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 I tend to think of myself as having an Odyssey side and an Iliad side.

I also have a lot of blank space, so I'm working out what else to do.

I mean, I honestly feel that my goal is to do the opposite of that.

I think in many ways I'm a very traditionalist translator, including by using traditional meter and trying to get back to elements of the original that I think have been obscured by 20th and 21st century translation norms, translation practices.

I also think it's really important to remember that the archaic term heros, from which we get hero, doesn't mean superhero in a mid-20th century American way.

It's not about saving Gotham City.

It's about characters who are larger than life, who are closer to the gods, who do extraordinary things.

So I think the idea that either the Odyssey or the Iliad are giving us a sort of simplistic idealization of their protagonists is a real misreading and doing it in some ways disrespectful or dishonoring to the original poems, which is so much more truthful than they would be if they were these sort of very moralistic didactic tales that some people on the Internet seem to think they are.

I also think quite a lot of these people on the Internet may not actually have read the Odyssey very closely or at all.

Who knows?

I mean, I don't think most of these people are very serious students of Homer or students of ancient history.

I think these are people who, from what I can tell, are people who want to construct some kind of narrative to justify prejudices that they are very much attached to.

I wish that some of them would like to just have a face-to-face conversation with me rather than spamming me with emails.

I mean, I also get so many lovely, lovely emails from strangers all the time.

I mean, in fact, I've got far more recently with the new attention to The Odyssey and The Iliad in the wake of this spectacular Hollywood film.

So I actually don't want the discourse...

to be framed in terms of it's all just about hatred and partisanship.

I think it's actually a lot of it that's not about that.

A lot of the story here is that there really are new readers, new audiences coming to Homer and ancient literature.

And also some of my favorites are people who've read The Odyssey of Iliad years ago or been forced through it in school and then come back to it and realize there is so much more in this poem than I realized when I read it when I was 16.

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