‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson: Nolan should've hired a screenwriter

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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 in New 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 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Christopher Nolan has cited her translation and discussing his approach to the character of Odysseus in his new film. In a review, Wilson called Nolan's film "A Bismally Written 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 the Stallion and the comedies of Aristophanies in fifth-century Athens. The book is titled "Crossing the Wine Dark Sea." Emily Wilson, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for your Zenia and having me. Zenia. It's a Zenia. It's a hospitality. 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? 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 Calipso, a goddess with whom he's been spending the past seven years.

And finally after many misadventures makes it back to Ithaca and after many more misadventures

on Ithaca reunites with his son tolemica, his wife, Penelope, and slaughtered the suitors of his wife. 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? Absolutely. I think people should see it.

“What 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 be 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 says stars studied cast and they're doing that absolute best with the script they were given. They're amazing. Not doing very much with character, right? I mean, the language 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.

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. That seemed to me rather a thin motivation, especially compared to the rich layered characterisation

It also just compared to a good movie.

I would like to have deeper characterisation in a film. I would like to care more. By 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 that intervene in human events. They are angry at times and jealous and capricious and compassionate.

“And they are just kind of missing from this film, aren't they?”

They are kind of missing. I mean, there's a moment when Zendaya, who's sort of Athena, but maybe not, says to Matt Damon's 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 wants to have it both ways. There's a noise in the soundtrack that's thunder. So of course, you see there, the Zeus's lore, which is repeatedly invoked.

And yet, it's also very unclear, do all we actually suppose to believe in Zeus, some Poseidon, and that is clip. So we've got it. Is Sociogodes. I would have liked a little bit more of the Divine.

Yeah, you get a sense. And poem.

And I'd listen to your translation of a world that was really different where people felt

the gods. This wasn't, 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. Yeah. I mean, I love the alienness of the Homeric poems.

I mean, they're 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 is runs all the way through the Odyssey and the Alien. Well, we're not here to talk about the movie. I want to talk about this work that you do, which has gotten so, 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?”

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 Aliad 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 rapists who had learned 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 be a bigger mission 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." One of the other thing is that the Humberick poems are also proto-traumatic.

They were composed before drama really existed, but they are their multivocal. They have these different characters who speak in different voices, have different perspectives. And I felt some of those proto-traumatic qualities, the multivocality, was very often flattened out in existing translations that I'd used with my students. You know, I think you say in your new book at some point that translation is impossible.

The poetry is really impossible, 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 U.N. speech because poetry uses language in a very sophisticated way to convey images and emotions and impressions.

If you use the same word in a different language, it's not going to work.

“You have to kind of absorb the impact and reinvent it, right?”

Yes, poetry is, of course, the ultra-moxt 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 Humberick poetry uses dactinic 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 English, which is a ambient amateur, rather than using free verse or prose, which is what most modern translators do. And then similarly, Humberick poetry is marked by other sound patterns such as a literation and assnance.

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. Well, 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 English, but you're doing it using me or an I amic pentameter, and you also use the same number of lines as the original poem.

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 our cake Greek means exactly

the same as this word in contemporary English. So you're always thinking, maybe there were ten different words I could use there. 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 betraying 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 and Greek, and I felt was diluted by the verbose quality of quite a lot of existing translations. I wanted 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 in some of them are very recent within, you know, in the 21st century. So I thought you would take a passage from your 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 us?

So in the book, I discuss a great length, the challenges of translating what's called the

program of the Odyssey, which is the first few lines of the poem, so maybe we can focus

on that. [Speaking in French] , 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.

[Speaking in French]

“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. I mean, I want to try to channel the experience of being a rap solo, and of course, there's overlap between being the kind of archaic Greek poetry performer who would learn bits of homework by heart and perform them, and then being a translator that I'm trying to channel the experience of the original, and then convey it for new audiences or listeners.

[Speaking in French] 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 translated in your own work. So I'll read the Robert Fagels translation in Frievers 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 halode heights of Troy. Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds. The 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.

time too.

Oh, that's Robert Fagels.

Robert Fagels. Robert Fagels. Robert Fagels.

“So what is in there that was added or modified from the Greek?”

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, Aida, in the Odyssey it's tell, it's Apple, and Neppere. So it starts in a way that is more casual or 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.

They also think it's interesting how Fagels 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 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 Fagels, domesticizing, and adding things to bring this ancient poem closer to the assumed metaphors and ways of thinking of his 20th century American leadership. OK, so let's hear what Emily Wilson did when you sat down.

You took six years of creating this translation.

This is the opening lines of the poem. And I should also say that this is a rewrite. This is 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.

OK, spoiler, spoiler. You read falseness. Sorry, but there was spoiler back. You can cut that out if you want to. 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. Put fools, they died by their own willfulness.

