She didn't set out to break into the Homeric boys' club. In taking on The Odyssey, Wilson's interest was primarily poetic. The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson, $30, Amazon She was enthralled by "this access to these alien cultures, which are both so totally different from the culture that I was living in and also so deeply relatable. Reading Plato and Euripides for the first time, it felt like a kind of conversion experience," Wilson says. "And I started taking Greek in high school as well, and that was also mind-blowingly amazing. She loves the way that the stories engage with such crucial issues of life and death, too: conquered cities and vengeful gods and questions of national identity. "I loved Latin, I loved the structure of the language, the sound of it," Wilson says. Her childhood passion only deepened when she hit high school and was able to study Latin and Greek texts firsthand. "I loved the story, I loved getting to dress up as a goddess, and that then made me want to read the kids’ adaptations of Greek myths." "I guess I first encountered the story of The Odyssey in a school play, when my elementary school put on a version of it and I got to play Athena," Wilson tells Bustle. Her translation is lyrical, radically readable, and as politically relevant as ever. Perhaps just as momentous as shattering this classical glass ceiling, Wilson has brought an ancient epic into the year 2017. The first translation by a woman came out on Tuesday.Īfter several centuries and 60-odd English translations of the ancient Greek epic, Emily Wilson has made history as the first woman to ever tell the story of Odysseus and his arduous journey home in the English language. This is a fun exercise and not without merit, but in the end, such a piecemeal approach is like judging productions of “Hamlet” on their “To Be or Not To Be.The first English translation of The Odyssey appeared around the year 1615. The reviewer then lays out the ways that the new translation either falls short or excels, quibbling over word choice and linguistic effects. It is tradition, when reviewing a translation, to set a passage alongside its predecessors in translations by Fagles, Lattimore, Pope, etc. The poem of Odysseus’s epic journey was composed in about the 8th century B.C., and its tale of a brilliant, exhausted veteran beset by dangers and yearning for home has been collecting admirers ever since.
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