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, for instance, before Telemachus does this,

That's Odysseus' son.

Telemachus, Odysseus' son, who's killing these 12 women and one enslaved man.

A lot of modern translations make Telemachus use sexualized abusive language to the women in that trio of lines.

So, for instance, I think the Fagles translation has him say, I won't give a clean death to these sluts.

And then many other translators, like the Lombardo translation, the Fitzgerald translation, all add similar language about the women as sluts or whores, which is not actually what the Greek does.

The Greek suggests that Telemachus thinks he has to kill these women, but he doesn't suggest they're sex workers or that he's going to blame them in a personal way for actions that they had very little or no autonomy over.

In fact, I think that actually makes a little bit of a nonsense of the

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, isn't it?

It's surprising, yes.

I mean, I think it's partly about trying to normalize and domesticize this very alien, ancient, imagined world in this poem, such that if you think a quote-unquote hero has to be a good guy by modern American standards, then you can't have Telemachus murdering these unarmed women, and so we've got to give him a really good motive, so they must be very bad.

And so we've got to add in a recognizable kind of badness, even if that isn't entirely in the text.

And then similarly, if we're uncomfortable with enslavement, as of course we are in the modern world, many translators use words like servant or maid to translate words that unambiguously mean enslaved person.

I was a real nerd and I'm still a real nerd, as you can probably guess.

I mean, I spent so much time in my childhood reading.

I was always very shy and introverted.

And as you said, my parents were scholars.

My dad, A.N.

Wilson, is a writer.

My mother, Catherine Duncan-Jones, was a Shakespeare scholar.

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