Emily Wilson
Articles and Essays
From "Growing up with the Odyssey"
Professor Wilson has contributed articles and essays to a variety of publications.
“I Began With Sound” on Public Books (October 2, 2023)
“I have now lived with this poem for some 35 years—rereading it, teaching it in the original and in various translations, and, now, rendering it into English.”
“Emily Wilson on 5 crucial decisions she made in her ‘Iliad’ translation” in The Washington Post (September 20, 2023)
“The challenges of producing a new metrical verse translation of a viscerally emotional, richly varied ancient epic poem go far beyond any individual word.”
“Exit Hector, Again and Again: How Different Translators Reveal the ‘Iliad’ Anew” in The New York Times (June 28, 2023)
“In one of the most moving and memorable scenes from the “Iliad,” the great Trojan warrior Hector says farewell to his wife, Andromache, who has urged him not to risk his life by fighting on the plain.”
"Why I Gave Homer A Contemporary Voice in The Odyssey" in Literary Hub (December 19, 2017)
"As the latest in a long line of translators of the Odyssey, I thought long and hard about my own role as the newest host for this much-traveled, mutable and much-turned poem."
"A Translator’s Reckoning With the Women of the Odyssey" in The New Yorker (December 4, 2017)
"The silencing of female voices, and the dangers of female agency, are central problems in the poem."
"How Modern Bias Is Projected Onto Antiquity" in Time (November 6, 2017)
"For a translator of The Odyssey, the term “fidelity” takes on a different resonance, since the poem itself is so deeply engaged with questions of loyalty, fidelity and truth – which turn out to mean entirely different things for male and female characters."
"Translator's Note to The Odyssey" in Poetry Daily (October 2017)
"Growing up with the Odyssey" in The Paris Review (August 7, 2017)
"I was Athena, the most kick-ass goddess of them all. Though Odysseus is the hero (acted by our class troublemaker, a clever, rowdy British Pakistani boy on whom I had a secret crush), I was vastly more powerful, and I got to tell him exactly what to do. "