Emily Wilson on Translations and Language (Ep. 63) | Conversations with Tyler
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March 27, 2019<br>Emily Wilson on Translations and Language (Ep. 63)
The literary translator’s toolkit must include pen, paper, various dictionaries, a big desk, and a huge orange cat.
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In a recent Twitter thread, Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: “There aren’t enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises” (#2 on the list), “It’s very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don’t connote modern psychology” (#5), and “There is no common English word of four syllables or fewer connoting ‘person particularly favored by Zeus due to high social status, and by the way this is a very normal ordinary word which is not drawing any special attention to itself whatsoever, beyond generic heroizing.’” (#7).
Using Twitter this way is part of her effort to explain literary translation. What do translators do all day? Why can the same sentence turn out so differently depending on the translator? Why did she get stuck translating the Iliad immediately after producing a beloved translation of the Odyssey?
She and Tyler discuss these questions and more, including why Silicon Valley loves Stoicism, whether Plato made Socrates sound smarter than he was, the future of classics education, the effect of AI on translation, how to make academia more friendly to women, whether she’d choose to ‘overlive’, and the importance of having a big Ikea desk and a huge orange cat.
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Recorded March 7th, 2019
Read the full transcript
TYLER COWEN: Hello, I’m here today with Emily Wilson, who is professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has recently translated Homer’s Odyssey. The book has been a smash hit. It’s my personal favorite of all the translations I’ve read. We’ll speak more about some of her other work. Emily, welcome.
EMILY WILSON: Thank you so much for having me.
COWEN: Let’s jump right in on the Odyssey. I want you to explain the whole book to me, but let’s start small. Does Odysseus even want to return home?
WILSON: [laughs] He does as the poem starts. As the poem starts, he spent the last seven years on the island of a goddess called Calypso, originally, the poem implies, quite willingly. So, it seems as if he’s changed his mind about whether or not he wants to go home. But as the poem begins, he does want to get back home to Ithaca, to his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus.
COWEN: Do you think he means it? Or is he just self-deceiving? Because he takes the detour into the underworld. He hangs around with Circe for many years. There’s a contrast with Menelaus, who acts as if he actually does want to get home. Who’s lying to whom in this story?
WILSON: Odysseus, of course, is lying all the time, so it’s very hard for the reader to get a firm grasp on what are his motives. Also, when he tells Calypso that he desperately wants to get back home, it’s very striking to me that he doesn’t give his motives. He says to Calypso, “You’re much more beautiful than my wife is, and you’ve promised to make me immortal. It’s a great offer, but I want to go home.” He doesn’t explain what is it that drives that desire to go home.
And you’re quite right: he makes many detours. He spends another year, quite willingly, with Circe, another goddess. So it seems as if he’s easily distractible from the quest, for sure.
COWEN: How much should the character of Odysseus actually be viewed as admirable?
WILSON: He’s a hero, which of course, in an archaic Greek context, doesn’t necessarily mean an admirable figure. He’s a figure who is — as I translate polytropos — he’s complicated. There’s many sides to him.
He has the extraordinary qualities — which is part of what makes him heroic — that he’s different from the rest of us. He’s smarter than any other mortal. He’s better at disguising, better at telling stories, better at fictionalizing his own life, better at coming up with a plausible way to get out of any impossible situation. Does that make him admirable? In a way, it does. He’s a survivor. He has impressive qualities that enable him to survive.
COWEN: But he loses what, 11 out of 12 ships to the Cyclopes? Isn’t he just a bad general?
WILSON: He loses a hundred percent of the men under his care, yes.
COWEN: Yes.
[laughter]
WILSON: He does. It’s a pretty bad track record, yes. Of course, as the father of one of the suitors says to him in book 24, after he’s slaughtered all his wife’s harassing suitors — says, “You have this unfortunate habit of killing young men. First, you killed this whole batch of young men who left with you to go to Troy, of whom zero returned. And now you get back home, you kill a whole bunch more young men.”
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