Emily Wilson, Translotor of the Iliad and the Odyssey: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

About this episode

Emily Wilson, whose translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination, joins us virtually to explore the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on 20 years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson reviews the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work. Ranging from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitations of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender,…