It’s nearly impossible to escape the summer’s discourse around Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and we have Emily Wilson to thank for at least some of that. Before she was speaking out about the, ahem, weak points in Nolan’s adaptation, in 2017, the British classicist, translator, and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania became the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English verse.
Ahead of the release of her third nonfiction book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, in September, Wilson recently shared five books that aided her translation of the Odyssey with Vogue. Find them all below.
Homer’s Odyssey: Oxford Readings in Classical Studies by Lillian E. Doherty
Homer’s Odyssey: Oxford Readings in Classical Studies
Apologies that this is an academic book, and therefore expensive, but maybe you can get it from your local library. This is an excellent collection of scholarly critical essays about the poem—a great sample of some of the exciting literary critical work that has been and is still being done on Homer. My perspectives on the poem have been informed and shaped by the work of many brilliant colleagues and predecessors, including those in this volume and many more. I’d also like to shout out, in particular, the work of Irene de Jong, whose narratological commentaries on both the Odyssey and the Iliad have helped me and many other Homerists gain a deeper
understanding of the sophistication and fluidity of Homeric narrative perspective.
Essays in Criticism (1865) by Matthew Arnold
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This collection includes Arnold’s essays on translating Homer, which he himself never did, but he did a lot of pontificating about how it should and especially should not be done, devoting many pages to skewering a contemporary translator (poor Francis Newman) for his convoluted, peculiar, and verbose approach. I always find it funny when people describe my work as “modern” and even more so when people say it’s “not Victorian.” I took great inspiration from Arnold, maybe the most Victorian of Victorians, in his account of the primary qualities of Homer: plainness of syntax and thought, rapidity and nobility. I felt that those qualities are genuinely essential to the Greek original, and weren’t well represented by most twentieth and twenty-first century English-language versions. There were pieces of Arnold’s own verse style that I also felt I could draw inspiration from that exemplify some of those four qualities, perhaps especially in his blank verse poem “Sohrab and Rustum”; lines like “Unwillingly the spirit fled away.” It’s neither “modern” nor “Victorian,” and it has a quasi-Homeric rapidity and plainness.
