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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, I mean, I love the alien-ness of the Homeric poems.
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I mean, they both have this, in some ways, very familiar narrative about community and family and homecoming, and yet also things that are so alien, such as animal sacrifice, which runs all the way through the Odyssey and the Iliad.
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Part of the answer was certainly informed by having taught it in translation as well as lived with the original Greek poem for so long.
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I felt in my many iterations of teaching the Odyssey and the Iliad in translation using multiple different 20th and 21st century translations that there were things I wanted to get across to my students in the classroom that were very difficult to convey using the existing translations.
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One of those was the fact that the original Odyssey is a poem.
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It's in regular traditional meter designed for performance out loud.
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Most people in antiquity over many centuries experienced it as performance poetry performed by rhapsodes who would learn sections or the whole thing by heart and perform it rhythmically, probably with musical accompaniment.
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So the lack of meter in most existing 20th and 21st century translations seemed to me a big omission.
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And I was constantly saying to my students, remember, it's a poem.
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But then we would read a bit and it didn't sound much like a poem.
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And then the other thing is that...
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The Homeric poems are also proto-dramatic.
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They were composed before drama really existed, but they're multivocal.
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They have these different characters who speak in different voices, have different perspectives.
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And I felt some of those proto-dramatic qualities, the multivocality, was very often flattened out in existing translations that I'd used with my students.
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Yes.
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Poetry is, of course, the ultra-marked kind of language.
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It's language which draws attention to itself as language.
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And, of course, different poetic traditions mark language in different ways.
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So in the archaic period, Homeric poetry uses dactylic hexameter, which is a regular traditional meter associated with narrative poetry.
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