Required Reading: Five Books That Inspired Emily Wilson’s Translation of ‘The Odyssey’

It’s nearly impossible to escape the summer’s discourse around Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and we have Emily Wilson to thank for at least some of that. Before she was speaking out about the, ahem, weak points in Nolan’s adaptation, in 2017, the British classicist, translator, and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania became the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English verse.

Ahead of the release of her third nonfiction book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, in September, Wilson recently shared five books that aided her translation of the Odyssey with Vogue. Find them all below.

Apologies that this is an academic book, and therefore expensive, but maybe you can get it from your local library. This is an excellent collection of scholarly critical essays about the poem—a great sample of some of the exciting literary critical work that has been and is still being done on Homer. My perspectives on the poem have been informed and shaped by the work of many brilliant colleagues and predecessors, including those in this volume and many more. I’d also like to shout out, in particular, the work of Irene de Jong, whose narratological commentaries on both the Odyssey and the Iliad have helped me and many other Homerists gain a deeperunderstanding of the sophistication and fluidity of Homeric narrative perspective.

This collection includes Arnold’s essays on translating Homer, which he himself never did, but he did a lot of pontificating about how it should and especially should not be done, devoting many pages to skewering a contemporary translator (poor Francis Newman) for his convoluted, peculiar, and verbose approach. I always find it funny when people describe my work as “modern” and even more so when people say it’s “not Victorian.” I took great inspiration from Arnold, maybe the most Victorian of Victorians, in his account of the primary qualities of Homer: plainness of syntax and thought, rapidity and nobility. I felt that those qualities are genuinely essential to the Greek original, and weren’t well represented by most twentieth and twenty-first century English-language versions. There were pieces of Arnold’s own verse style that I also felt I could draw inspiration from that exemplify some of those four qualities, perhaps especially in his blank verse poem “Sohrab and Rustum”; lines like “Unwillingly the spirit fled away.” It’s neither “modern” nor “Victorian,” and it has a quasi-Homeric rapidity and plainness.

I’ve loved this book since I was a child. I’ve reread it many times. It is, like the Odyssey, a book about travel, identity, and a clever man’s journey away from one community and back to another. But primarily, I thought of LeGuin’s style, especially in that book, as one of many guiding lights as I considered and experimented with how to convey the vividness (enargeia in Greek) of Homeric poetry. Of course, LeGuin is writing prose, not metrical poetry, but there’s something both very beautiful, very plain/noble/rapid, and very Homeric about her style in this book. The sentences actually often have a beautiful rhythmicality to them: “This is a tale of the time before his fame,before the songs were made.”

Logue was a jack-of-all-trades who knew no Greek, and yet managed to create a pretty amazing set of poetic riffs on the Iliad, designed in the first instance for oral performance on the radio. I read this (like LeGuin) at a formative age, and Logue helped inform my sense of what I might be able to do to evoke the energy of Homeric similes and a sense of the specifically Homeric sublime, without the padding and verbosity that have plagued many twentieth and twenty-first century translations.

I’ve read a lot of translation theory, as well as scholarship on the history of translation. I don’t always agree with Venuti, but I find him consistently interesting. This book is a classic in translation studies, and I found it very useful to think with. Venuti is a translator of contemporary Italian and Catalan literature, and he argues for translators to “foreignize” in order to challenge the expectations of English-speaking readers. It was partly through reading and meditating on Venuti that I realized that the expectations of retranslations of ancient Greek and Roman texts are not the same as the assumptions people make about translations of contemporary fiction—and therefore that re-translators of ancient literature, like me, may need to think differently about howto convey the alterity of these fascinatingly strange, and yet vividly familiar, ancient works.