One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.
Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.
Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.
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Leanne Ogasawara: “Tell me about a complicated man” may be the most debated single line of translation in recent memory—one reader even joked that it sounded more like a relationship status on Facebook. In your book you explain that polytropos can convey versatility, cunning, wandering, and the experience of being turned about by circumstance. How did you finally land on “complicated” and did the intensity of the reactions surprise you?
Emily Wilson: I write about that choice at some length in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, so I will try not to replicate all that here. I’ll just say for now that I arrived at that choice after many days of consideration and experimentation, and now, almost ten years later, I still don’t think I can improve on it, given the particular goals of my translation of the original poem. I aimed to echo the traditional, metrical poetics of the original, and its status as a text designed for oral performance—unlike most modern translators in English, who have used prose or free verse. So I needed a word that could scan, when followed by the stressed syllable of “man.”
It’s good that so many people feel empowered to engage with a discussion about the high stakes and complexities of translation, no matter what their background, their knowledge, or their feelings may be.
I also aimed, unlike most translators, to recreate the rapid pacing of the original, so I didn’t want to translate one four-syllable word by a long multi-word phrase; doing so has certain obvious advantages in terms of echoing the ambivalence of this single word, but also obvious disadvantages in terms of slowing down the whole narrative right at the start. Like every translation choice, “complicated” is a compromise. It isn’t identical in denotation, connotation, register or sound to the original—and nor are any of the other ways translators have dealt with polytropos.
I think of it as being like democracy: the worst option, except for all the others.It’s not surprising that there was and remains so much fixation on the fifth word of the first line, in a poem that is over twelve thousand lines long. Sticking to one word in the first line saves a great deal of time. It’s good that so many people feel empowered to engage with a discussion about the high stakes and complexities of translation, no matter what their background, their knowledge, or their feelings may be.
LO: When your translation was first published in 2017, it was described everywhere as the first English Odyssey by a woman—the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all ran “first woman” headlines. I was puzzled at the time by how heavily that framing dominated, especially since we saw nothing like it when Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote appeared. It also made me think about how thoroughly men have dominated translation from ancient Greek and Latin, despite how many women take PhDs in the field. The contrast with classical Japanese translation is striking: women are well represented, with the notable exception of The Tale of Genji, whose English translators have all been white men. Why do you think the translator’s gender became the story in the case of Homer specifically? And has that conversation broadened into a discussion of who gets to translate canonical texts more generally—questions of race, class, and access as well as gender?
EW: I shared your surprise about those headlines and that framing. When I took on the project of re-translating the Odyssey, I hadn’t even known or considered that I might be the first non-man to publish a complete English version. I had taught several different English translations over the years, and had never even noticed that they were all by men. I don’t think my actual work as a translator—either of Homer, or of Seneca, Sophocles or Euripides—has anything to do with my gender as such. My goals were about poetic form, pacing, and narrative perspective. And yet the labelling of me as “the woman translator” or “the feminist translator” persists even unto this day. It’s become my standard traditional epithet, rather as ships in Homer are always “swift” and “sea-faring,” even when they’ve been immobilized on a beach for ten years. Epithets are sticky things.
Over the past ten years, I’ve been very moved by how many people, especially young people, have told me they see me as some kind of inspiration. I feel very touched and honored by that, and I recognize that it’s a great responsibility.
But you’re right also that there is indeed a weird gendered imbalance, in that published English translations of major, long canonical works by Greek and Roman authors into English have tended to be by men, even though that’s not the case in other languages (there are plenty of French and Italian translations of Homer by women), and even though there are plenty of English-speaking classicists who are not men. I think it’s about a cluster of partly separate issues, which include language training (for living languages, there is a far wider pool of competent potential translators, whereas for those that are no longer spoken, competence has to be acquired in the academy for English-speakers, whereas in France or Italy, it can be acquired in the liceo or lycée); there is also the marginalization of translation in the Anglophone academy (it’s not going to get you tenure or promotion, so there’s less motivation to take on a major, time-consuming translation project).
