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- [00:01]
Announcer
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Dave Davies
This is FRESH air. I'm Dave Davies. Christopher Nolan's new film the Odyssey has earned critical praise and big box office returns. This retelling of the classic story from ancient Greece features plenty of recognized stars, and it's also burnished the reputation of an established star in the world of classical scholarship. That's our guest today, Emily Wilson. In 2017, Wilson published her own translation of the Odyssey, a task that took six years to complete and had quite an impact. Wilson was the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, though that's not the first thing she'd want you to know about her work. Her translation was widely hailed in reviews for its vibrant language and faithfulness to the original Greek text attributed to the poet Homer. Her translation sold thousands of copies and was added to high school and college curricula across the country. Wilson was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and, after she followed with the translation of the Iliad, a Guggenheim Fellowship. Christopher Nolan has cited her translation in discussing his approach to the character of Odysseus in his new film. In a review, Wilson called Nolan's film abysmally written and and lacking in psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth, though she said it's still an event to celebrate because it's getting more people into theaters and interested in the classics. Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies and chair of the classics department at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of several books, including a new one coming out in September. It's a collection of essays introducing readers to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and the challenges of translation and exploring some modern themes, such as parallels between the hip hop of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, and the comedies of Aristophanes in 5th century Athens. The book is titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. Emily Wilson, welcome to FRESH air.
- [02:10]
Emily Wilson
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for your zinnia and having me.
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Dave Davies
Zinnia, right. Yes.
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Emily Wilson
Hospitality.
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Dave Davies
I thought we would begin just because a lot of people know something about the Odyssey but may not have thought about it in a long time. Just give us a quick summary of the plot. What is the story about?
- [02:27]
Emily Wilson
The story is set in the aftermath of the mythical Trojan War, and it centers on the mythical Greek hero from Ithaca, Odysseus, and the final sequence of his very long, extended journey home In Greek, there's a word nostos, from which we get nostalgia. A story about a journey home from war. The Odyssey traces the story of how Odysseus escapes from the island of Calypso, a goddess with whom he's been spending past seven years. And finally, after many misadventures, makes it back to Ithaca. And after many more misadventures on Ithaca, reunites with his son Telemachus, his wife Penelope, and slaughters the suitors of his wife.
- [03:11]
Dave Davies
Okay, that's a good quick summary. In interviews before Christopher Nolan's film was released, you recommended that people should go and see it. You wrote a pretty tough review. Do you still think people should see it?
- [03:24]
Emily Wilson
Absolutely, I think people should see it. I think there's a lot to think about and talk about and I think it's a good time at the movies. It's a big spectacle. There's a lot to think about both in terms of what is this film saying about our times and about war, violence and deception in our times. And also what it's doing with the source material. I do think that it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter because that would have solved a lot of the issues. But I also think the actors are amazing. It's a star studded cast and they're doing their absolute best with the script they were given. Right.
- [03:55]
Dave Davies
Actors are amazing. Not doing very much with character. Right. I mean, the language here was pretty tough. You're right. I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script. It's a family friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate fourth of July fireworks display with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth. You also complain that there are no sex scenes and all the food looks horrible.
- [04:16]
Emily Wilson
Yes, I mean, that's the laugh line. But the serious point I was trying to get to with the laugh line about no sex, no food, is that I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus. He doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want? He wants to assuage his guilt. And that seemed to me rather a thin motivation, especially compared to the rich, layered characterization of both Odysseus and the other characters in Homer. But also just compared to a good movie. I would like to have deeper characterization in a film. I would like to care more by
- [05:01]
Dave Davies
the time I saw the film, I had spent a lot of time preparing for this interview. So my head was into the Odyssey and some of your work. And I found the film disappointing, honestly. And one of the reasons was that the gods and goddesses in the Odyssey are really active creatures. They intervene in human events. They are angry at times and jealous and capricious and compassionate and. And they're just kind of missing from this film, aren't they?
- [05:26]
Emily Wilson
They're kind of missing. I mean, there's a moment when Zendaya, who's sort of Athena, but maybe not, says to Matt Damon, Odysseus, who's complaining that the gods don't speak in a language that mortals can understand, and Zendaya says, who doesn't understand thunder, fire, a baby's cry? We understand those things so implicitly. The gods are present. But I felt the film in some ways wanted to have it both ways, that there's a noise in the soundtrack, there's thunder, Course Zeus is there. There's Zeus's law, which is repeatedly invoked. And yet it's also very unclear. Are we actually supposed to believe in Zeus and Poseidon? Is Calypso a goddess? Is Circe a goddess? I would have liked a little bit more of the divine.
