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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Daily · What’s Epic About the ‘Odyssey’? Everything. · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

I think modern readers can totally tolerate rhythm and, in fact, love it.

Sure.

So I can read from the episode in which Odysseus and his men have to pass through the strait between two terrible goddesses, one of whom is a whirlpool who threatens to swallow their whole ship, and the other is a six-dog-headed deity who will eat up six of the men from every ship that passes by, depending on which side the ship veers towards.

So we rode through the narrow strait in tears, on one side Scylla, on the other shining Charybdis with a dreadful, gurgling noise, sucked down the water.

When she spewed it out, she seethed, all churning like a boiling cauldron.

On a huge fire, the froth flew high to spatter the topmost rocks on either side, but when she swallowed back the sea, she seemed all stirred from inside, and the rock around was roaring dreadfully, and the dark blue sand below was visible.

The men were seized by fear.

Yeah, that's a really difficult question, I think, for any translation project is just because it's never going to be possible to replicate in totally different words for a totally different culture every single element, every single syllable, every single sound of the original text.

I mean, I felt that, as I already said, the meter of the poem seemed essential to me, and also the multivocality seemed essential to me.

Then there were other things where I thought, I can convey some quality of this without being 100% one-for-one about it.

And that included things like the fact that the original poem, because it's based on a centuries-long or pre-existing oral tradition, has a huge amount of repetition.

And so I thought, I need to include some repetition.

Everyone needs to have the iconic, "'Wine Dark Sea, Wine Dark Sea, Wine Dark Sea, some more Wine Dark Sea."

We need to have bright-eyed Athena keep on being bright-eyed.

We need to have Nestor being a horse lord over and over.

But it may be possible that you can get the idea that this is a repetitive formulaic text without it being absolutely 100% of the time when there's a repetition in the original.

Does there need to be a repetition every single time in the translation?

Maybe I can convey that quality actually more vividly by repeating some amount of times, but maybe not 100% of the amount of times.

I mean, so I thought in some ways, if I'm going to vary sometimes, then that's an opportunity to lean into the fact that some of these epithets, which is the standard formulaic describing words for these characters or the nouns in the poem, some of these have multiple different meanings.

So if possible, I want to be able to convey, for instance, that when Odysseus is described, as he repeatedly is, as polyklasa,

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