@EmilyRCWilson Scholia — Emily Wilson
Emily Wilson
Back
About Wilson
Articles and Essays
Books
Recorded Talks
Back
The Odyssey
Emily Wilson
Emily Wilson
Emily Wilson as Athena, age 8. (see "Growing up with the Odyssey," The Paris Review, August 7, 2017)
@EmilyRCWilson Scholia<br>Please subscribe to Professor Emily Wilson’s Substack page for insights about Homer and translation. She is also on Bluesky @EmilyRCWilson.<br>The Send Off (October 16, 2024)<br>“People often think that translation is difficult only for the long, fancy, unusual words – the ones like “polytropos”. But that is not true. Frequently, the most ordinary words and phrases – the ones that do not make the reader of the original pause or feel confused – are the hardest to render into another language.”<br>On Complicated... (September 16, 2024)<br>“Most Homeric characters have a small number of standard epithets, which can fit metrically with the name in different positions in the line. Achilles is "swift-footed" and "son of Peleus". Agamemnon is "lord of men" and "son of Atreus".”<br>Translation Comparison: The Odyssey Bed (September 15, 2024)<br>“The olive wood bed, manufactured by cunning, crafty Odysseus himself (as he declares insistently, repeatedly using the first person singular), represents his control over his own household, and his ability to construct an extraordinary technical marvel from his found environment.”<br>Translating the beginning of the Odyssey: 4 ways (September 2, 2024)<br>“My goal is not to rank them, nor to criticize my esteemed predecessors and colleagues, but to analyze in a more precise way, for the benefit of those who have not read the original, how each of these pieces of English echoes and differs from the Greek (as every translation must do).”
@EmilyRCWilson on Twitter (2017-2024)<br>Professor Wilson’s Twitter feed (@EmilyRCWilson) provided her readers with insights into the art of translation. In her posts, she analyzed the challenges a translator faces, with examples from the Odyssey, Iliad and Oedipus Tyrannos (Norton 2021). Wilson also used Twitter to compare short passages from different English translations of the Odyssey. She commented on how other translators have interpreted different words, phrases, and concepts from the original Greek into English.<br>In a blog post for The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson wrote about how "Wilson’s presence on Twitter is quietly revolutionary, a new kind of experience for readers, poets, translators, and really anyone who likes to watch knowledge take shape in an open format, its seams exposed" ("The Classics Scholar Redefining What Twitter Can Do", March 19, 2018).<br>Selected Twitter threads:<br>Hector and Andromache (June 30, 2023) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“Andromache takes/welcomes her baby to her κόλπος.”<br>Languages Individuate the World Differently (May 11, 2022) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“A classic translator's dilemma, … One language makes a distinction where another makes none.”<br>Hector’s Bird Omen (February 8, 2022) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“In the Iliad, an eagle flies past the Trojans, dropping the snake he carried -- & so gets home empty-beaked and wounded.”<br>Ovid’s Metamorphoses (February 6, 2020) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“If you are, for any reason, in the mood for a long poem about the abuse of power, I'd like to recommend Ovid's Metamorphoses.”<br>Some Challenges to Translating the Iliad (January 2, 2020) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“Ideally, every choice has to make sense in itself & in the context of 10,000 other similar choices, in the larger quest to produce a text with a deep and detailed connection to the original, & with its own life and integrity in English.”<br>NOT The First Woman to Translate the Odyssey (October 2, 2019) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“I put "NOT the first woman to publish a translation of the Odyssey" on my twitter-bio, after seeing it asserted for the gazillionth time.”<br>Juxtaposing Points of View in Homer (June 11, 2019) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“One of the most powerful features (tropes? modalities?) of Homeric verse is the juxtaposition of one POV with another.”<br>“Find the Beginning” The Odyssey (Book 1, line 10) (March 19, 2019) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“The Greek is this: τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν. My rendition is: '"Tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning".”<br>The Impossibility of Translating Homer into English (March 8, 2019) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>“So that you can all feel my pain, here are a few more reasons why it's more or less impossible to translate Homer into English in a satisfactory way.”<br>Stylistic "Equivalence"? (August 8, 2018) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>"A question that is always present, for any translator: What is stylistic "equivalence"?"<br>A Translator's Choices: Lines 1-2 of the Odyssey (August 6, 2018) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>"Why and how is translation so hard?"<br>Translating Oedipus Tyrannos (July 22, 2018) [opens PDF of archived tweet]<br>"Creon says he...