- [06:09]
Dave Davies
Yeah, you get a sense in the poem, and I'd listen to your translation of a world that was really different, where people felt the gods, they weren't entities that they occasionally prayed to, they were out there all the time. And that was a very different kind of world.
- [06:25]
Emily Wilson
Yeah, I mean, I love the alien ness of the Homeric poems. I mean, they both have this, in some ways, very familiar narrative about community and family and homecoming, and yet also things that are so alien, such as animal sacrifice, which runs all the way through the Odyssey and the Iliad.
- [06:41]
Dave Davies
Well, we're not here to talk about the movie. I want to talk about this work that you do, which has gotten so much attention and praise. You know, you've been reading Ancient Greek for a long, long time. You've been teaching it to students for decades, using many of the existing translations of the Odyssey. I was surprised until I read your book, because I didn't know how many times it had been translated. What made you want to try your own after teaching it for so long?
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Emily Wilson
Part of the answer was certainly informed by having taught it in translation as well as lived with the original Greek poem for so long. I felt in my many iterations of teaching the Odyssey and the Iliad in translation, using multiple different 20th and 21st century translations, that there were things I wanted to get across to my students in the classroom that were very difficult to convey using the existing translations. One of those was the fact that the original Odyssey is a poem. It's in regular, traditional meter designed for performance out loud. Most people in antiquity, over many centuries, experienced it as performance poetry performed by rhapsodes who would learn sections or the whole thing by heart and perform it rhythmically, probably with musical accompaniment. So the lack of meter in most existing 20th and 21st century translations seemed to me a big omission. And I was constantly saying to my students, remember, it's a poem. But then we would read a bit and it didn't sound much like a poem. And then the other thing is that the Homeric poems are also proto dramatic. They were composed before drama really existed. But they are. They're multivocal. They have these different characters who speak in different voices, have different perspectives. And I felt some of those proto dramatic qualities. The multivocality was very often flattened out in existing translations that I'd used with my students.
- [08:30]
Dave Davies
You know, I think you say in your new book at some point that translation is impossible. Translation of poetry is really impossible. I mean, I had this realization many decades ago when I was looking at a poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. And I knew enough Spanish to read the Spanish and the English. And it dawned on me that you can't really translate poetry the same way you would translate, you know, a court deposition or a UN speech. Because poetry uses language in a very sophisticated way to convey images and emotions and impressions. And if you use those same words in a different language, it's not going to work. You have to kind of absorb the impact and reinvent it. Right?
- [09:11]
Emily Wilson
Yes. Poetry is, of course, the ultra marked kind of language. It's language which draws attention to itself as language. And of course, different poetic traditions mock language in different ways. So in the archaic period, the Homeric poetry uses dactylic hexameter, which is a regular traditional meter associated with narrative poetry. So in order to create the same effect, I use the meter that's traditional in English, which is iambic pentameter, rather than using free verse or prose, which is what most modern translators do. And then similarly, Homeric poetry is marked by other sound patterns, such as alliteration and assonance. So again, I mean, if you're translating an AD or a court deposition, you may not need to think about the sound effects in quite the same way as I think you do need to think about the sound effects if you're translating a poem, especially one that's designed for oral performance.
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Dave Davies
Wow. So you really put yourself in a difficult position here. You're not only taking these sophisticated ideas and images and stories, trying to put them in. In English, but you're doing it using meter in iamic pentameter. And you also use the same number of lines as the original poem.
- [10:23]
Emily Wilson
Yes. How many?
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Dave Davies
12,000. Something like that?
- [10:25]
Emily Wilson
Over 12,000? Yes. So that was another thing that I thought on reflection about my experience in teaching the Odyssey in many different translations was that as you said before, translation is very difficult. There's never a one to one equivalent of this word in Archaic Greek means exactly the same as this word in contemporary English. So you're always thinking, Maybe there are 10 different words I could use there. So the temptation is always to expand on the original, to use three or four words where the original might use only one. But then, of course, you're also portraying something that's essential also to the experience of the original, which is its pacing and the rapidity. The propulsive quality of please tell me more, tell me more, keep going. Is very much part of the experience of Homer in Greek, and I felt was diluted by the verbose quality of quite a lot of existing translations.
- [11:20]
Dave Davies
I want to hear some of what you do, and it's interesting, you know, in your book you note that English translations of the Odyssey date back to 1611, I think, and continue up. And some of them are very recent within, you know, in the 21st century. So I thought we would take a passage, a familiar passage, maybe have you give us the reading in the original Greek and then maybe talk about one of the existing translations and then give us a sense of what you did with your own. So what passage would you like to read to us?