They ate the cattle of Hyperion, the Sun, who took away their chance of home. But these events now tell us also, God, us, daughter of Zeus, begin from anywhere. So one of the things that people have 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. And saying he's complicated, well, I mean, you thought about this a lot. I know from reading your book, you spent a lot of time going back and forth. But 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. Yes, I mean, I see it in a way as a teaser for the poem to come. It peaks your interest because you're not told right away a very definitive thing about Odysseus.

“So I think it's a 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 polometis, meaning crafty, or polomeknos, meaning that he's skilled in technological inventions, like the wooden horse. But this much more rare epithet, polutropos, which faggles translators, twists, a man of twists and turns, it suggests a twistiness, a terniness, a lay-adness, 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? And kind of the many faceted character of Odysseus, I guess, is one of the things that you really miss in the book, because it's a shame. 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, in my case, 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 Mademona's Odysseus, who does it, 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. So, we're going to take another break here, let me introduce you.

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, but this is fresh air. Oh, hey there, I'm Brittany Luce, and, I don't know, maybe this is a little out of pocket

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As audiences are still streaming into theaters to see Christopher Nolan's $250 million

adaptation of the classic story of the Odyssey. We're 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 Eliot and his written several books. Her latest 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's journey and how in the popular imagination they have strayed from the original text, one of them involves

the Syrians. You want to explain what the Syrians are?

The Syrians, in the UK, can classical Greek tradition, are always represented in ancient art as

bird characters with women's faces, and they hint at this idea that there might be divine bird-like creatures who could hear sailors to their doom. Their goddesses who have this enchanting song, and in the Odyssey they appear in a very, very short episode as one of the island's 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 Syrians and end up joining the many bones that surround the Syrians 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. Right, so it's what they're saying, it's the content of their song that is alluring. And a lot of the translations refer to their lips, but don't have one. But it's 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 troops about what is a Syrian have affected modern translation choices such that the pre-19th century translators don't do this move of making giving the Syrians lips whereas the many of the 20th centuries translators do that. So it's a suggestion that they are these last year's 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? Yeah, I was in the Nolan film with a little vague. I'm looking at him through the mist. I'm not kind of sure what these creatures are. I mean they seem, they're definitely not birds. They're

“surrounded by seals. They seem to have any clothes on, but I think they're a sort of naked”

seal ladies, but I'm not really sure. Okay. 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 band quits in there and drinking his wine

in the dining hall without weapons and kills them all with the help of his son till them because 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 that all I don't think. And if that says something about kind of, well,

“the nature of life then an important part of the punch tell us about that. Yes. So as you say,”

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 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 telemicus 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 Malantheus who's done the most to bring them bring them all this meat and wine.

Telemicus then hangs the 12 women with a sailor's rope and then hacks off the hands and feet

of Malantheus 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. Now this was by any modern standard an

utterly barbaric act. I mean he's 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 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? 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 other ways that I might have done certain things differently even without noticing it. So for instance, before Telemicus does this, I think that- Oh, this is a son. Telemicus is a son who's killing these 12 women and one enslaved man. A lot of modern translations make Telemicus use sexualised abusive language to the women in that trio of lines. So for instance, I think the

figure's translation has him say, I won't give a clean death to these slots and then many other translators like the Lombardo translation, if it's Joel translation, all add similar language about the women as slots or halls, which is not actually what the Greek does. The Greek suggests that Telemicus thinks he has to kill these women but he doesn't suggest their 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.”

No, that's pretty remarkable. It's surprising, yes. And I think it's partly about trying to normalize and domesticize this very alien-enchant-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 Telemicus 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 slave puts in. We're taking out the break here. Let me re-introduce 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.

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she's a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who has translated the Illyid 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 and a family of scholars, your sister B is a noted

“food writer. Tell us a little about your childhood. What kind of kid were you?”

I was a real nerd and I'm still a real nerd as you can probably guess. I spent so much

my childhood reading. I was always very shy and introverted and as you said, my parents were

scholars, my dad, A and Wilson is a writer, my mother, Katherine Duncan Jones, was a Shakespeare scholar, so it was assumed that B and I would spend most of our time reading and we did. Yeah. At age eight, you had what you described as a turning point in your life. Most of us don't have turning point at age eight, I think. Maybe. You're going to play tell us about this. 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 B was Helen of Troy. She was great and I got to be Athena and I got to make my own tin foil helmet and we got to gouge out the eye of the headmaster who played Polyphemus. He was wonderfully game and then that I'll stir it and it was it was such fun and for me it's a very shy child. I realised that there was this wonderful outlet through the world of stories, especially

through the world of Greek myths. 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 that in a Greek and so my life was made. Right, right, right. You know, the New Yorker profile of you kind of suggested 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. Yeah, I think it's part, 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.”

