Emily Wilson has done it again. Critics viewed her translation of the Odyssey as groundbreaking. (I discussed Wilson’s Odyssey in a post.) Now she’s come out with a translation of the Iliad. I’m looking forward to spending some time with it.
Until I do, I’ll share some reviews by others. Wilson included extensive notes explaining her thinking. I suspect that gave reviewers a short cut to interesting discussions. In any case, each of these posts that I’ve linked to below is genuinely engaging. They each take slightly different approaches to interpreting the validity of Wilson’s choices in her translation of the Iliad.
One Word, So Many Meanings
Some reviews discuss the strengths and weaknesses of individual word choices. Those unpack, via Wilson’s notes, all the layers in the Greek word and then why she picked whatever English word to cover as many of those layers, or not, as she felt necessary. Two articles with this approach are:
The Washington Post, “Emily Wilson on 5 crucial decisions she made in her ‘Iliad’ translation”
Homer Compare and Contrast
Slate’s review of Wilson translation of the Iliad is particularly good with its discussion of how the Iliad and Odyssey differ and why. It also looks at individual word choices and at poetic lines. Slate, “She Reeled Us In With The Odyssey. Now: The Hard Stuff.”
Relevancy of a new translation of the Iliad
Esquire Magazine went for the “how is the Iliad relevant today” in an interview, and Wilson shows how deeply meaningful the ancient epic is to us right now. For example, she says: “In an era of extreme partisanship, the Iliad is about people who are within the same community. It’s not about Trojans versus Greeks. It’s about Greeks versus Greeks and one deity versus another deity, one Trojan versus another Trojan. It speaks to the way that conflict can become so intense and so destructive for a whole society, especially when it’s between people who are as close as Achilles and Agamemnon or Hector and Paris are to each other, or Hera to Zeus.”
Esquire also asked a number of other questions to which I found Wilson’s answers genuinely intriguing. She’s a sharp thinker even when given a slightly silly questions like about her tattoos. Esquire interview with Emily Wilson.