- [11:55]
Emily Wilson
So in the book, I discuss at great length the challenges of translating what's called the proem of the Odyssey, which is the first few lines of the poem. So maybe we can focus on that. Andra moyne per musa polutropon hos mala polla plankthe. Polo un d' anthropoen danastia kaino unegno polo docen ponto pathanalgia hon kadathumo arnemanos hen tepen kain noston he tairun alud hos hetaurus per autoi gar svetaresina tastalies sin olonto nepioi hoi catabus superiono se elioio estion autar hotuisin a fe letter nostimon emar ton hamathen getha a thugeter dios eepa kaihemin.
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Dave Davies
And that's our guest classics professor, Emily Wilson, reciting the first few lines of the Odyssey in the ancient Greek from memory. Very well done. You know, I've seen you do this a lot on tape. You are a real performer.
- [13:10]
Emily Wilson
I love to perform. I love to ham it up. It's fun. Yeah. Yes.
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Dave Davies
Do you picture yourself, then, like an actor on a stage, or do you picture yourself, I don't know, a couple thousand years ago in a hall, doing this before a Greek audience?
- [13:24]
Emily Wilson
I mean, I want to try to channel the experience of being a rhapsode. And of course, there's overlap between being the kind of archaic Greek poetry performer who would learn bits of Homer by heart and perform them and being a translator that I'm trying to channel the experience of the original and then convey it for new audiences or listeners.
- [13:43]
Dave Davies
All right, now, those words that you just recited have been translated many, many times in English and other languages, of course, but I'm going to ask you to give us the translation of one that's well known, and then we'll talk about how you translate it in your own work.
- [13:59]
Emily Wilson
Yes. So I'll read the Robert Fagel's translation in free verse, because that was, I think, is still a very popular translation. So I think it's worth continuing to talk about because it's a translation that many people read. Sing to me of the man, Muse the man of twists and turns driven time and again, of course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds Many pains he suffered Heartsick on the open sea Fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home but he could not save them from disaster Hard as he strove the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all the blind fools they devoured the cattle of the sun and the sun God blotted out the day of their return Launch out on his story Muse, Daunter of Zeus. Start from where you will sing for our time, too.
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Dave Davies
That's. Robert Fagel was the translator, a very widely known translation. So what is in there that was added or modified from the Greek?
- [15:09]
Emily Wilson
So I think there are lots of very interesting choices, and I'll just pick up on a couple. One is the choice to repeat the word sing when the original verb in the start of the Odyssey, in contrast to the Iliad, where the verb invoking the muse is sing. In the Odyssey, it's tel. It's so it starts in a way at a more casual or more. A more ordinary level as we're building up towards what is in some ways a more domestic story than that of the Iliad. So I think there's something quite striking about choosing to translate a tell verb with a sing verb. So there's a grandiosity to the language. I also think it's interesting how Fagl's very, very often adds in metaphors, idioms, one could say, cliches that are common in contemporary American English that don't correspond to idioms or metaphors in the original. So, for instance, we have twists and turns time and again, of course, the idea of launching out on the story as if the story is like a boat. But none of that, none of those metaphors are there in the original Greek. And of course, there's nothing wrong with adding in a lot of metaphors. It's a friendly gesture to the reader. But I think if you haven't read the original, you may not quite realize how much is Fagl's domesticizing and adding things to bring this ancient poem closer to the assumed metaphors and ways of thinking of his 20th century American readership.
- [16:38]
Dave Davies
Okay, so let's hear what Emily Wilson did when you sat down. You took six years creating this translation. This is the opening lines of the poem.
- [16:46]
Emily Wilson
Yes, this is the opening lines of the poem. And I should also say that this is a rewrite. This is not my. Not exactly the same as my published 2017 version, because I'm actually in the process of doing it all again. So I'm going to do this expanded version.
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Dave Davies
Spoiler.
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Emily Wilson
New retranslation. Sorry about the spoiler there. You can cut that out if you want to. That's fine. Tell me about a complicated man, muse, who was lost so long and fled so far when he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. And how he saw and understood so many people and so many places and suffered so much in his heart at sea as he was struggling to save his life and bring his men back home. But even so, despite his efforts, he did not protect them. Poor fools. They died by their own willfulness. They ate the cattle of Hyperion, the sun, who took away their chance of home. These events now tell us also, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, begin from anywhere.