But these issues don’t fully explain why so many twentieth and twenty-first century English-language translations of major Greek and Roman works have been published by retired male academics, rather than elderly women. Perhaps it is partly about networks; I personally took on all my translation projects only because I was approached with the idea by specific editors; perhaps there are gaps in terms of whom editors or publishers think of as potential translators. But this is all pure speculation; I really don’t know!
Over the past ten years, I’ve been very moved by how many people, especially young people, have told me they see me as some kind of inspiration. I feel very touched and honored by that, and I recognize that it’s a great responsibility.
I’d definitely like to see a wider conversation about who translates the canon and how that might matter (as well as how it might not). Classicist Jackie Murray has written eloquently about the need for more BIPOC translators of Greek and Latin classics.
In terms of the media coverage: I think that’s a somewhat separate question. One reason for the persistent headlines, I would argue, is that it’s quite similar to the fixation on “complicated”: it’s difficult to come up with a new story, and people, including journalists, tend to congregate in packs. After the New York Times had covered my work with the framing that, “Wilson is a woman and she used the word ‘complicated,’” there were then dozens more pieces saying exactly those same two things.
To me, this was not a particularly good framing, in that it entirely ignores my actual interpretative and poetic goals and work in favor of a factoid about the field, and in that the fixation on me as if I’d cracked a glass ceiling sidelines the work of a multitude of other female classicists, Homerists and translators who are also not men. But of course, I can see the appeal of a quick nugget for a headline writer, and I am very glad that there was such wide coverage of translation and of Homer in the popular press. The coverage, whatever its content, has succeeded in prompting at least a notch more popular awareness of the interpretative stakes of translation, and I’m grateful for that, regardless of what anybody thinks or says about me personally.
As for why it was different with Edith Grossman’s brilliant Don Quixote: this might have something to do with particular assumptions and perceptions of Homer in particular, and perhaps partly about Greek and Roman literature more broadly. Quixote himself is a comically ineffectual, bumbling hero; he’s nobody’s notion of idealized masculinity.
Moreover, Spanish is not imagined by most English-speakers as a language that belongs particularly to men. Things are different in the case of Homeric poems, especially in how they’re configured in American popular culture, with perceptions of these epics as foundational both for “western culture” (although they originate in the eastern area of the archaic Greek world), and as authorizing or modelling a particular modern set of ideas about idealized, heroic masculinity. Much of the public reaction to my work is, I would say, less about my actual work than about the tenacity of these dubious and non-historical ideas.
A major theme in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is that particular interpretations of ancient literature or culture can be very sticky, regardless of their truth value. For instance, I discuss a version of this phenomenon within antiquity, in my analysis of the brilliant ancient orator, Demosthenes—whose presentation of classical Athens as the glorious home of liberty and resistance to imperial oppression has been extraordinarily influential in later periods, regardless of its historicity. Another way this plays out in the book is in my analysis of how re-translators often echo or follow one another, rather than looking afresh at the interpretative possibilities of the originals.
LO: Is there something inherently adversarial about retranslation? After all, deciding a book needs translating again implies that the previous versions no longer do everything you want them to do. Haruki Murakami, in an essay he wrote about translating The Great Gatsby, argued that translations have expiration dates. The original may endure, but translations age along with the language and assumptions of the culture that produced them. I wondered what you make of that?
EW: Arthur Sze’s latest book, Transient Worlds, makes a similar point: that the great works of antiquity, whether in classical Chinese or ancient Greek and Latin, may endure, while their translations are transient and need to be replaced with each new generation of readers.
As for the great question about whether re-translation is necessarily adversarial: I would not say so, because it is not a zero-sum game.
I think this is true, up to a point. One of the major themes of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is that as our own culture changes, we see new and different things in ancient literature and ancient cultures—and these new vantage points enable or necessitate asking new questions about the past, reinterpreting and re-translating in light of new insights, priorities and norms.
But it’s also true that translations can sometimes become canonical works in their own right, as is the case for the Latin Vulgate and the King James Version of the Bible, or the Pope translation of the Iliad—which isn’t usable for teaching American undergraduates about Homer in the twenty-first century, but is foundational if you want to understand the history of British poetry in the eighteenth century (and is also a fabulous read in itself).
