Emily Wilson

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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

And then the other thing is that...

The Homeric poems are also proto-dramatic.

They were composed before drama really existed, but they're multi-vocal.

They have these different characters who speak in different voices, have different perspectives.

And I felt some of those proto-dramatic qualities, the multi-vocality, was very often flattened out in existing translations that I'd used with my students.

Yes.

Poetry is, of course, the ultra-marked kind of language.

It's language which draws attention to itself as language.

And, of course, different poetic traditions mark language in different ways.

So in the archaic period, Homeric poetry uses dactylic hexameter, which is a regular traditional meter associated with narrative poetry.

So in order to create the same effect, I use the meter that's traditional in English, which is iambic pentameter, rather than using free verse or prose, which is what most modern translators do.

And then similarly, Homeric poetry is marked by other sound patterns, such as alliteration and assonance.

So again, I mean, if you're translating

an ad or a court deposition, you may not need to think about the sound effects in quite the same way as I think you do need to think about the sound effects if you're translating a poem, especially one that's designed for oral performance.

Over 12,000, yes.

So that was another thing that I thought on reflection about my experience in teaching the Odyssey in many different translations was that, as you said before, translation is very difficult.

There's never a one-to-one equivalent of this word in archaic Greek means exactly the same as this word in contemporary English.

So you're always thinking, maybe there were 10 different words I could use there.

So the temptation is always to expand on the original, to use three or four words where the original might use only one.

But then, of course, you're also...

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