- [17:48]
Dave Davies
So one of the things that people have really, really noticed is that you describe Odysseus as a complicated man. And there are a few words in the original which don't translate easily. A man of many turns. Right? And so translators have done all kinds of things with that in saying it's complicated. Well, I mean, you've thought about this a lot. I know from reading your book you spent a lot of time going back and forth. But what it does, it sort of it doesn't tell us exactly in what way he is complicated. And I guess what it's sort of saying is hang in there, you're going to hear quite a story about this guy.
- [18:22]
Emily Wilson
Yes. I mean, I see it in a way as a teaser for the poem to come. It piques your interest because you're not told right away a very definitive thing about Odysseus. So I think it's very much a choice on the part of the composer of this poem not to use one of the more common epithets for Odysseus, such as polumetis, meaning crafty, or polumechnos, meaning that he's skilled in technological inventions like the wooden horse. But this much more rare epithet, polutropos, which Fagels translates as twists, a man of twists and turns. It suggests a twistiness, a turniness, a layeredness which applies both to the protagonist and the poem and his journey. And we don't yet know how many disguises or turns will this protagonist take or what will it look like, what will it sound like in the narrative of the poem.
- [19:13]
Dave Davies
And kind of the many faceted character of Odysseus, I guess, is one of the things that you really miss in the movie.
- [19:19]
Emily Wilson
That's the shame. I mean, I think the movie is doing something in a way very brave by stripping away everything that we expect. And I certainly feel this way, love about Odysseus in the poem, which is that he's clever and multiple and smart and therefore a fascinating character. Whereas the movie gives us a version of Matt Damon as Odysseus who is not required to be smart. Instead, he's just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War.
- [19:51]
Dave Davies
So we're gonna take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Emily Wilson. She's a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania who has translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. Her new collection of essays is titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH
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Emily Wilson
Maybe these effects are much broader than we previously thought.
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Ideas about the brain, addiction and empathy. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:50]
Dave Davies
The most compelling global stories straight to your ears. That's what we do at State of the World from NPR developments in Ukraine, Iran with Ebola, but also how British beavers are fighting the effects of climate change.
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Emily Wilson
So we said the beavers can do at probably a fraction of the cost, certainly more sustainably.
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Dave Davies
Listen to State of the World every weekday on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is FRESH air. I'm Dave Davies. As audiences are still streaming into theaters to see Christopher Nolan's $250 million adaptation of the classic story the Odyssey, we are speaking with University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson. Her translation of the odyssey, completed in 2017, was praised by critics and scholars for bringing the ancient text to life. Nolan cited her translation in discussing his approach to the character of Odysseus in his film. Wilson also translated the Iliad and has written several books. Her latest, a collection of essays about ancient literature, is titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. I want to look at some of the specific episodes of the Odyssey and Odysseus journey and how in the popular imagination they have strayed from the original text. One of them involves the sirens. You want to explain what the sirens are?
- [22:11]
Emily Wilson
The Sirens in the archaic and classical Greek tradition are always represented in ancient art as kind of bird characters with women's faces. And they hint at this idea that there might be divine bird like creatures who could lure sailors to their doom. So they're goddesses who have this enchanting song. And in the Odyssey, they appear in a very, very short episode as one of the islands past which Odysseus and his comrades sail. Odysseus blocks his men's ears with wax so that they don't hear the enchanting song and therefore want to go close to the rocks of the Sirens and end up joining the many bones that surround the sirens on their island. But Odysseus himself is eager to hear their song, so he has the men tie him to the mast, which is a very memorable scene in the movie. It's also a very memorable scene in the poem. And they sing a song that seems to entice him with the possibility of hearing everything that happens anywhere on Earth. So in a way, they're like being sucked into the Internet. But they also promise this possibility of learning more and more and more about his own glory, because they promise also that they know who he is and they know how glorious he was at Troy.
- [23:31]
Dave Davies
Right. So it's what they're saying, it's the content of their song that is alluring.
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Emily Wilson
Yes.
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Dave Davies
And a lot of the translations refer to their lips. And birds don't have lips.
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Emily Wilson
Birds don't have lips. So, I mean, that was. I discussed that a little bit in the book, that it was interesting to me to realize that the popular tropes about what is a siren have affected modern translation choices such that the pre 19th century translators don't do this move of giving the Sirens lips, whereas many of the 20th century translators do that. So it's the suggestion that they are these luscious ladies with their beautiful lips and that Odysseus is gazing at their lips and presumably also at their bodies, rather than thinking primarily about how is this song going to be going to tempt him with the possibilities of infinite knowledge.
