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

If you're a serious classicist, of course, you read the poems in Greek.

You read the commentaries, you read the dictionaries, you read the original texts.

Whereas once I got to this country, and especially once I started teaching in America, I realized there's so much potential for translations to introduce serious undergraduates to the world of ancient literature studied and read in translation.

And therefore, translation actually really matters.

So I think the combination of the fact that I didn't go to an American high school, so I wasn't made to read a particular translation of the Odyssey in ninth grade.

So I didn't imprint on a particular one.

So I didn't think of myself as being iconoclastic.

I wasn't destroying something which I loved when I was 16 or my teacher told me was the Homer when I was 16.

Instead, I imprinted on the Greek.

But then once I'd

been teaching Homer in many different translations for many years, I realized there were things I could convey from the Greek that would actually be useful for English-speaking readers to have available to them in a translation of Homer.

I mean, I started getting tattoos very late in life once I thought, oh, I've got tenure.

Who cares what I look like?

It's fine.

I can do whatever I like.

I have tattoos that primarily represent both my family and also the other elements of my life that I see as absolutely permanent.

And I'm never going to not be committed to this, which is my love of ancient literature.

So I have, for instance, a spear on one leg and a bow on another for the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It's Achilles and Odysseus.

I also have horses on one arm for the immortal horses of Achilles and an octopus on the other arm for the multiplicity of Odysseus.

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