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

And I should also say that this is a rewrite.

This is not exactly the same as my published 2017 version because I'm actually in the process of doing it all again.

So I'm going to do this expanded version.

Spoiler there.

New re-translation.

Sorry about the spoiler there.

You can cut that out if you want to.

That's fine.

Tell me about a complicated man, Muse, who was lost so long and fled so far when he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and how he saw and understood so many people and so many places and suffered so much in his heart at sea as he was struggling to save his life and bring his men back home.

But even so, despite his efforts, he did not protect them.

Poor fools, they died by their own willfulness.

They ate the cattle of Hyperion, the son, who took away their chance of home.

These events now tell us also, goddess, daughter of Zeus, begin from anywhere.

Yes.

I mean, I see it in a way as a teaser for the poem to come.

It piques your interest because you're not told right away a very definitive thing about Odysseus.

So I think it's very much a choice on the part of the composer of this poem not to use one of the more common epithets for Odysseus, such as polymetis, meaning crafty, or polymekinos, meaning that he's skilled in technological inventions like the wooden horse,

But this much more rare epithet, polutropos, which Pagels translates as a man of twists and turns, it suggests a twistiness, a turniness, a layeredness, which applies both to the protagonist and the poem and his journey.

And we don't yet know how many disguises or turns will this protagonist take or what will it look like, what will it sound like in the narrative of the poem.

That's the shame.

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