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Dave Davies
Sorry, I was a bit much in the Nolan film. It's a little vague. I'm looking at him through the mist. I'm not kind of sure what these creatures are.
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Emily Wilson
I mean, they seem. They're definitely not birds. They're surrounded by seals. They don't seem to have any clothes on, but I think they're sort of naked seal ladies, but I'm not really sure.
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Dave Davies
Okay.
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Emily Wilson
I don't know.
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Dave Davies
One other thing that I think is really striking and that is when Odysseus finally makes it home. His home, his castle, I guess, is filled with these men who want to marry his wife Penelope. And they're having banquets in there and drinking his wine and eating, you know, boars that they've slaughtered. And Odysseus, through a lot of trickery, manages to get them in the dining hall without weapons and kills them all with the help of his son Telemachus and a few others. But there's a second set of killings, and that's the one that's really not in what's not in the movie at all, I don't think. And that says something about kind of, well, the nature of life then an important part of the poem. Just tell us about that.
- [25:24]
Emily Wilson
Yes. So as you say, there's this amazing trick that Odysseus does with the bow that he's the only one who can string his bow, can shoot through all 12 iron axe heads. Thus showing that he can conquer both weapons of bronze and weapons of iron. He can move, move into this new age. He's the hero who conquers time. And he can also use this weapon to slaughter all the suitors of his wife. Then once all of these, in a way, peers, peer warriors, men, have been slaughtered, Odysseus delegates the final set of killings to his son Telemachus, and says that he must hack the life out of the 12 women and one man who have most intimately served the desires of the suitors. So that's the 12 women who have had sex with the suitors and the one man, Melanthius, who's done the most to bring them all this meat and wine. Telemachus then hangs the 12 women with a sailor's rope and then hacks off the hands and feet of Melanthius, who'd been bound up on the ceiling of the palace. So there's a way that this real distinction between the slaughter of the suitors, who are male equals, and the slaughter of these 13 enslaved people, who obviously are unarmed, and it's about claiming back the full ownership and glory and control of the household by destroying those who have that kind of memory of what it was for the house to be claimed by so many other men.
- [26:55]
Dave Davies
Now, this is, by any modern standard, an utterly barbaric act. I mean, these enslaved women who had sex with these men, who. They really didn't have agency. And to decide that they all must be killed to restore the honor of the house is kind of shocking. What's interesting is, is that you write that some of the subsequent translators have characterized these women differently in a way that heaps blame on them before their sexual conduct. Right?
- [27:22]
Emily Wilson
Yes. I was surprised to look at that more closely. I think I actually hadn't noticed that in the way that I did after I'd published my translation. And I was thinking about, are there ways that I might have done certain things differently even without noticing it? So, for instance, before Telemachus does this,
- [27:40]
Dave Davies
I think that's Odysseus son, right?
- [27:42]
Emily Wilson
Telemachus, Odysseus son, who's killing these 12 women and one enslaved man. A lot of modern translations make Telemachus use sexualized, abusive language to the women in that trio of lines. So, for instance, I think the Fagles translation has him say, I won't give a clean death to these sluts. And then many other translators, like the Lombardo translation, the Fitzgerald translation, all add similar language about the women as sluts or whores, which is not actually what the Greek does. The Greek suggests that Telemachus thinks he has to kill these women, but he doesn't suggest they're sex workers or that he's going to blame them in a personal way for actions that they had very little or no autonomy over. In fact, I think that actually makes a little bit of a nonsense of the narrative.
- [28:35]
Dave Davies
Yeah. That's pretty remarkable, isn't it?
- [28:37]
Emily Wilson
It's surprising, yes. I mean, I think it's partly about trying to normalize and domesticize this very alien, ancient, imagined world in this poem, such that if you think a quote unquote hero has to be a good guy by modern American standards, then you can't have Telemachus murdering these unarmed women. And so we've got to give him a really good motive. So they must be very bad. And so we've got to add in a recognizable kind of badness, even if that isn't entirely in the text. And then similarly, if we're uncomfortable with enslavement, as of course, we are in the modern world, many translators use words like servant or maid to translate words that unambiguously mean enslaved person.
- [29:21]
Dave Davies
I'm going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania who has translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. Wilson has a new collection of essays. It's titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. We'll talk more after this break. This is FRESH air.
- [29:38]
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- [30:37]
Emily Wilson
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- [30:46]
Dave Davies
This is FRESH air, and we are speaking with Emily Wilson. She's a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania who has translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, which has gotten more attention lately with the release of Christopher Nolan's new film. Wilson has a new collection of essays titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. Let's talk a little bit about your background. You grew up in England in a family of scholars. Your sister Bea is a noted food writer. Tell us a little about your childhood. What kind of kid were you?
