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
And so they pressure Odysseus into joining the Games, but luckily he's excellent at every single sport.
So he's going to outperform all of them with his great athleticism.
Look how cool I am, except for the running.
And he explains that on the raft, he hasn't been able to work out.
And for that reason, he can't sprint anymore.
And I actually think it really matters that...
he's still got all the strength that involves holding on and endurance and wrestling and discus throwing.
If you're frozen in space, you still have the strength.
But if you're stuck on the journey and unable to go forward, which is kind of the place that Odysseus is in the poem, there are ways that bodily movement maps narrative movement.
He can't run forward.
He can't sprint, even though he can do everything else, but that's not enough to get home.
Even though, of course, there is no running route from Skeria to Ithaca.
I don't think I've actually talked about a male body beyond Odysseus' body.
The obvious place to go on with this issue in the Iliad is Thersites, who is said to be the ugliest man who marched to Troy, who gets beaten up by Odysseus in Book 2 of the Iliad.
if the words that Achilles speaks in terms of critique of Agamemnon's management of the troops are spoken by somebody who's in a non-normative body, then that person will get beaten up, and that will be part of the way that the hierarchies within this complicated coalition, which maybe isn't even supposed to be a hierarchy, and there's questions about how do you order bodies if there's no clear social hierarchy, but then maybe we can order them by aesthetics?
but maybe there's something wrong with society's looks and therefore his speech is ugly, even though his speech, as I said, sounds very much like Achilles' speech.
So I think the poem has things to say about the anxieties of how does order happen and how does social order relate to pressures that societies put on bodies to look a certain way and be a certain way.
I didn't really say anything about translation, but I guess one thing in translating that passage, it seems to me there's a real ambiguity in the Greek about...
The degree to which the other men watching Odysseus beat up Thucydides are thinking, this is great.
He's beating up Thucydides.
Showing 81–100 of 132 · page 5 of 7
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