When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Something went wrong. He studied at Berkeley and Harvard and taught for 34 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Bascom-Halls Professor of Classics Emeritus. The students of Girton and Smith who performed Electra were showing off their intellectual capacity, but at the same time they were defusing any political threat; the choice of play reassured their audiences that classical education for women would reinforce their sense of duty and subjection. Please try again. Wilson's Odyssey was named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018[15] and it was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award. I have not enjoyed this translation as much, finding aspects of it rather quirky with the use of modern idiom in places and some of the subtleties of the Ancient Greek words and proper names missing . Greek maenads were the model for a new, uncorseted way of moving, leaping and dancing. This is what sweetness and light is. Which, of course, is absurd and rather pseudo-feminist. Euripides Hippolytus in which Phaedra falls in love with her stepson, who wants to remain asexual was read by John Addington Symonds in male homoerotic terms (since Hippolytus rejects heterosexuality), but the play was reread by his correspondent, a young student and poet named Agnes Robinson, as a way to discover her lesbian desires, through the thwarted, impassioned desire of Phaedra. The media wouldnt have cared otherwise. This article was amended on 10 July 2017 to give Diane Arnson Svarliens full name. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 26, 2019. There have also been some marvellous female literary responses to classical literature in recent years not translations, but rather imitations, riffs, remixes or acts of resistance, including Alice Oswalds Memorial, Carsons Nox and Margaret Atwoods The Penelopiad all three of which find in classical literature a precise, devastating way of speaking about loss, grief, guilt and rage. THE ODYSSEY By Homer Translated by Emily Wilson 582 pp. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. , she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. The inability to take classical texts for granted is a great gift that some female translators are able to use as a point of leverage, to shift the canon to a different and unexpected place. The potential shame of pronouncing a French word wrong was pretty inhibiting, Wilson said, laughing. Wilson: I was unknown before I publishedThe Odyssey, and then suddenly I had a readership. All English translators of Homer face a basic problem. Maria Dahvana Headley (whose new Beowulf has just appeared) and Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey, now at work on The Iliad) joined LTAC Director Susan Bernofsky for a far-ranging conversation on the radical practice of making translation a space of resistance and joy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. His Odyssey was archaic and fragmentary, an artifact forged by firelight and rusted by time. September brought us Daniel Mendelsohns An Odyssey, his memoir of teaching this poem about fathers and sons to a class at Bard College that included his own father. You can do it all in writing. [2], Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of the first great Homeric epic: the Iliad. Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2021. Wilson returns to strict iambic pentameter. Most every Homeric translation since has been scrutinized against his quartet of qualities. and Yale University (Ph.D.). What happens to all the unelite women?, In the episode that Wilson calls one of the most horrible and haunting of the whole poem, Odysseus returns home to find that his palace has been overrun by suitors for his wifes hand. Graduate Coordinator: Katelyn Stoler 236 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 (215) 573-0250 kastoler@upenn.edu I n The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of . You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. Emily Wilson is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Among modern renderings hers is perhaps closest to Robert Fitzgeralds 1961 version. Chapman starts things off, in his version, with many a way/Wound with his wisdom; John Ogilby counters with the terser prudent; Thomas Hobbes evades the word, just calling Odysseus the man. Quite a range, and weve barely started. I asked Wilson why translation isnt valued in the academy. (review of three separate translations of, This page was last edited on 25 January 2023, at 19:47. I just felt like I wanted to spend a little bit longer with Euripides.. Dismal as it has been in other respects, the fall of 2017 has been good to readers of Homer. But altogether its as good an Odyssey as one could hope for. University of Pennsylvania Professor Emily Wilson in the School of Arts and Sciences has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the humanities category for her translations of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. Here's what happened when a woman took the job", "The first English Translation of the Odyssey by a woman was worth the wait", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emily_Wilson_(classicist)&oldid=1135613612, Scholar, professor, writer, translator, poet, "Ah, how miserable!" I've always greatly preferred the Iliad. