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Emily Wilson, the classicist who in a review eviscerated Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” isn’t done with Homer’s epic. She’s translating the ancient Greek poem again.
“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told the Associated Press last week. “I’m about halfway through.”
Wilson’s 2017 interpretation of the 2,800-year-old poem — the first major English translation published by a woman — is widely considered a faithful, top-notch rendition, particularly for readers looking for an accessible take on Homer’s work. It was a bestseller when it first hit bookshop shelves nearly 10 years ago — and after Nolan mentioned Wilson’s work in an early interview promoting his big-screen adaption, its sales spiked.
A representative for Audible told The Times last month that, year over year, purchases of Wilson’s “Odyssey” translation were up by more than 600% across Audible’s U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces. Daily global title sales rose nearly sixfold during the week the movie premiered.
Earlier this month, ancient-history podcast “Instant Classics” shared an interview with Wilson from the spring discussing “The Odyssey,” and Wilson said back then — before the film premiered and her brutal critique was heard ’round the world — that she wanted to retranslate the work in a way that freed her from the constraints she placed on herself with the 2017 version.
There are several popular renditions of “The Odyssey” written in prose, such as E. V. Rieu’s 1946 translation, which according to Penguin focuses on the clarity of the storytelling. But Wilson’s 2017 translation aimed to stay true to the ancient Greek form and was written in verse; it uses a strict poetic meter with a steady rhythm, and has the exact same number of lines that Homer’s poem does. No easy feat!
In her new translation, Wilson said she’s allowing herself more lines, longer words and the repetition of phrases, which is the same approach she used in her 2023 translation of “The Iliad.”
“I’m proud of my ‘Odyssey’ translation. … I think there are lots of good things about the kinds of compression and choices that I was forced into,” she said during the interview, referencing the strict rules she’d set for herself in mirroring Homer’s form. Also, in the new translation, readers will get even more of Wilson’s expertise: “I’m also going to quadruple the number of endnotes because endnotes are really fun to write.”
In case you missed the discourse around Wilson’s scathing review of Nolan’s film adaption, the scholar chalked up Nolan’s take as a sexless dud that dulled the women, missed the point when interrogating the cost of war and mirrored Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones.” By the end, she “almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.”
Peter Simon, Wilson’s editor at Liveright Publishing, told the Associated Press in a statement that because Wilson had “poured so much of her life and scholarship into ‘The Odyssey’ … her new approach is bound to be thrilling.”
