an adult literary reader. I think especially in the first Percy Jackson book, \u201cThe Lightning Thief,\u201d there\u2019s very much an ideology of: \u201cHere\u2019s this white boy in America who\u2019s going to gather the whole of Western civilization, and there\u2019ll be a hero\u2019s journey, which will really be the heroism of American exceptionalism.\u201d And I just think that is ideologically and historically quite questionable.<\/p>\n

AP: In your chapter on comedy in ancient Greece, you begin with a reference to Cardi B\u2019s<\/a> (and Megan Thee Stallion\u2019s<\/a>) \u201cWAP.\u201d Does this happen to you a lot, where things pop up in the culture and it just resonates and you\u2019re thinking, \u201cOh, that reminds me of something from classical times\u201d?<\/p>\n

WILSON: It happens to me all the time. Yes. This is not necessarily an explicit trope in the book, but I very much want to be constantly doing that, suggesting that we can find echoes of antiquity in places we might not expect. I use the discussion of \u201cWAP\u201d and of hip-hop as a way of talking about ancient comic poetry. My main point is not just that there\u2019s lots of obscenity in both, but also lots of poetics in both. And if we somehow turn around our expectations about antiquity, we can turn around our expectations about modernity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 If you\u2019re among the many readers who learned to love \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d through Emily…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1029518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2122,36029,185,26299,380931,168,411708,407,360134,171,57,411707,388779,411702,411703,21075,53,6217,5217,2830,411705,197678,28186,411706,185226,61,67,132,68,353867,107,411704],"class_list":["post-1029517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-books-and-literature","tag-celebrities","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-daniel-mendelsohn","tag-domestic-news","tag-edith-hamilton","tag-education","tag-emily-wilson","tag-entertainment","tag-general-news","tag-henry-james","tag-joyce-carol-oates","tag-kate-deimling","tag-madeline-miller","tag-martin-luther-king-jr","tag-movies","tag-nonfiction","tag-pa-state-wire","tag-pennsylvania","tag-peter-simon","tag-rick-riordan","tag-robert-f-kennedy","tag-robert-fagles","tag-salman-rushdie","tag-u-s-news","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-walt-whitman","tag-world-news","tag-zhong-shu"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1029517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1029518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1029517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1029517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1029517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}