Jacke (Jack) Wilson
speaker
1,063 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Jacke (Jack) 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
Okay, joining me now is Daniel Mendelson, a humanities professor at Bard College, and a celebrated author, critic, classicist, and translator, familiar to readers of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
He's here today to discuss his new translation of The Odyssey, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Daniel Mendelson, welcome to the History of Literature.
Do you remember the first time you read the Odyssey?
And as a teacher yourself, you probably know the feeling when you put the right book in the right hands of the right person, how satisfying that can be.
And you uh you mentioned that the Odyssey is is kind of your thing as opposed to the Iliad and w was that from the very beginning?
What were your first impressions?
Right.
I was struck as I was reading your new translation, which is fantastic by the way.
We'll talk about that more and and the accomplishment that you have uh that you've really achieved here, but
I was struck when I was reading it this time, uh, how much exposition there is at the beginning.
And that struck me as being uh almost like a a a storyteller's risk, for example.
I could imagine uh uh uh an editor today, you know, if this had had come in come in off the slush pile or something, saying, Well, we gotta get we gotta get to Ulysses a lot faster than this.
You
Yeah, he's
Odyssey is it's taking us too long to get there.
And it it it struck me that with an oral storyteller is kind of taking that risk as well.
Right.
And as I was reading it, thinking about people hearing it, and of course we know from filmmakers or novelists that that that isn't the only way to tell a story is to start with the main character and in fact
Mm.
Showing 881–900 of 1,063 · page 45 of 54
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