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College, B.A., and Corpus Christi College, M.Phil.) Wilson commented on the challenges of translating Seneca's ornate rhetorical style, saying that Senecan bombast in contemporary English risks sounding "too silly to be impressive. The older colleagues were mostly childless women and had this whole sort of anger anger and also refusal to understand that there might be extra demands on my moms time, because she had children. Wilsons mother and another colleague took matters into their own hands. I had read others, including Richmond Lattimore's much admired translation. In 2006, she was named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, and in 2019 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Publisher "[18], Wilson has noted that being a woman did not predetermine her critical work as a scholar, reader or translator, and has expressed discomfort with the media reception of her work in terms of gender, since it tends to obscure her primary goals (such as the use of regular meter and attention to sound), and risks erasing the work of other female Homerists and female translators. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there. Course readings Week Author Reading Assignment Week 1 Hesiod Introduction to oral poetry; Hesiod Theogony Week 2 Homer Iliad: The Lay of the Wrath of Achilles Iliad books 1-8; focus on 1-6 180 Dr Emily Wilson @EmilyRCWilson Male classical scholars are represented by the heading classicists which counts more than 200 volumes. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. It is the Pope translation. Polydamas says, plausibly, this sign means the Trojans should pull back from attacking the Greek wall: casualties will be too high, and gains few." It is also true, less obviously, of the available translations into English of ancient Greek and Roman texts, most of which are still created by classicists. As a kid I was just aware of unhappiness, and aware of these things that werent ever being articulated, but the sense that nobody is going to be saying what they feel or encouraging anyone else to say what they feel. Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem.. Wilson has emphasized that other female translators of Homer, such as Anne Dacier and Rosa Onesti, made very different interpretative choices from hers. The first English translation of The Iliad by a woman (Alexander) came out last year. 3. : Rigorous in its readings, Wilsons study is also frequently touching. Top subscription boxes right to your door, 1996-2023, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. But most have preferred iambic pentameter, the default meter for English poets. And even though I think translation is a way of being innovative within your field, my colleagues dont see it that way., One way of talking about Wilsons translation of the Odyssey is to say that it makes a sustained campaign against that species of scholarly shortsightedness: finding equivalents in English that allow the terms she is choosing to do the same work as the original words, even if the English words are not, according to a Greek lexicon, correct., What gets us to complicated, Wilson said, returning to her translation of polytropos, is both that I think it has some hint of the original ambivalence and ambiguity, such that its both Why is he complicated? What experiences have formed him? which is a very modern kind of question and hints at There might be a problem with him. I wanted to make it a markedly modern term in a way that much turning obviously doesnt feel modern or like English. From the Latin verb complicare, it means to fold together. No, we dont think of that root when we call someone complicated, but its what we mean: that theyre compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand. : On the wall hung pictures of Wilsons three young daughters; the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the Odyssey, one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus? Amazing read. I think about status very differently now as a result. It could be that hes the turner.. The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homers epic a radically contemporary voice. Emily Wilson. Both projects were outgrowths of her old desire to spend a little bit longer with these authors. He has published translations of the ILIAD, the ODYSSEY, the AENEID, and the poems of HESIOD. Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web. is professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. These Wilson shares. [1] In 2017 she became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer 's Odyssey into English. It took away a whole level of shame., As an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, Wilson studied classics and philosophy. The Odyssey Appearances @EmilyRCWilson Scholia About Wilson Contact Me Contact Form. Anyone can read what you share. Here is how Wilsons Odyssey begins. Theres Alexander Popes for wisdoms various arts renownd; William Cowpers For shrewdness famed/And genius versatile; H.F. Carys crafty; William Sothebys by long experience tried; Theodore Buckleys full of resources; Henry Alfords much-versed; Philip Worsleys that hero; the Rev. Yopie Prins addresses this question in Ladies Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy, her splendid new study of late 19th- and early 20th-century female translators of ancient Greek tragedy. "We discussed toxic masculinity, pseudo feminism, and which pronouns are most appropriate for Homer," says Purkert. He has published original poetry, many fictional works, including an academic mystery A LAND OF SLAVES, a memoir RAMSES REBORN, and the illustrated TALES OF THE TROJAN WAR. My colleagues told me: You really shouldnt be doing that kind of thing before tenure. Wilson is not persuaded. Norton trumpets it as the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman. (Anne