)critics lauded it as a revelation (Susan Chira. ) At the center of each of Homers epics is a warrior. The first of these changes is in the very first line. 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. Graduate Coordinator: Katelyn Stoler 236 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 (215) 573-0250 [email protected] Emily Wilson received a BA (1994) and MPhil (1996) from the University of Oxford and a PhD (2001) from . Last Name. Homers hexameters run from 13 to 18 syllables. In Robert Fagless much-praised translation of the poem, Telemachus says, before he executes the palace women on his fathers command: No clean death for the likes of them, by god!/Not from me they showered abuse on my head, my mothers too!/You sluts the suitors whores!. Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her translation writes, . Wilson is more understated: Tell me about a complicated man. Too understated, one might think at first but gradually the adjective comes to feel just right. He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. . Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above couldnt be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word theyre translating. Both works attributed to Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey - are over ten thousand lines long in the original. [2] A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1994 (B.A. Why put oneself in this difficult, alienating position? If Wilsons version has an English model, it is rather the moving plainness of Matthew Arnolds Sohrab and Rustum: Soon a hum arose, As of a great assembly loosed, and fires Began to twinkle through the fog; for now Both armies moved to camp and took their meal . As a young woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning made a melancholy, stuffy, diligently rhyming translation of Prometheus Bound a play that presumably spoke deeply to this immobilised invalid and returned to the play 23 years later to create a far more expansive and fluent version. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does a man of many turns suggest the doubleness of the original word a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Daciers well-informed, scholarly texts were widely read, not least by Alexander Pope, who used her French to produce his translations of Homer. Emily Wilson 2021. I had read others, including Richmond Lattimore's much admired translation. Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. appeared in 2017revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was fresh, unpretentious, and lean (Madeline Miller. Wilson is not persuaded. As Wilson spoke, I recalled a little formula by the American critic Guy Davenport about the difference between Homers two poems: The Iliad is a poem about force; the Odyssey is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force. Wilson was parsing the nature of that triumph, embedded in the poems very first adjective, a difference in mind that would make for a difference in Odysseuss nature, both as a warrior and as a husband. Introduced by: Amy Stolls. She and another female colleague who had a child who was the same age as me organized this day care, first in my house and then it moved to this building near Somerville College.. Close to perfect for the first time reader, Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2013. CreditGeordie Wood for The New York Times. There was a lot of silence, Wilson says. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there. The frustrations of the teenage Telemachus come through clearly. Its not like he ever translated Homer. Among the Ancients with Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jones, writer and editor at the London Review of Books.Medieval Beginnings with Irina Dumitrescu, Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bonn, and Mary Wellesley, historian and contributor to the London . 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. I never had a female mentor in classics. Still, the appeal of classics as a discipline was profound, particularly the way that Greek drama presented great emotional tumult. 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. Publisher In 2014 she published The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca. 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. [6], Wilson has authored five books. Don't waste your money, unless of course that is what you are after. 7:05 pm - 7:55 pm EDT Room 145 (Street Level, North Building) Alberto Manguel discusses "Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography" (Grove), Madeline Miller discusses "Circe" (Little, Brown) and Emily Wilson discusses her translation of "The Odyssey" (Norton) in a panel conversation. wanted a Greek copy of the Pentateuch the five books of Moses for the Library of Alexandria. Wilsons unadorned but resonant language plumbs the poems profound pathos and reveals its characters as palpably real, even complicated, human beings. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. and Yale University (Ph.D.). On Wednesday, translator Emily Wilson GRD '01 delivered the 2020 edition of the Mark Strand Memorial Reading, where she read from her in-progress translations of Homer's "Iliad" and Sophocles' "Oedipus Tyrannus" on a Zoom webinar.. Though her education there, she says, offered her a strong introduction to literary study, it wasnt lost on her that none of her professors were women. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2018. One tale has it that an Egyptian king of the third-century B.C. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of the first great Homeric epic: the Iliad. 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. 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. But to consult Wilsons 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by. John Giless of many fortunes; T.S. 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 work of translation could turn from a bond to a mode of literary and conceptual freedom. 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. Unable to add item to List. "We discussed toxic masculinity, pseudo feminism, and which pronouns are most appropriate for Homer," says Purkert. These are not good criteria, Wilson told me. 