The path of true literary history never did run smooth. A core theme in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is that canons shift, and all such worlds are transient things. I often think about Keats’s great sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” not just because it’s a wonderful reminder of how revelatory and important a translation can be, for someone without access to the original, but also because it’s a reminder that the newest isn’t always the best for every reader. Keats had read more recent translations, including Pope; but it was Chapman’s seventeenth century translation that made Homer alive to him, because it had stylistic features that foreshadowed what you might call being “Keatsian,” in its focus on synaesthetic experience.
As for the great question about whether re-translation is necessarily adversarial: I would not say so, because it is not a zero-sum game. Pope didn’t replace Chapman; both are still available to be read. When I published new translations of Homer, I didn’t burn all copies of the work of my predecessors! The Apple of Discord—thrown amid the wedding feast by Eris, goddess of Conflict—causes bitter in-fighting among the goddesses, and a deadly war for mortals, because it is inscribed with a singular dedication: “For the most beautiful,” or, “For the finest.”
The Greek word makes it clear that there is only one “finest” dedicatee. There’s no chance of dividing the Apple, and only one goddess can win the prize—so Hera and Athena are furious that Aphrodite is given this glory, and the Trojan War ensues.
In Homer, the same kind of dilemma plays out on the human plane, in the conflict over which singular man can be the “best of the Achaeans,” the “best of the Greeks,” or the singular lord of rocky Ithaca. But the Homeric poems also remind us that in some spheres—like the banquet or the council meeting or in athletic competitions—honor and benefits can be shared among a group, and difference need not be deadly. To me, re-translation is more like a banquet than a deadly battle: I’m not slaying my esteemed predecessors to establish my own glory. Instead, I provide a different cut of meat for everyone to enjoy at the feast.
My commitment to poetic form is one of my most important priorities as a translator of metrical poetry.
At the same time, any re-translator does have a responsibility to bring a new dish, not just reheat the same old stuff. Another theme of my discussion of translation in CWDS is that there can be a temptation for translators to echo the approach and even the phrasing of their predecessors—even when it’s not the only option. I find this a bit disappointing, because it means that readers without access to the original have a more limited vision of its possibilities than they could otherwise have. “Make it new” is a good mantra for all writers, and that includes re-translators.
Any new work of re-interpretation needs to justify its own existence. This is true of new works of history or literary criticism, and it’s also true of re-translation. If I publish a new book about Sophocles, I need to explain clearly how it’s different from the numerous existing books on the same subject. Similarly, if I publish a re-translation, I need to offer something that is genuinely, deeply, responsibly engaged with the original, while offering a significantly different vision of it, compared to existing English translations. If I can’t do that, the whole project is a waste of everyone’s time.
LO: I really appreciated the twenty principles for translating ancient texts in your afterword. My favorite is your insistence that translators reproduce not only information but effect: “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.” What effects of Homer did you feel were underplayed or missing in earlier English translations? And what did you most want to restore?
EW: I wouldn’t have re-translated Homer at all, unless I’d felt there were important elements of the original poems that were under-played or ignored in existing modern translations. The primary elements I wanted to replicate were: the use of traditional, musical meter, rather than the prose or free verse used by most modern English translators; the multiplicity of perspective (rather than flattening out the different voices); the rapidity of the narrative, which makes the original feel much more exciting than the more verbose translations; and the emotional and descriptive vividness, which ancient critics called enargeia.
These goals are in tune with two major themes of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. These are the importance of poetic form in verse translation—whether of drama, lyric poetry or epic—and the need for literary translators to consider the stylistic and emotional effects of both the original and the translation. For instance, in my extensive discussion of the challenges of translating ancient Greek and Roman comic genres, I consider whether translators of these texts need to try to make the reader or audience laugh—even when the jokes hinge on social assumptions and values that are quite alien to many modern readers.
LO: I had not realized until reading your essay on translating Homer that you rendered the entire poem in iambic pentameter—and that your translation has one English line for every line of the Greek. That is an astonishing formal commitment. What did keeping both the meter and the line count force you to sacrifice—and what did it make possible? Do you have different formal priorities when tackling other ancient poets or writers?
