After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. The students of Girton and Smith who performed Electra were showing off their intellectual capacity, but at the same time they were defusing any political threat; the choice of play reassured their audiences that classical education for women would reinforce their sense of duty and subjection. 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. But now, at long last, we are beginning to see an outpouring of translations of Greek and Latin texts by women. Guernica'sBen Purkert interviewed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson! [16] In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences. Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2014. The main purpose of my work is that I should entertain the people. Order now and if the Amazon.com price decreases between your order time and the end of the day of the release date, you'll receive the lowest price. , she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. [2] Her sister is the food writer Bee Wilson. Definitely worth it. Wilson returns to strict iambic pentameter. Here's what happened when a woman took the job", "The first English Translation of the Odyssey by a woman was worth the wait", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emily_Wilson_(classicist)&oldid=1135613612, Scholar, professor, writer, translator, poet, "Ah, how miserable!" Emily Wilson is Professor of classical studies and Graduate Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. It says it is translated by Fagles but it is not. On the wall hung pictures of Wilsons three young daughters; the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. The Iliad and Odyssey are composed in a long dactylic line (tumpety-tumpety-tum) thats poorly suited to the natural rhythms of English. His adventures are many and memorable before he gets back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope. On the other hand, as Prins says, these plays could be read more than one way. "[2] The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003. Male classical scholars are represented by the heading classicists which counts more than 200 volumes. I must confess, I bogged down about halfway through reading this, one of the iconic works of Western literature. Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the Odyssey, one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus? This title will be released on September 19, 2023. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. Poetry News Guernica Talks to Emily Wilson While She Translates The Iliad By Harriet Staff Guernica 's Ben Purkert interviewed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson! Prins gives a nuanced response to this central question. In 2014 she published The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca. The inability to take classical texts for granted is a great gift that some female translators are able to use as a point of leverage, to shift the canon to a different and unexpected place. Later Bible translators failed to meet that mystical standard. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poems fifth word to polytropos: When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. In the Iliad, it is Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks, a demigod almost invulnerable to death. I read the second half only by means of the Arguments which precede each Book. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. Im trying to take this task and this process of responding to this text and creating this text extremely seriously, with whatever I have, linguistically, sonically, emotionally.. Wilsons unadorned but resonant language plumbs the poems profound pathos and reveals its characters as palpably real, even complicated, human beings. 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. The Aeneid, perhaps the most canonical Latin text, was translated into English by a woman (Ruden) for the first time in 2009. The fact that its possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? : f 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, Innovative, stylish versions of Greek tragedies Anne Carson. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. Celebrated for her vivid and lyrical translation of Homer's The Odyssey, Wilson will read from new work currently in progress: translations of Homer's Iliad and Oedipus . Emily Wilson is the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities, professor of Classical Studies, and graduate chair of the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary. But often such words carry real weight: the suitors sauntered in, for instance, where the verb perfectly captures this crew of dapper sociopaths. Almost none have French or Latin roots. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. Alexanders Iliad mirrors the length and redundancies of the original, providing a welcome reminder of how distant Homers world is from our own. Some trade-offs are inevitable. My name is Zameer Ahmed. This is a short version of the episode. Emily Wilson. Emily Wilsons translation of Homers Odyssey will be published in the autumn by Norton. [1] In 2017 she became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer 's Odyssey into English. How, I asked, would she address such a complaint from someone in her field? I think he was a terrible reader of poetry. Dismal as it has been in other respects, the fall of 2017 has been good to readers of Homer. Which, of course, is absurd and rather pseudo-feminist. This year marks the publication of the first female translation of five of Plutarchs Roman Lives (by Mensch, who has also translated Arrian, Herodotus and five of Plutarchs Greek Lives). When finished, they compared their work. Biography. For the love of whatever please stop asking, it's legit distressing. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Why was tragedy so important for women of this period? Zeus is the poems prevailing god, and what men do, or are willing to do, in love and war and in the friendships that arise in war and its losses, are the poems preoccupations. I liked more or less everything about it. But Hutchinsons work exists only in manuscript; like that of most British female classical translators before this generation, her work was largely unknown beyond her own immediate circle. Try again. Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app. : A Version of Homer That Dares to Match Him Line for Line, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/books/review/odyssey-homer-emily-wilson-translation.html. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2021. That youre going to be communicating with the masses, which is less important than being innovative within your field. A few translators have tried to fashion an English equivalent; Richmond Lattimore was perhaps the most successful. So it would be GREAT if you can mention the name of the translator in the product description. Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. I think he had a good classics major undergraduate kind of Greek, but I think its all to do with a particular notion of aesthetics and class, the whole plainness and nobility. Its about noblesse oblige and youre going to be the kind of gentleman whos going to have gone to Rugby and that will be the kind of language that we speak: the classy kind of language. 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. Many of the most dedicated (such as Pamela Mensch, Sarah Ruden, Caroline Alexander and Josephine Balmer) have no institutional affiliation and are thus free from the pressure to produce work that counts for tenure. 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. And projecting all of that back on to the classics. I just felt like I wanted to spend a little bit longer with Euripides.. If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, . I wanted there to be a sense, Wilson told me, that maybe there is something wrong with this guy. And there are numerous translators who have attempted to translate the Iliad, each with their own advantages and vices. Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. One characteristic of Homeric verse is the formulaic epithet: much-suffering Odysseus, lovely-ankled Ino. These arose as byproducts of oral composition pitons, Mendelsohn calls them, stuck into the vast face of the epic to provide a momentary respite for both bard and hearers. Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times -bestselling author of . One tale has it that an Egyptian king of the third-century B.C. You have all this information, and you can regurgitate, in the sense that you can strategize to translate an English sentence or a Latin sentence. In this context, Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey is notable for its ability to demonstrate that the world of Odysseus is alien to the contemporary conjuncture--is not possible in the world of powder, lead, and the printer's bar--but that its alienness can be comprehended according to a translation structure that renders it . She liked French but was in terror of talking in class. 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!. They knew how much was at stake, not only for their status as intellectuals, but for their artistic and literary vision. One might assume optimistically that things have changed. [7] Her next book, The Death of Socrates (2007), examines Socrates' execution. Speaker: Emily Wilson (University of Pennsylvania) Professor of Classical Studies Title: "Iliad 24: A Reading from My Translation" It could be that hes the turner.. I had enjoyed Fitzgerald's verse translation of The Aenied as a result of which I bought this verse translation of the Iliad. In her reading of the modernist poet HD (Hilda Doolittle), Prins shows brilliantly that the attempt to translate Euripides lyric meters into English enabled her to invent a new kind of free verse in English. 63)", "The Norton Anthology of Western Literature", "The Norton Anthology of World Literature", "Child, Busby and Sissay join 2020 Booker Prize judging panel", "Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation is short listed for the national translation award", "MacArthur 'Genius' Grant Winners Attest to 'Power of Individual Creativity', "Historically, men translated the Odyssey. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. You can do it all in writing. [1] Her thesis was entitled Why Do I Overlive? Its not like he ever translated Homer. Theres Alexander Popes for wisdoms various arts renownd; William Cowpers For shrewdness famed/And genius versatile; H.F. Carys crafty; William Sothebys by long experience tried; Theodore Buckleys full of resources; Henry Alfords much-versed; Philip Worsleys that hero; the Rev. The context in which contemporary women produce translations of ancient Greek and Latin is very different from that of the Victorian and Edwardian ladies studied by Prins. "In the Iliad, an eagle flies past the Trojans, dropping the snake he carried -- & so gets home empty-beaked and wounded. The whole question of What is that story? is going to depend on the language, the words that you use.. I find this to be a very good translation, into modern English. Menschs colourless prose is not noticeably more conscious or critical of the gender identities of Plutarchs violent elite Roman men than that of other contemporary translators (such as Robin Waterfield, whose fine Oxford Worlds Classics translation came out in 1999). For hundreds of years, the study of ancient Greece and Rome was largely the domain of elite white men and their bored sons. Her books include The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007) and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (2014). I'm posting this review because Amazon keeps emailing me asking how many stars I would give the Iliad and every time I see that email come up I just think "oh my god stop asking me this book ripped my soul to shreds and rendered me void of any spirit for a week PLEASE DON'T REMIND ME." Euripides Hippolytus in which Phaedra falls in love with her stepson, who wants to remain asexual was read by John Addington Symonds in male homoerotic terms (since Hippolytus rejects heterosexuality), but the play was reread by his correspondent, a young student and poet named Agnes Robinson, as a way to discover her lesbian desires, through the thwarted, impassioned desire of Phaedra. The story is so good/intense it ruined my life for a solid week. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (wandered wrecked where worked) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (Tell me about and Find the beginning) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homers polytropos and Odysseuss complicated nature. Why would female classicists even want to translate these dead white men? Why put oneself in this difficult, alienating position? But Wilsons rendering is remarkable in other ways as well. Some of the media coverage has made me uncomfortable, because it reflects Anglophone hegemony. When Telemachus visits Menelaus, a slave girl brings him bread and many canaps. (Well, there is a wedding in progress.) translating the fairly neutral word used of Odysseus's hanged slave-girls as 'whores'. