Emily Wilson
speaker
214 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 12 Jul
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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that also hooked me in a whole new way to how it sounds on the level of the line, the passage, the voice, the speech, and the rhythms of the language.
And also I was hooked on just how fascinatingly complex the storytelling techniques of this ostensibly very simple story are and how psychologically deep and subtle it is.
It's not just a kid's adventure story.
It also has so much to say about these really deep questions about grief and rage and loss and whether full recovery or going back in time is ever possible.
I felt so grateful to get to spend these many, many years working on the Odyssey.
It was just so fun.
The opportunity I saw was partly about trying to activate elements of the original in contemporary English that I felt were not fully activated in the many translations that I tried using with my students.
And one of the big elements that I felt wasn't fully activated was the meter, the fact that the original isn't just a story, it's a poem.
It has rhythm.
It's designed for oral performance.
And so it seemed to me that I needed to use traditional poetic form, the meter of Shakespeare and Milton, in order to activate for an English listener or English reader some elements of what did Homer sound like to a fluent listener of the original.
I could easily have used 20 years.
If the publisher said, let me have 20 years, I would have used every second of it.
So the original is composed in the meter that was common, traditional for epic verse in Archaic Greece, which is dactylic hexameter.
Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, by the way.
And it has that rhythm all the way through.
So it has this traditional meter.
I'm not the first translator to use iambic pentameter in English, but I'm very rare in doing that in the modern era.
It's something that earlier translators, early modern translators, assumed that, of course, meter needs to be translated into meter.
Whereas in the modern era, there's been this assumption that modern readers can't tolerate rhythm, which I think is false.
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