- [31:16]
Emily Wilson
I was a real nerd, and I'm still a real nerd, as you can probably guess. I mean, I spent, I spent so much time my childhood reading. I was always very shy and introverted. And as you said, my parents were scholars. My dad, A.N. wilson, is a writer. My mother, Catherine Duncan Jones, was a Shakespeare scholar. So it was assumed that Bea and I would spend most of our time reading. And we did.
- [31:38]
Dave Davies
Yeah. At age 8, you had what you've described as a turning point in your life. Most of us don't have turning points at age 8. I think maybe you were in a play. Tell us about this.
- [31:49]
Emily Wilson
Yes. So I went to the local primary school and the teachers there were getting sick of doing nativity plays every year, so they wanted to mix it up and use their creativity. So they did a kids adaptation of the Odyssey. And Bea was Helen of Troy. She was great. And I got to be Athena and I got to make my own tinfoil helmet and we got to gouge out the eye of the headmaster who played Polyphemus. He was wonderfully game and let us do it. And it was such fun. And for me, as a very shy child, I realized that there was this wonderful outlet through the world of stories, especially through the world of Greek myth. So it turned me on to the fact that this world of magic existed and I was the wrong generation for Percy Jackson. But I read all of the kids adaptations that I could get my hands on. And then eventually I went to a high school where I could learn Latin and Greek. And so my life was made.
- [32:47]
Dave Davies
Right, right, right. You know, the New Yorker profile of you kind of suggested that, that you're from two different worlds, being from England and the United States, and that somehow that connects to your study of the classics. A different world.
- [33:01]
Emily Wilson
Yeah, I think it's partly, I mean, just specifically about the fact that when I was studying Homer as an undergraduate, nobody ever said you must read this or that translation. Translations were very much despised. They were for amateurs, if you're a serious classicist, of course, you read the poems in Greek, you read the commentaries, you read the dictionaries, you read the original text. Whereas once I got to this country, and especially once I started teaching in America, I realized there's so much potential for translations to introduce serious undergraduates to the world of ancient literature studied and read in translation. And therefore translation actually really matters. So I think the combination of the fact that I didn't go to an American high school, so I wasn't made to read a particular translation of the Odyssey in ninth grade, so I didn't imprint on a particular one. So I didn't think of myself, myself as being iconoclastic. I wasn't destroying something which I loved when I was 16 or my teacher told me was the, the Homer when I was 16. Instead I'd imprinted on the Greek. But then once I'd been teaching Homer in many different translations for many years, I realized there were things I could convey from the Greek that would actually be useful for English speaking readers to have available to them in a translation of Homer.
- [34:19]
Dave Davies
You know, in photographs of you, you can see a lot of visible tattoos. Do you want to describe some of them in their meaning?
- [34:27]
Emily Wilson
I mean, I started getting tattoos very late in life once I thought, oh, I've got tenure, who cares what I look like? It's fine. I can do whatever I like. I have tattoos that primarily represent both my family and also the other elements of my life that I see as absolutely permanent. And I'm never going to not be committed to this, which is my love of ancient literature. So I have, for instance, a spear on one leg and a bow on another for the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's Achilles and Odysseus. I also have horses on one arm for the immortal horses of Achilles and an octopus on the other arm for the multiplicity of Odysseus. So I tend to think of myself as having an Odyssey side and an Iliad side. I also have a lot of blank space. So I'm working out what else to do.
- [35:14]
Dave Davies
That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. You've taken some criticism since you released your translation and probably more as the film has come out, because there's been this criticism by some might say, traditionalists and kind of right wing Internet contributors. I'm just wondering how that has hit you. One of the criticisms is that your translations kind of don't honor the ancient sounds of the text that people are familiar with. There was one that said, you know, the translation does not read as heroic and ancient, like other translations, and that to modernize the text is to suck the ancient life out of it. What do you make of this, this criticism? How do you respond to it?
- [36:01]
Emily Wilson
I mean, I honestly feel that my goal is to do the opposite of that. I think in many ways I'm a very traditionalist translator, including by using traditional meter and trying to get back to elements of the original that I think have been obscured by 20th and 21st century translation norms, translation practices. I also think it's really important to remember that the archaic term heros, from which we get hero, doesn't mean superhero in a mid 20th century American way. It's not about saving Gotham City. It's about characters who are larger than life, who are close to the gods, who do extraordinary things. So I think the idea that either the Odyssey or the Iliad are giving us a sort of simplistic idealization of their protagonists is a real misreading and doing it in some ways disrespectful or dishonoring to the original poems, which are so much more truthful than they would be if they were these sort of very moralistic, didactic tales that some people on the Internet seem to think they are. I also think quite a lot of these people on the Internet, meaning not actually have read the Odyssey very closely or at all. Who knows?