Daciers French prose version appeared in 1708.) : We feel sadness on both sides when Odysseus sleeps with the nymph Calypso, not wanting her / though she still wanted him. We feel sympathy for Helen, and even for Odysseus slave women, executed for sleeping with the enemy or as Wilson puts it, the things the suitors made them do with them. (This goes further than the Greek, but not further than is allowable.). Later Bible translators failed to meet that mystical standard. Bought in good faith. In the second-wave feminist scholarship in classics, Wilson told me, people were very keen to try to read Penelope as, Lets find Penelopes voice in the Odyssey, and lets celebrate her, because look, here she is being the hero in an epic in ways we can somehow unpack. I find thats a little simplistic. The reviewer actually says this about Emily Wilson's translation: " And genius is certainly one of the first words that comes to mind when reading Emily Wilson's clean-lined, compulsively readable translation of the Odyssey **, one of the most interesting versions of the epic ever produced in English."**. At first glance one is reminded of the translation from Odyssey 11 that opens Ezra Pounds Cantos. Pound wanted to evoke Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (We set up mast and sail on that swart ship / Bore sheep aboard her ). Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time. Throughout her translation of the Odyssey, Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented radical in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. Yes, there are boring passages about How Many Boats Are Present but there's also an intensely emotional and gripping (gripping like the narrative makes it impossible not to feel like your heart is being crushed in a vice) climax and conclusion. The fact that its possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? I think I would enjoy reading this aloud more than silently. Socially and emotional complex beyond my expectations, Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2016. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2020. Wilson is at her best in one of the poems greatest scenes, the first meeting in Book 19 between Penelope and her unrecognized husband: Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell and flow again. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseuss nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). When the Trojans learn Achilles is not participating in the siege they counterattack. "[2] The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2021. Celebrated for her vivid and lyrical translation of Homer's The Odyssey, Wilson will read from new work currently in progress: translations of Homer's Iliad and Oedipus . She wept for her own husband, who was right next to her. Her mothers experience as a female academic, Wilson said, over lunch the next day at a noisy bistro, was tied up with her colleagues in Somerville, the womens college where she taught. CreditGeordie Wood for The New York Times. That goes to what this translation is aiming to do in terms of an immersive reading experience and conveying a whole narrative. The Odyssey (trans. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. In them, he offered a takedown of existing translations of Homer and then asked in what faithfulness exists: The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.. In it, she shows how the idea of wild women who dance in nature formed an essential model for female aesthetes, including Harrison and contemporary female choreographers, including Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, who found in Euripides a way to legitimise their own rejection of traditional ways of being a scholar, a dancer, or even an embodied woman. [16] In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences. The frustrations of the teenage Telemachus come through clearly. Guernica: What impact did the success of your translation have on you? I am learning it in a whole new way with the Iliad. The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. Prins gives a fascinating account of the importance of Greek tragedy in translation and theatrical production in the colleges of higher education for women that emerged in this period. Perhaps the most famous such expression is in Matthew Arnolds On Translating Homer, his series of lectures in 1860 when he was Oxford professor of poetry. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading." A dramatic reading of BOOK 1 of the poem, in current in-progress iambic pentameter verse translation, followed by Q and A. Thursday, November 7, 4:30-6:00 p.m. In episode one of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom begin with a beginning, Homer's Iliad: its depictions of anger and grief, of capricious gods and warriors' bodies, and the sheer narrative force of the great epic of the Trojan War.. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. , Hardcover Wilson later reflected that she was interested in the ways and methods that Socrates would educate people, but also Socrates' death as an image: "What does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment, even when you've just poisoned yourself? Alexanders Iliad mirrors the length and redundancies of the original, providing a welcome reminder of how distant Homers world is from our own. There is now a far larger textbook market for classical translations to be read in university courses, which imposes its own constraints on the translator. The prefix poly, Wilson said, laughing, means many or multiple. Tropos means turn. 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