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Its all going to be talked out. There were learned female classicists all over Europe in the early modern period, including several Italian humanists. This year marks the publication of the first female translation of five of Plutarch's Roman Lives (by Mensch,. I struggle with this all the time, Wilson said. 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? Greek maenads were the model for a new, uncorseted way of moving, leaping and dancing. The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander by Homer, Dominic Keating, et al. Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. The play was staged by 19th-century female students keen to show their intellectual worth. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Here is how Wilson renders their undoing: If I was really going to be radical, Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, I wouldve said, polytropos means straying, and andra man, the poems first word means husband, because in fact andra does also mean husband, and I couldve said, Tell me about a straying husband. And thats a viable translation. Don't waste your money, unless of course that is what you are after. Polytropos, Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word u of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. I n The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of . Aristotle said that the Iliad was a poem in which things happened to people, while the Odyssey was a poem of character. Wilson knew that if she was being smart, she ought to focus on something understudied, like Plutarch. Young female slaves in a palace would have had little agency to resist the demands of powerful men. My colleagues told me: You really shouldnt be doing that kind of thing before tenure. [5] Wilson's parents divorced shortly before she went to college. But then she goes on to give us Penelopes ordinary grief: She cried a long, long time, / then spoke again where cried (not wept) and the repeated long evoke Penelopes sobbing as powerfully as any other words could do. The potential shame of pronouncing a French word wrong was pretty inhibiting, Wilson said, laughing. [14], Wilson is perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed translation of The Odyssey (2017), becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. Emily Wilson received a BA (1994) and MPhil (1996) from the University of Oxford and a PhD (2001) from . 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. Wilson doesnt shy from colloquialisms: fighting solo, pep talk, on day eighteen. And there are some daring choices. Since the Odyssey first appeared in English, around 1615, in George Chapmans translation, the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseuss ill-fated 10-year attempt to return home from the war in Troy to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, has prompted some 60 English translations, at an accelerating pace, half of them in the last 100 years and a dozen in the last two decades. It took some time and chapters before I finally knew who the main characters were. "We discussed toxic masculinity, pseudo feminism, and which pronouns are most appropriate for Homer," says Purkert. We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. Some 70 Jewish elders said to be skilled in the Scriptures and in both languages were sent from Jerusalem. Home . The prefix poly, Wilson said, laughing, means many or multiple. Tropos means turn. Many or multiple could suggest that hes much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, hed like to be on. The list of English classical translations by contemporary women is distinguished and growing every year: it includes Susanna Braunds Lucan; Diane Arnson Svarliens Euripides; Cynthia Damons Tacitus and Julius Caesar; Alicia Stallings Lucretius; Deborah Robertss Prometheus Bound; Janet Lembkes Virgil and Euripides; Laura Gibbss Aesop; and Anne Carsons innovative, stylish versions of Greek tragedies, as well as her Sappho (also now translated by Diane Rayor). 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. 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. Office Hours: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ITWAWPXKjDn2CaB5IGbow07gIF3hOvFt6tRSZMzdIo/edit Education: FAAR 2006-2007 Ph.D. (Classics and Comparative Literature) Yale University, 2001 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. Though she has resisted them, the women in her palace have not. Emily Wilson's crisp and musical version is a cultural landmark. 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. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2018. Wilson is at her best in one of the poem's greatest scenes, the first meeting in Book 19 between Penelope and her unrecognized husband: Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr scatters. Many female classical translators, such as Mensch, seem to find themselves drawn to a foreignising, markedly uncontemporary style, as if to shore up authority in a world where they (we) may still be seen as interlopers and to demonstrate fidelity to the dead male original. She loved the systematization of it, the reams of things to memorize and to get right. The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. Homer didn't write in King's English, you know. Wilson is good too with the poems undertones and double meanings. Complicated: the brilliance of Wilsons choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. : Greek, Latin and English Tragic Survival. It is an interesting injunction from Odysseus, who himself, during his 10 years of wandering, was serially unfaithful. The myths of Io and Prometheus were, for these women, symbolic of their own struggle to find mobility within the constraints of translation and Victorian literary norms. It does not dwell on the causes of the war. Although translation might seem a natural step for a scholar preoccupied by the connections between antiquity and later texts, Wilson was dissuaded from pursuing it. Wilson: I was unknown before I publishedThe Odyssey, and then suddenly I had a readership.