- [37:10]
Dave Davies
You know, there's this. This whole new current in American culture, particularly among young men, maybe young white men, of embracing some image of masculinity that they say is rooted in, you know, a traditional view, maybe exemplified by some of the heroes of the classics. And they seem to object to you in some way for violating this. Is the. Are those the complaints you're getting? What have you been hearing from these folks?
- [37:37]
Emily Wilson
I mean, I don't think most of these people are very serious students of Homer or students of ancient history. I think these are people who, from what I can tell, are people who want to construct some kind of narrative to justify prejudices that they are very much attached to. I wish that some of them would like to just have a face to face conversation with me rather than spamming me with emails. I mean, I also get so many lovely, lovely emails from strangers all the time. I mean, in fact, I've got far more recently with the new attention to the Odyssey and the Iliad in the wake of this spectacular Hollywood film. So I actually don't want the discourse to be framed in terms of it's all just about hatred and partisanship. I think it's actually there's a lot of it that's not about that. A lot of the the story here is that there really are new readers, new audiences coming to Homer and ancient literature. And also some of my favorites are people who've read the Odyssey of the Iliad years ago or been forced through it in school and then come back to it and realize there is so much more in this poem than I realized when I read it when I was 16.
- [38:47]
Dave Davies
On your website, there's a place to send emails if you want book an interview or a speaking engagement, another one if you want to offer praise. And then one is titled simply Misogynistic Trolls. And there's a notice there that says, please know that I reserve the right to share your message in presentations and on platforms such as Blue Sky Substack and in articles I write. If I use your work, I will be sure to credit you for your remarks with your full name and contact email. All threatening messages are reported to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. What's been the impact on your life?
- [39:17]
Emily Wilson
I mean, I took my contact details down from my pen website. I've made myself a little harder to find, though. Also, I don't want to be invisible. My name is not no man. I want to actually be able to be out in the world and speak about things I care about with people who are engaged and want to talk to me. I mean, I mostly just remind myself that this is a tiny pocket of the world. Most people are decent and well intentioned. And I also, when I was a child, I learned by heart Kipling's poem if, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, I can do the whole thing. But I'm not going to waste your time with the whole thing. But it ends up with the idea that if you can do all of that, if you can put things in perspective, you'll be a man, my son. And so I just think I'm the bigger man here.
- [40:10]
Dave Davies
Okay, we need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania who has translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. Our new collection of essays is Is Crossing the Wine Dark Sea. We'll talk more after this break. This is FRESH air. On a new episode of Are we doomed? We are losing the moon. The moon is indeed drifting away. And what to do? Blow it up. Yeah, I think that's overkill the moon, why we might need it, a real plan to nuke it and new space race for it. Join me for Are We Doomed? Distributed by the NPR Network. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:54]
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- [41:18]
Dave Davies
This is FRESH air. We're speaking with Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who's translated the Iliad and the Odyssey, which have gotten more attention lately with the release of Christopher Nolan's new film. Wilson has a new collection of essays titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. You know, when people describe you often the first thing they mention is that you're the first woman to have translated the Odyssey into English. It was one of the first things I mentioned. But I think I read that when you the publishing contract to do this translation, you didn't even know that you would have been the first woman to translate it into English. Was that news?
- [41:52]
Emily Wilson
Yes, that was news to me. I mean, I hadn't hadn't even thought about the fact that all of the translations I'd used in the classroom before were by men. I mean, that wasn't actually part of my motivation at all. I mean, I've already talked about my motivation in terms of poetics and in terms of pacing and in terms of the protodramatic vividness of the poem. It wasn't that I wanted to I thought, you know, Homer hasn't got enough girl cooties on it. Let me get that. Which I think is sometimes the online discourse seems to be some version of that or some version also of I mean, it can be let's celebrate her for being a girl, which I think either one of those is actually a little bit misleading about my actual work.
- [42:28]
Dave Davies
Right. I think having listened to it, I get that. How do you react when people call it a feminist translation of the Odyssey?