EW: My commitment to poetic form is one of my most important priorities as a translator of metrical poetry. It is perhaps my most fundamental commitment. In terms of my training, I’m somewhat distinctive among contemporary classicists in having a degree in early modern English literature as well as degrees in classics, and in taking an obsessive interest in the long histories of classical reception and in poetic form, in English as well as ancient languages. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea pulls together my interests in the long historical sweep of classical receptions and in poetic form.
Predictably, my focus on traditional meter has not been central in the public discourse about my work; “Scholar publishes traditional metrical translation of ancient poem” is, I’ll admit it, less catchy than “First Woman!” or “Modern Translation!” But the “modern” framing strikes me as extremely misleading, just as much so as the “woman” framing, insofar as my approach is mostly not modern at all: I want to convey the alien strangeness of the original texts, and in my Homeric translations, I aim to convey the plainness, rapidity and nobility of the originals, the qualities emphasized by the Victorian critic and poet, Matthew Arnold, in contrast to the verbosity and lack of rhythm in the translations of most of my contemporaries.
The decision to confine myself to the same number of lines as the original Odyssey had some huge pay-offs, in terms of forcing me to think constantly about pacing. Luckily, for the possibilities of this approach, English has a huge vocabulary, and Homeric Greek makes great use of little particles that don’t necessarily have to be translated as such in English, as long as the sense and emphasis of the sentence is conveyed; most translators, not just me, often omit direct translations for many of the little particles that suggest “indeed” or “at least” or “then” or “on the one hand” or “in contrast to the previous thing said” (like au or dē or ara or men).
It’s more natural in English to convey many of these points of emphasis by word order rather than particles. As an example of what I mean, here’s a random (but great!) line of the Iliad (9.309): chrē men dē ton muthon apēlegeōs apoeipein. The Loeb prose translation—whose creators don’t subject themselves to any poetic or sonic constraints—doesn’t translate the particles, “men dē” (“and on the one hand indeed”): the translation reads, “I must speak my words outright.” This is quite typical of Homeric poetics.
And yet, sticking to the original line count, combined with extremely regular meter, was indeed a tight constraint. Odysseus might be polymechanos in the original, and he’d have to be “crafty” or “smart” in the translation; I couldn’t afford a five-syllable translation of every five-syllable word, and I wanted a little more flexibility in terms of word choice and sentence structure. With my translation of the Iliad, I gave up on the line-for-line constraint, while continuing to use traditional meter (iambic pentameter). I aimed there to use a similar number of words, to roughly echo the pacing of the original, but not to limit myself to the line count. I ended up feeling that in many ways, I preferred that approach. For that reason, I’m now partway through a complete re-re-translation of the Odyssey, using a similar approach. With this new version—which may, perhaps, be the second published English translation by a woman, ha ha—I am still using very regular traditional iambic pentameter, but I’m using more lines than the original, as in my version of the Iliad.
With other verse translation projects, such as my versions of Seneca, Sophocles and Euripides, I’ve played around with poetic form, for instance using different rhythms in tragedy when the original meters change. With ancient verse drama, the line breaks are often extremely important: for instance, in scenes where there is stichomythia—where each character in a debate or fraught conversation delivers only one metrical line, then capped by the other character—it seemed to me essential both to use meter, and to keep the specific line breaks. Another ongoing translation project of mine is of Ovid’s Heroides, which is composed in elegiac couplets, and which makes extensive and repeated use of witty turns or punch-lines at the end of the couplets; with this particular project, it seems to me essential both to convey Ovid’s technical poetic mastery, the precarious balance between sorrow and comedy, and also to land the line-breaks in the right places.
As I show repeatedly in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, there is no one single way to approach the technical and stylistic challenges of creating an equivalent to a literary text, using none of the same words. Every translation project brings its own joys and challenges. It’s so fun, and such a privilege to get to play with this kind of task every day.
