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

So it's a suggestion that they are these luscious ladies with their beautiful lips and that Odysseus is gazing at their lips and presumably also at their bodies rather than thinking primarily about how is this song going to tempt him with the possibilities of infinite knowledge.

I mean, they're definitely not birds.

They're surrounded by seals.

They don't seem to have any clothes on.

But I think they're sort of naked seal ladies, but I'm not really sure.

I don't know.

Yes.

So as you say, there's this amazing trick that Odysseus does with the bow, that he's the only one who can string his bow, can shoot through all 12 iron axe heads, thus showing that he can conquer both weapons of bronze and weapons of iron.

He can move into this new age.

He's the hero who conquers time.

And he can also use this weapon to slaughter all the suitors of his wife.

Then once all of these, in a way, peers, peer warriors, men have been slaughtered, Odysseus delegates the final set of killings to his son Telemachus and says that he must hack the life out of the 12 women and one man who have most intimately served the desires of the suitors.

So that's the 12 women who have had sex with the suitors and the one man, Melanthius, who's done the most to bring them all this meat and wine.

Telemachus then hangs the 12 women with a sailor's rope and then hacks off the hands and feet of Melanthius, who'd been bound up on the ceiling of the palace.

So there's a way that there's this real distinction between the

slaughter of the suitors who are male equals and the slaughter of these 13 enslaved people who obviously are unarmed.

And it's about claiming back the full ownership and glory and control of the household by destroying those who have that kind of memory of what it was for the house to be claimed by so many other men.

Yes, I was surprised to look at that more closely.

I think I actually hadn't noticed that in the way that I did after I'd published my translation.

And I was thinking about, are there ways that I might have done certain things differently, even without noticing it?

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