- [42:36]
Emily Wilson
I think it's very limiting in terms of women's work and also in terms of feminism, if you think anything a woman does is is inherently feminist. I also think it's misleading about the fact that, of course, there were many, many female classicists, many female Homerists. There were also many female translators of Homer into other languages There was one by a French woman called Anne Dacier from centuries ago into French prose. So I think it's this blinkered idea both about gender and about the idea that the English speaking world is the only thing that exists. I mean, I certainly don't approach the task of translation with the assumption that all female characters will be presented as ridiculous, but I don't think that's actually feminism. I think feminism actually needs to be a bit more than that if there's going to be a feminist intervention. I do approach the task of translating Homer with the idea that these poems are really good and they're really good at characterizing all of the characters, including female characters, including enslaved characters, that we really do get these richly realized, distinct points of view. But again, that's not actually about feminism.
- [43:49]
Dave Davies
You know, when I started preparing for this interview, I read a lot about you. I read things you'd written. I listened to podcasts and interviews of yours, and then I decided, wait a minute, there's an audiobook of this translation. And so I started listening at the very beginning. I listened to almost all of it and really enjoyed it. How would you recommend people who want to engage with your work read it? Listen to the audiobook? Both.
- [44:14]
Emily Wilson
I love that you listen to the audiobook. So the audiobook of My Odyssey is done by Claire Danes, and the audiobook of My Iliad is done by Audra McDonald. I think they both did amazing jobs. Homer, as we've said already, was usually experienced in antiquity in oral performance. So there's something very authentic about listening to an audiobook of Homer. But also I think it's fine to read it however you prefer. Read it on your phone, on your Kindle if you want to, or get the paperback. And then you could underline things if you throw in passages that you like or don't like. I also love that I very often hear from people who are forming little book clubs and reading it out loud with their friends or with their partners, or reading it out loud to their children. I think it's really fun to be. For readers to also be actively engaged with these poems. And you can. Readers can do what I always love doing whenever I get to read a little bit of put on funny voices. And I think people should both read it in whatever form works for you and have fun with it.
- [45:11]
Dave Davies
You spent six years translating the Odyssey, similar time translating the Iliad, and now you want to do it again?
- [45:18]
Emily Wilson
Yes, I'm addicted, yes.
- [45:22]
Dave Davies
Why? I mean, were there things that you felt you got wrong or you needed to Enhance or I don't know.
- [45:28]
Emily Wilson
So, I mean, as we said a few minutes ago, I was very keen to try to replicate something like the experience of the rapidity of Homeric poetry in both my Odyssey and Iliad translation. So with my 2017 Odyssey translation, I confined myself to the same number of lines as the original, which I liked in terms of how it conveys the speed of the original poem. But I also was constantly feeling if I just had one or two more syllables, I could do more with that phrase or that word. With the Iliad translation, I gave up on the line for line constraint. So I use a few more lines than the original has and I felt it worked better. I felt it enabled me to use more polysyllabic than I could with the original Odyssey translation. I was always forced to, whenever possible, use a monosyllable because otherwise the line count won't work out. Especially because I was using.
- [46:22]
Dave Davies
It's remarkable that you could pull that off. To me,
- [46:26]
Emily Wilson
it was a fun challenge. It was not just the fun of engaging with Homer all the time, every day, but also that fun language challenge, which translation is fascinating in itself because it's this constant puzzle about how can you do the impossible with two languages. So, new translation of the Odyssey. I'm redoing the whole thing to match the approach of my Iliad. I'm prioritizing many of the same things as I do in my existing Odyssey translation. Metricality, multivocality, the directness, the emotional impact, all of that. But I also am using more lines, therefore longer words sometimes. That also means that I can do more with the repetitions of the original. And I'm also going to have much, much longer. Endnotes.
- [47:12]
Dave Davies
You having fun with it?
- [47:13]
Emily Wilson
I'm having so much fun, yes. I'm over halfway through and I never want it to end.
- [47:17]
Dave Davies
Emily Wilson, thank you so much for speaking with us.
- [47:20]
Emily Wilson
Thank you so much.
- [47:21]
Dave Davies
Emily Wilson is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania who's translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. Her new collection of essays is titled Crossing the Wine, Dark Sea. On tomorrow's show we speak with Emmy award winning actor Jon Bernthal. He often plays intense, violent, damaged characters like Mikey from the Bear and Shane from the Walking Dead. When talking about himself and his characters, Bernthal says it's easy for someone who's scared to turn into someone who's really scary. He currently stars in the Odyssey and the new Spider man film, A Brand New Day. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show. And get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram prfresh. Air Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nashley, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show for Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley. I'm Dave Davies.
- [48:48]
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