LO: In your introduction, you quote Susan Sontag on translation as an ethical encounter with people different from ourselves. And throughout the book, you return to the importance of preserving the strangeness of ancient literature rather than smoothing it away for modern readers. What struck me is that your Homer is not strange because the English is archaic or difficult, but the strangeness lies instead in the Homeric world itself—its assumptions, values, and images. Can you talk a bit about how you worked to preserve the strangeness in translation?
EW: Great question! I think any literary translator needs to think hard about how to work with and push back against readers’ likely horizons of expectations. As a comparandum, I have really enjoyed the translations of Korean fiction by Anton Hur, and also appreciated Hur’s critical comments about how he aims to challenge both rigid notions of who “the reader” is and what “he” wants, and expectations about the style and genres of contemporary Korean or Asian fiction—which includes diverse voices, diverse genres, comedy, fantasy, and queerness, and doesn’t always cater to the “mythical white male English reader.”
There is no linear progression of “enlightenment” from antiquity to the present day.
In the case of ancient Greek and Roman literature, popular and even scholarly expectations about how these texts “should” sound in English are quite different from the expectations many readers may have about how contemporary fiction “should” sound. There’s a presupposition, reinforced by specific traditions of translation over the past century, that these poems will and should sound stilted, awkward, verbose, and almost unreadable—even if the originals are fluent and beautiful!—or that the only way to appeal to the mythical “modern English reader” is to add in numerous modern clichés and use an excitable style, full of exclamation points and ellipses. My goal with Homer was to relocate the strangeness of these poems, so that it’s not about weird word order, but about the magical strangeness of the poems’ imagined worlds and metaphors, as well as about the experience, likely strange to many modern readers, of inhabiting metrical, traditional poetry for many hours on end.
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea aims to underline the strangeness of numerous ancient genres and cultural assumptions, beyond Homeric epic. I discuss, for instance, the alien forms of archaic Greek lyric, designed to be literally sung with the accompaniment of a lyre—a cultural form that is very difficult to replicate or recreate, using the norms of contemporary poetics and a printed page (or an e-book).
A major theme of the book is that ancient literature and culture is sometimes familiar in surprising ways: for instance, I trace connections between ancient comedy and contemporary hip-hop, and between Athenian tragedy and modern discourse about gendered violence and injustice. Conversely, another major theme of the book is that antiquity is often strange in ways we may not expect—and that contemplating the past can enable us to see the strangeness and mutability of the present. For instance, in my essay on the myths surrounding Helen of Troy (also known as Helen of Sparta), I show that modern versions of this figure are sometimes more straightforwardly misogynistic than the ancient depictions. There is no linear progression of “enlightenment” from antiquity to the present day.
LO: I learned an enormous amount from this book, both about translation and about the specifics of carrying ancient Greek and Roman literature across languages and cultures. There was a time when translating the classics was a standard part of education, particularly in England and the US. Students mostly stuck to word-for-word renderings, but even in that limited way, wasn’t the exposure to how people think in other languages somehow world-opening? It made me wonder what we lose when the study of other languages and literatures disappears from education.
EW: Thank you so much—I’m really thrilled the book was illuminating for you. I really hope that it’s a fun read both for people with an interest in translation, and those with an interest in antiquity, and those who don’t yet know that they might care about either of these subjects!
I think exposure to other languages and other literatures and other cultures couldn’t possibly be more important, however it is done. I felt grateful that I was able to send my kids to a charter school that had an immersion Spanish program, so they are all fluent, to varying degrees, in Spanish. Knowing the words and the stories of other cultures and other peoples opens the world, and invites us out of our own little bubbles, to the challenges and joys of dialogue. I wish every kid in the US or the world could be at the very least bilingual. I’d also love to see more recognition and honor for the world-expanding, beautiful cultural knowledge and insights of communities where many or most people are bilingual or trilingual—for instance in immigrant communities.
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea focuses on the languages, literatures and stories of Greek and Roman antiquity, and one of my big themes is the importance of these cultural touch-stones for understanding our own world, in terms of what’s special about modernity. We can’t answer that question without an awareness of the past, just as we can’t understand what is or is not special about English unless we can understand other languages. Every culture and every person has a different perspective on the world, and we need to listen deeply to as many of them as possible.
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