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. Please try again. One might wonder whether the gender of the translator makes a difference that can be discerned on the page. I remember that being one of the big questions I had to start off with.. The most highly praised male classicist translators of our era such as Robert Fagles write with a confident exuberance, often expanding or adding to the original. Women have long been marginalised in the world of ancient texts, but female scholars and translators are finally having their say, If you look up the subject heading female classicists in the large research library catalogue at the university where I teach, a grand total of five books pop up of which two are separate editions of Its a Dons Life by Mary Beard. Regardless of intentions, however, female translators often stand at a critical distance when approaching authors who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as belonging to men. If youre going to admit that stories matter, Wilson told me, then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? Polydamas says, plausibly, this sign means the Trojans should pull back from attacking the Greek wall: casualties will be too high, and gains few." [5] Wilson's parents divorced shortly before she went to college. It took away a whole level of shame., As an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, Wilson studied classics and philosophy. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of the first great Homeric epic: the, In Wilsons hands, this exciting and often horrifying work now gallops at a pace befitting its best battle scenes, roaring with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, and the anguished cries of dying men. The spell of Greek, for Virginia Woolf and many women of her generation, lay in its near-unintelligibility: it was a language that drew attention to the foreign element that is present in any language and thus facilitated a shift away from Victorian poetics. In the US and the UK, almost all the most prominent translators of Greek and Roman literature have been men, even as recently as 10 or 20 years ago and even as academic departments of classical literature have moved closer to a more balanced gender distribution. None is independently striking; their force comes from their juxtaposition with one another pat pat pat, like raindrops on a metal roof. I asked Wilson why translation isnt valued in the academy. Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem.. is professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. So it would be GREAT if you can mention the name of the translator in the product description. Wilson returns to strict iambic pentameter. Find all the books, read about the author, and more. Wilson has emphasized that other female translators of Homer, such as Anne Dacier and Rosa Onesti, made very different interpretative choices from hers. $39.95. I think its very interesting thats still with us. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading." A dramatic reading of two early books 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. Cohen Hall, room 402 [2] Her sister is the food writer Bee Wilson. In one noteworthy choice, enslaved characters, described as "dmoiai" or "dmoioi" in the Greek, are often referred to as "slaves" in Wilson's versions, instead of "maids" or "servants"; Wilson has expressed surprise that so many modern North American translations obscure the social structures, noting "how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we dont use a simple average. Just the fact of never having a female teacher, but its a difference to how you feel when you dont have any mentors who dont even know what it would be like. Guernica: What impact did the success of your translation have on you? Email Address * Subject * Message * Thank you! : But most have preferred iambic pentameter, the default meter for English poets. Sophocles Electra, for example, was staged by women at Girton College, Cambridge in 1883 and at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1889 and played an essential role in their demonstration to the world of their intellectual seriousness. He has published translations of the ILIAD, the ODYSSEY, the AENEID, and the poems of HESIOD. The potential shame of pronouncing a French word wrong was pretty inhibiting, Wilson said, laughing. Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app. I had a childhood where it was very hard to name feelings, and just the fact that tragedy as a genre is very good at naming feelings. What has that been like? Im not a believer, Wilson told me, but I find that there is a sort of religious practice that goes along with translation. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text thats not going to be interpretively straightforward.. To read a translation is like looking at a photo of a sculpture: It shows the thing, but not from every angle. And it is a damned refreshing take on Homer! That youre going to be communicating with the masses, which is less important than being innovative within your field. 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. When Telemachus visits Menelaus, a slave girl brings him bread and many canaps. (Well, there is a wedding in progress.) 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. Department Colloquium: Emily Wilson (Penn) "Iliad 24: A Reading from My Translation" Thursday, November 4, 2021 - 4:45pm to 6:15pm 402 Cohen Hall and also on Zoom, registration below. But even for atheists, lesbians or women who just dont feel that way about Virgil or Homer, the position of being a woman translating one of these dead, white men creates a strange and potentially productive sense of intimate alienation. The mood and voice needs to be distinctive and entirely itself. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. 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. Odysseus, after slaying the suitors, tells his son, Telemachus, to kill the women. The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander by Homer, Dominic Keating, et al. Arnold wrote a famous essay, On Translating Homer. Though he never produced a translation himself, I think he would have recognized his Homer a poet eminently rapid, eminently plain and direct in Wilsons. Wilson did write a range of books before tenure, most on canonical texts: her study of suffering and death in literature; a monograph on Socrates. We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. Wilson paused. Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. But Wilson aims for a direct equation: one line of English for one of Greek. My name is Zameer Ahmed. So were her lovely cheeks dissolved with tears. If youre unhappy, all you can do is go to your room and cry silently. Her parents divorced shortly before she went to college. "[8], Wilson's next works primarily focused on Rome's tragic playwright Seneca. [16] In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences. He is celebrated for his argument tying the creation of the Greek alphabet to the recording of the Homeric Poems, but is also well known for his textbooks on Greek myth and Greek history and his work on the history of writing. The words are short, mostly monosyllables. The fact that its possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? The first English translation of The Iliad by a woman (Alexander) came out last year. 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