Arts & CultureEducationalFeaturesLiteratureSocietyWorld
How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern
Her vitally urgent translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the “tarnish of centuries.”
Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means “hostage” is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us.
- Judith Thurman
- The New Yorker
The Iliad’s subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is survival.
Both plumb the male psyche and women’s enthrallment to its bravado.
“Tell the old story for our modern times,” Homer entreats his muse, in the Odyssey’s first stanza.
The translator Emily Wilson took him at his word.
Her radically plainspoken Odyssey, the…