We're if we are serious classes, of course you read the poems and Greek, you read the commentaries, you read the dictionaries, you read the original texts. Whereas once they got to this country and especially once I started teaching in America I realised 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 as being a iconoclastic. I wasn't destroying something which I loved when I was 16 or my teacher told me was that the Homer when I was 16. Instead I imprinted on the Greek but then once I'd been teaching Homer in many different translations for many years I realised 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. photographs of you, you can see a lot of visible tattoos. You want to describe some of them in their meaning. I mean I got started getting tattoos very late in life once I thought, I've got tenure, who can hopefully 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

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 black space so I'm working out what else to do. 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 rightening 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 texts that people are familiar with. The was one that said the translation does not read as heroic and ancient like other translation 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? 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 to get back to elements of the original that I think have been obscured by 20th and 21st century

“translation norms for 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 closer close to the gods, who do extraordinary things. So I think the idea that either

of the Odyssey or the Aliad are giving us a sort of simplistic idealization of their protagonists

is a real mistreading 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 novelistic, 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 may not actually have read the Odyssey very closely or at all who likes. There's this whole new current in American culture, a particularly among young men,

maybe young white men, of embracing some image of masculinity that they say is rooted in 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 that that are those the complaints you're getting?”

What have you been hearing from these folks? I mean I don't think most of these people are very serious students of Homer or students of ancient history. I think there are 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 Aliad 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 got a lot of it that's not about that. A lot of the the story here is that the 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 Aliad 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. On your website there's a place to send emails if you want.

“It's a book an interview or a speaking engagement or another one if you want to offer praise and then”

one of it 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 substacking and 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? I mean I took my

contact details down from my pen website. I've made myself a little harder to find. Though I also I don't want to be invisible. My name is not no man. I want to 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 learnt by heart-kiptings 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

not going to visit 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 thicker man here. 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 Elliott and the Odyssey. Our new collection of essays is Crossing the Wine Dark Sea. We'll talk more after this break. This is fresh air. On Consider This, NPR's afternoon news podcast

we cover everything from politics to the economy to the world but every story starts with a question. NPR, we stand for your right to be curious to make sense of the biggest story of the day and what it means for you. Follow Consider This, wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. We're speaking with Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania who's translated the Elliott 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 mentioned 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 got 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 nice? Yes, there was news to me. I mean I 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 politics and in terms of pacing and in terms of the proto-traumatic vividness of the poem.

It wasn't that I wanted to, I thought, you know, Homer hasn't got enough gold cookies on it, let me get rid of that. Which I think is sometimes the online discolors 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. Right, I think having listened to it, I get that. How do you react to people call it a feminist

translation of the honestly? 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 inherently feminist. I also think it's misleading about the fact that of course there were many, many female classes, many female homerists. There were also many female translators of Homer into other languages. There was one by a French woman called Andasia from centuries ago in French prose. So I think it's, it's this

“linkhead idea both about gender and about the idea that the English-speaking world is the only thing”

that exists. I mean I suddenly 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 has 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, which we realize distinct points of view. But again that's not actually about feminism. When I started preparing for this interview, I read a lot about you. I read things you'd read and I listened to podcasts and interviews of yours and then I decided to wait a minute. There's an audio book of the Strangelations. 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 audio book, both. I love the lesson to the audio book. So the audio book of my Odyssey is done by Claire Danes and the audio book of my Iliad is done by Audromic Donald. I think

me both did amazing jobs. Homer, as we've said already, was usually experienced in antiquity

in oral performance. So it's something very authentic about listening to an audio book 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 paper back and then you could underline things if you”

have passages that you like or don't like. I also love that I very often hear from people who are forming little booklubs 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

whenever I get to read a little bit of put on funny voices and I think people should both

“read it and whatever form works for you and have fun with it. You spent six years translating the”

Odyssey similar time translating the alien and now you want to do it again? Yes, I would do to just why I mean were there things that you felt you got wrong or you needed to enhance or I don't know. 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 her merit 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 without 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”

polysilabic words than I could with the original Odyssey translation and I was always forced to

whenever possible use a monociliable because otherwise the the line count went work out especially because I was using the remarkable that you could pull that off to me. It was a fun challenge so 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 with my 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 more lines therefore longer words sometimes and that also means that I can do more with the repetitions of the original and I'm also going to have much much longer inmates. You haven't fun with? I'm having so much fun. Yes, I'm over half

way through and I never wanted to end. Emily Wilson thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you so

much. 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 John Burnthall. 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, Burnthall 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 at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger, our technical director at Ingenier is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support from Adam Stanashowsky.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers and Marie Baldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Fayette Challenger, Susenia Cundee, Ann O'Bowman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper, Roberto Chorock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies. DLP ones are best known as wheat lost drugs, but they may also help people cut back on alcohol,

cigarettes, and opioids. They seem to work for many types of addiction. Maybe these effects are much broader than we previously thought. 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.

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