‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson offers a new essay collection

Emily Wilson is a woman of twists and turns. The University of Pennsylvania classicist is perhaps most famous for being the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, made even more famous by Director Christopher Nolan when he said it inspired his recent blockbuster adaptation. Now, though, Wilson is denouncing the film that propelled her to the status of a true public intellectual. In a pair of reviews, she recently claimed that Nolan failed to capture the true depth of the ancient Greek world she attempts to communicate in her own work. Considering all the controversy that has raged over both the film and Wilson’s translation, the irony might be enough to make even Socrates smile.Fascinatingly, Wilson has now vowed to retranslate The Odyssey from scratch — although she says she will “probably” keep her controversial first line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” While readers will have to wait some years for this new, corrected version, they can occupy themselves in the meantime with Wilson’s newest book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. After years of “woke” accusations, even her critics may be surprised at just how conservative her outlook is across this collection of essays. Wilson’s politics are no doubt somewhere to the left of center, but her intense desire to understand classical authors as they understood themselves is evidence of a disposition to preserve the past as a living thing, something those on the Right should better appreciate.My first encounter with Wilson’s work came when I downloaded an audiobook of her original translation of The Odyssey, read by the actress Claire Danes, to listen to during a pandemic-era road trip. I was somewhat skeptical of the translation after witnessing the social media pile-on, but I quickly fell in love with Wilson’s unique voice. It is true that her work brims with modernity, but the goal of breaking with more traditional English translations is often to point us back to the sometimes-strange, sometimes-beautiful world of ancient Greece. While some commentators condemned the novelty of her choices, I found that they helped the poem come alive by demonstrating just how far away the Homeric hero is from modern values. Wilson does not disguise the fact that Homer’s Odysseus is something of a pirate, or that his actions throughout his time fighting at Troy and during his long journey home to Ithaca are repellent to us moderns, Christians, and liberals alike, even if the character brims with humor and charm. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature; By Emily Wilson; Liveright; 288 pp.; $19.99 Wilson’s Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is perhaps most interesting in what it reveals about this approach to translation. “Most twenty-first-century culture based on ancient Greek myth or literature tends to recast ancient stories and characters in the framework of modern, twenty-first century concerns,” she complains in one essay. Elsewhere, she criticizes the Elizabethan translator George Chapman for allowing the morals and attitudes of his own time to slip into his version of The Odyssey. The ancient world of Wilson’s scholarship, by contrast, is strange and very foreign. As such, she writes, her goal with the poem was to “recreate certain alien features of the original that aren’t reflected in most modern translations,” from its pagan moral universe to “traditional poetic metre.”While Wilson wants us to take the Greeks seriously, she cautions against the danger of taking them too literally. “A translator who tries to find ‘neutral’ language — as if there were such a thing – may take a greater liberty with the original than one who casts their linguistic net as wide as it will go,” she writes in an essay about English versions of Catullus’s Latin poetry. Classical literature is full of sly allusions, double-meanings, and even groan-inducing puns that can be lost in translation if scholars are not careful.Many of Wilson’s own translations — including the infamous “complicated man” opening line — are an attempt to avoid the Scylla of literalism and the Charybdis of built-up cultural expectations. “In teaching Homer to undergraduates I have seen the students frequently assume that very old poems will have simple morals, simple psychology, and simple heroes, regardless of the translation,” she writes in her own defense. “I liked ‘complicated’ as a way of reminding the reader right away to reconsider that assumption.”Of course, other classicists have found plenty to criticize about Wilson’s translations. Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, for example, Spencer Klavan argues that her 2017 Odyssey has too much “editorializing” and otherwise “shield[ing] Homer’s female characters and modern readers from his insufficiently progressive views.” Wilson has her own answer, though. “If people want ‘heroes’ who are entirely sympathetic, or ethically uncomplicated, and who would never let anyone die under their command, daytime soap operas may be a better bet than Homer,” she writes. That retort has its zing, but it does make a reader wonder how seriously Wilson herself takes her scholarly critics.Bound up with the back-and-forth over her translation choices, of course, are the many accusations that Wilson is a “woke feminist.” To my knowledge, she has never publicly claimed either label, let alone appended them to her translations, although these essays certainly show a concern for the place of women in ancient and modern society alike. In perhaps the most provocative essay of the collection, “Slut-Shaming Helen of Troy,” for example, Wilson explores the reputation of the woman whose face “launched a thousand ships.” While she makes accusations of misogyny in some treatments of the legendary beauty, she is more interested in discussing the fuller “complexity” of portrayals over the years. Wilson sees the ways that her story is full of ambiguity, caught somewhere between agency and victimhood.Another example of Wilson’s unexpectedly non-ideological approach comes in her appreciative treatment of ancient comedy, especially the plays of the great Athenian Aristophanes. She obviously revels in the bawdy humor and irreverent attitudes which characterize his writing — but she also sees something deeper in it. “Perhaps his memorable comic and poetic artfulness can be an antidote to the dangerous sound bites, falsehoods, and simplifications of contemporary political discourse,” she writes. Can one detect a certain discontentment with the rigors of political correctness?GEEKS BEARING GRIFTS There is one more way Wilson’s appreciation of ancient comedy hints at a certain conservative disposition. In another essay, “Ave, Jeeves!,” about depictions of slavery in Roman comedy, she also laments how many classics curricula have dropped the genre altogether. Wilson clearly believes that reading these ancient texts is worthwhile because we can learn something about being human from them, lessons that transcend place and time, and that therefore certain works deserve to be considered canonical. No one will catch Wilson chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go!”As an afterword, Wilson offers 20 “rules” for translation, all of which seem more or less sensible to this non-classicist reviewer. Her final rule, though, proves the most profound. “You will never be able to apply all your principles successfully in every passage, line, word, or syllable,” she writes. “But the project — of devoting your life to these great texts, of bringing them to life in new ways for new generations — is always worth it. Keep going.” It is this combination of fierce tenacity and deep love for antiquity that I admire the most about Wilson. Indeed, in the end, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea proves that any classicist in the modern world must be skilled in all ways of contending.Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence. He is also the editor of a new anthology of Russell Kirk’s writings, On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776.