Classicist Emily Wilson never expected her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which was published in 2017, to be such a hit. Aside from being incredibly well reviewed, it inspired a cycle of works by the great painter Chris Ofili, sparked a handful of theatrical adaptations, was the subject of several mass Homeric reading marathons, and has been mined for the text of a new musical composition. She particularly delights in the letters from readers, she tells me: from parents who read it to their babies, from octogenarians who, after many goes, at last made it through the poem thanks to her version.
Her translation of the Odyssey was the first published version by a woman in English, but that plain fact, remarkable in itself, doesn’t begin to account for its impact. Wilson – whom I first met when we studied classics together at Oxford in the 1990s – has a theory about why readers found it so captivating. “A lot of it’s just that I managed to find a language that was able to speak to different kinds of people,” she tells me by Zoom from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Perhaps more significant, she thinks, is the fact that she rendered the immense poem in iambic pentameter, the metre used by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. The crispness of the rhythm made for a poem that ran by with immense speed and lightness. (The original is in hexameters, a six-foot metre based on syllable length.) Using iambic pentameter, the metre of English narrative and dramatic verse, “invites reading out loud”, she says. “It makes you feel it in the body – and you put the poem inside you in a different way.”
But then came the Iliad. She always knew she would tackle it, right after the Odyssey. In this case, she’s not the the first woman to publish an English translation (Caroline Alexander did that in 2015). Even so, there’s a weight of expectation on her work that was entirely absent when she brought out the Odyssey. And in the US there’s already pre-publication carping from voices on the right that her interpretation will be too woke, too feminist, too politically correct.
The two poems are very different. “There’s a lightness and playfulness and magic about the Odyssey that I wanted to get across in the translation,” she says. “And of course, the Iliad has tons of magic to it: it has a huge sense of the divine. And yet, there’s also a deep sense of pain and darkness and constraint. I don’t want to make you laugh very much. I think you should be crying a lot more than you should be laughing.”
Certainly, that was its effect on me. The Iliad is a poem I have read many times, stumbling through it in Greek, reading and rereading it in various translations over the years before sitting down with Wilson’s new version. We encounter literature, especially classic texts, in relation to the moment we are in, and the world around us. Reading the Iliad in the midst of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which I have reported on, brought the poem home to me in new and disturbing ways. Wilson’s translation, again in iambic pentameter, runs as swift as a bloody river, teems with the clattering sounds of war, bursts with the warriors’ hunger for battle, and almost every line pulses with endless, terrible loss and mourning: death after death after death.
None of this came easily. “I thought the best training for translating an epic poem would be translating an epic poem. And I had just done that training.” She thought she was ready. It turned out she was not. In fact, she tells me, she was stuck for two years of the six she worked on the Iliad, latterly through the pandemic, in her study while her three daughters did their schoolwork remotely, with a high-stepping reproduction Greek bronze horse at her elbow. (Behind her, as we speak, is a new arrival: a bust of Alexander the Great that belonged to her mother, the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones, who died last year. Her father is the writer AN Wilson and her sister the food writer Bee Wilson.)
To understand why Wilson tussled so much to find her way into the poem, it is necessary to know something of its nature. It is set in the middle of the Trojan war. Not at the famous beginning – there’s no judgment of Paris, no abduction by the Trojans of Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, the recovery of whom is the pretext for the Greek invasion. Nor is it set at the famous end, with the eventual storming of Troy by the Greeks after the subterfuge of the wooden horse. Instead, it is set in the war’s ninth year, and concerns the killing of the Trojans’ greatest war leader Hector, son of King Priam, by the Greeks’ greatest fighter, Achilles, an event that foreshadows the Trojans’ eventual defeat.
Achilles is the poem’s remarkable protagonist, by turns unimaginably brutal and gracefully tender, the son of a goddess who possesses both a clear-eyed insight into the warrior code that governs the mortal society in which he lives, and a sharp, painful sense of the proximity of his own death. He is absent for much of the poem, though: the Iliad starts as a row erupts between him and the Greeks’ overall leader, Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, over the apportionment of an enslaved woman, Briseis, taken as war loot in an earlier raid. Robbed of the human prize he sees as his due, Achilles decides to sit out the fighting, while the gods put their weight behind the Trojans. In a lengthy central sequence the Greeks are pushed back all the way to their ships and possible defeat. Then, at last, Patroclus, Achilles’s beloved companion, persuades his friend to let him lead some of their troops into battle to save the Greeks from disaster.
