Emily Wilson
speaker
132 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 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 — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, I find these poems so stirring, it's hard to pick one.
They are extremely stirring.
I mean, I'm sort of going to cheat by just sticking to the passage I just did.
And I'm thinking about the fact that that passage establishes the stakes of the poem in terms of the menace, the overwhelming quasi-divine wrath of Achilles, which will cause the deaths of so many people, including so many people on his own side.
and not just deaths, but also ongoing humiliations, because these people, who are not corpses of people, but people, will be on the battlefield becoming the haloriakunon, the spoils for the dogs, and the daita for the birds, the banquet for the birds.
And I have a dog.
I think about feeding my dog all the time.
I'd love to have her be happy, but then do I love to think about myself being dog food?
Not quite so much, no.
Beyond that, just my own personal experiences of loss and grief and of anger, I think about those.
I mean, I'm not thinking about those explicitly while I'm thinking about the wrath of Achilles and the grief of Achilles, but they're there.
I mean, if I were in a Spock and I'd never experienced those things, I don't think I would be able to bring them on the page or to the tongue.
But I absolutely have to, because you can't inhabit this poem without having these... It's always going up to 11 in terms of both noise and emotional intensity.
And it has to, to feel real, to feel as big as it needs to be feeling.
I think that, so right now I'm doing a total revamp retranslation of my Odyssey translation.
I'm trying to make it match the Iliad more, making it longer.
It's going to have much longer end notes, but it's also going to be much longer.
So I'm thinking actually a lot about the ways that grief works in the Odyssey and the way that in the Odyssey there's the repeated trope of, so we traveled on grieving in our hearts for our friends, but we kept on going.
That is not Achilles' way of dealing with grief.
Right.
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