Emily Wilson — A Homer for Our Generation
University of Pennsylvania classicist Emily Wilson discusses her new Iliad translation, following her celebrated 2017 Odyssey, and what it means to make ancient epic speak to contemporary readers.
Why we picked this
Wilson's 2017 Odyssey was the first English translation of Homer by a woman — her craft questions about what fidelity to an ancient text actually requires have turned out to be questions about power, gender, and whose voice gets to speak across time.
Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey was called “a revelation,” “a cultural landmark,” and “fresh, unpretentious and lean” — and it was the first English-language Odyssey ever translated by a woman. The MacArthur Fellow and Department Chair of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania brought to Homer not just scholarly precision but a reckoning with the ideological choices embedded in centuries of male translation: the heroes who got to sound heroic, the women who got described rather than heard, the violence that was aestheticized rather than rendered plainly. The result was a Odyssey that felt both ancient and genuinely new.
Her Iliad translation, presented at this Town Hall Seattle evening, applies the same principles to the more demanding of Homer’s two epics: a poem of battle, grief, and the inscrutability of the gods that is simultaneously the most visceral and the most philosophically ambitious work in the Western tradition. Critics describe Wilson’s language as “crisp but resonant,” finding in her version characters who are “palpably real, even complicated” rather than the marble figures of nineteenth-century translations.
The conversation at Town Hall goes beyond the mechanics of translation — Wilson has become one of the most thoughtful public voices on what ancient texts carry and what they demand, and on why the choices a translator makes are never neutral. Presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures; available in-person and via livestream.