Patroclus, however, is killed by the Trojan, Hector. It is Achilles’s violent, furious grief at the death of his friend that powers the final books of the poem. As Achilles re-enters the battle, glorying in the violence he unleashes on the Trojans, the poem seems to crest up like a wave and breaks only when, at last, he slaughters Hector. The poem ends as the great wave finally retreats: funeral games are held for Patroclus, and King Priam ventures into Achilles’s encampment to retrieve his son’s corpse. The encounter between father and killer is the most tense and touching in all literature.
That’s the bones of it, but there’s so much more to take in. The poem contains multitudes: three finely drawn worlds, of the Greeks, the Trojans and the gods; a whole range of competing and complementary architectures; exquisite variation of tone. And perhaps its most striking aspect is the way in which worlds beyond the battlefield are evoked through its imagery: armies are like floods or wildfires or flies swarming round a milk pail; gods fly with the speed of imagination or of hawks; humans are as short-lived as leaves. The poem clangs and clatters, and it’s so gleaming in its visual effects that reading it can feel like staring into a midday Mediterranean sun. Through it all pulses death, death that at every moment renders life more intense.
Finding the right form and rhythm was Wilson’s first challenge. She knew she’d do it in a regular metre, again, but would it be iambic pentameter? The technical challenges of the Iliad are different, with many more non-negotiable, necessary names and places that position people socially, politically and geographically. “If the Greek is polumetos [an epithet often attached to Odysseus in the Odyssey] I can translate that as ‘crafty’. It’s four syllables to two syllables, no problem. Whereas if the phrase is ‘Agamemnon son of Atreus’, it’s just got to be as long as it is,” she explains. An obvious solution was to lengthen the lines using another metre – alexandrines, for example, would give her an extra beat and some more syllables. “I spent six months trying to do that. And I realised it was a complete failure. It just didn’t read well.” In the end, she stuck with iambic pentameters and abandoned line-for-line verisimilitude.
Then there are the multiple challenges of tone and language. Wilson tells me she struggled over the often very freighted language of war, noting how translations of the 20th century often come with linguistic echoes of, say, the second world war, or Vietnam. In fact some of Wilson’s most illuminating and moving encounters with the poem have been with veterans in the US, she tells me. Modern warriors “take Homer very seriously”, she says. “For them it may be ancient – but it’s not far away.” Notwithstanding powerful contemporary resonances, however, “I don’t want [this translation] to be tied to a particular war. Instead I was thinking a lot about structural violence, which points to Homer’s very hierarchical and unequal society, in which the obvious violence of the spear going through the flesh is a manifestation of all these other kinds of violence that are always ongoing – of enslavement and colonisation and one group of men coming to steal from another.”
On a desert island, would she want the Iliad or the Odyssey? “It’s a very difficult question,” she says. Nevertheless, she answers without a blink: “I’m an Iliad person. For sure. And I think I would always have said that.” In fact, she tells me, she remembers giving the same answer, age 17, when asked the question at school. “The Iliad feels more truthful,” Wilson says. “Whereas the fantasy that at least one special person can get it all back, and that loss is not inevitable, is central to the plot of the Odyssey.” The Iliad, on the other hand, “is committed to showing you over and over, that no, it is inevitable, however special you are, that you’re always going to die, you’re always going to suffer the worst possible loss you could suffer.” Bleak but true: and precious, brief life shimmers all the more brightly because of it.
We discuss how conflict and war lie at the heart of story structure, how everyone I’ve met in Ukraine has a vivid story to tell, how the Iliad is really “multiple stories folded into the grand story”. She lights up when she starts thinking about the characters of the poem, so fully realised even when they have tiny parts to play, she argues. “I mean, Achilles is a fabulous character, and it’s easy both to see how much damage he causes and to have enormous empathy for him, and the same for Hector – but the same goes even for the minor characters. Hera [queen of the gods] is a great character. I think Iris is a great character.” For a moment she considers Iris, goddess of the rainbow, who darts around between deities, relaying important messages verbatim – or not. And she laughs, and with a great beaming smile, says: “The rainbow goddess of translation! I love her!”
• Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Iliad will be published on 26 September by WW Norton. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
