Emily Wilson

speaker

468 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 1 Aug

Emily Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · ‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson: Nolan should've hired a screenwriter · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

I would like to care more.

They're kind of missing.

I mean, there's a moment when Zendaya, who's sort of Athena, but maybe not, says to Matt Damon's Odysseus, who's complaining that the gods don't speak in a language that mortals can understand.

And Zendaya says, who doesn't understand thunder?

fire, a baby's cry.

We understand those things.

So implicitly, the gods are present.

But I felt the film, in some ways, wanted to have it both ways, that there's a noise in the soundtrack, there's thunder, so of course Zeus is there, there's Zeus' law, which is repeatedly invoked, and yet it's also very unclear, are we actually supposed to believe in Zeus and Poseidon, or is Calypso a goddess?

Is Circe a goddess?

I would have liked a little bit more of the divine.

Yeah, I mean, I love the alien-ness of the Homeric poems.

I mean, they both have this, in some ways, very familiar narrative about community and family and homecoming, and yet also things that are so alien, such as animal sacrifice, which runs all the way through the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Part of the answer was certainly informed by having taught it in translation as well as lived with the original Greek poem for so long.

I felt in my many iterations of teaching the Odyssey and the Iliad in translation using multiple different 20th and 21st century translations that there were things I wanted to get across to my students in the classroom that were very difficult to convey using the existing translations.

One of those was the fact that the original Odyssey is a poem.

It's in regular traditional meter designed for performance out loud.

Most people in antiquity over many centuries experienced it as performance poetry performed by rhapsodes who would learn sections or the whole thing by heart and perform it rhythmically, probably with musical accompaniment.

So the lack of meter in most existing 20th and 21st century translations seemed to me a big omission.

And I was constantly saying to my students, remember, it's a poem.

But then we would read a bit and it didn't sound much like a poem.

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