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 · last 12 months

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

Homer, as we've said already, was usually experienced in antiquity in oral performance.

So there's something very authentic about listening to an audiobook of Homer.

But also I think it's fine to read it however you prefer.

Read it on your phone, on your Kindle if you want to, or get the paperback and then you could underline things if there are passages that you like or don't like.

I also love that I very often hear from people who are forming little book clubs and reading it out loud with their friends or with their partners or reading it out loud to their children.

I think it's really fun for readers to also be actively engaged with these poems.

And readers can do what I always love doing whenever I get to read a little bit of put on funny voices.

And I think people should both read it in whatever form works for you and have fun with it.

Yes.

I'm addicted, yes.

I don't know.

So, I mean, as we said a few minutes ago, I was very keen to try to replicate something like the experience of the rapidity of Homeric poetry in both my Odyssey and Iliad translation.

So with my 2017 Odyssey translation, I confined myself to the same number of lines as the original, which I liked in terms of how it conveys the speed of the original poem, but I also was constantly feeling if I just had one or two more syllables, I could do more with that phrase or that word.

With the Iliad translation, I gave up on the line-for-line constraint, so I use a few more lines than the original has.

And I felt it worked better.

I felt it enabled me to use more polysyllabic words than I could with the original Odyssey translation.

I was always forced to, whenever possible, use a monosyllable because otherwise the line count won't work out, especially because I was using... It's remarkable that you could pull that off to me.

I mean, it was a fun challenge.

It was not just the fun of engaging with Homer all the time every day, but also that fun language challenge, which...

Translation is fascinating in itself because it's this constant puzzle about how can you do the impossible with two languages.

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