JOEL ROSE, HOST:
"The Odyssey," that ancient Greek, epic poem by Homer has been having a moment. Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film reimagining of the familiar tale racked up more than half a billion dollars domestically. But perhaps one of the most interesting conversations about the poem is happening off the silver screen. Emily Wilson is a celebrity classicist whose translations of "The Odyssey" and "Iliad" are extraordinarily popular and, in some circles, controversial. She's outspoken about the role of classic works in modern society, as she writes in her new book of essays, "Crossing The Wine-Dark Sea." Emily Wilson, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
EMILY WILSON: Thank you so much for having me.
ROSE: So this summer, you found yourself at the center of the discourse around "The Odyssey" in a somewhat surprising way. You said, very publicly, that you are not a fan of Nolan's film. I want to know - was this all an elaborate ruse to get even more people talking about ancient poems?
WILSON: (Laughter) I mean, I love it that people are talking about ancient poems. I wish that more people were reading ancient poems rather than clicking on clickbait-y (ph) silliness, which is what I think most of the discourse is. But if it's bringing people to read and to engage with culture and engage with history, I love it.
ROSE: Do you have any regrets about how this all played out?
WILSON: No. I have a sense of, you know, the gods are always more powerful than mere mortals. I'm a mere mortal. I have no way to tell what any of the words that I speak, that are feathered things on the breath of air - how will they be received, and how will my chaos be dispersed to the winds? I have no way to control any of that.
ROSE: All right. Let's talk about your new book, "Crossing The Wine-Dark Sea." It's a series of essays reflecting on translation, on classic writing and the modern world. You write at one point, quote, "it is a waste of everyone's time if a retranslation takes more or less the same approach as one or more existing published translations," unquote. In short, if you don't have something new to say, don't say anything. Tell me, why did you write that?
WILSON: Because it does seem to me that there are a huge number of available translations of the same canonical Greek and Roman texts - far more Greek and Roman texts than of other ancient literature - which are retranslated endlessly. And some of those retranslations are very different from each other, and it's fascinating to examine and look at the differences, whether or not you can read the original.
ROSE: So you have your own very famous translations of "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad," and I gather you have selected a portion of your own translations that you want to read aloud for us. What are you going to read?
WILSON: So I thought that, in honor of Sir Christopher Nolan, I would read the most extensive passage from Homer about the Trojan horse, which is a simile about how the Trojans bring the horse into the city, and Odysseus is listening to this story and has a strange reaction to it. So the singer in this mysterious land of the Phaeacians is singing/telling the story of the Trojan horse. So the passage first starts off with what the singer is saying, and then we have Odysseus' reaction.
(Reading) The town was doomed to ruin when it took that horse filled full of fighters bringing death to Trojans. And he sang how the Achaeans poured from the horse in ambush from the hollow and sacked the city, how they scattered out, destroying every neighborhood. Like Ares, Odysseus, with Menelaus, rushed to find Deiphobus' house, and there he won at last through dreadful violence, thanks to Athena, so the poet sang.
(Reading) Odysseus was melting into tears. His cheeks were wet with weeping as a woman weeps as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home and children. She is watching as he gasps and dies. She shrieks a clear, high wail, collapsing upon his corpse. The men are right behind. They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor and a life of pain. Her face is marked with her despair. In that same desperate way, Odysseus was crying.
ROSE: Wow. Thank you.
WILSON: Thank Homer.
(LAUGHTER)
WILSON: Homer was really good.
ROSE: Can we talk for just a second before we get into the choices about just how you read it? You know, when you go to a poetry reading, I feel like everyone adopts this very flat, very dry way of reading, and that's not at all what you did there. Why?
WILSON: These poems come from a period before theater as we know it existed, but they provide something in a way like theater, like a radio play or like a performance thing. So I very much want both in the translation, but then whenever I read it, I hope I and then other people who read it, too, can understand that this is a kind of poetry that has these very intense emotions and these very different perspectives within the poem.
ROSE: What was the hardest part of that translation for you? Was there like a word or a phrase that, you know, you got stuck on?
WILSON: There's a superlative right at the end of the description of what does Odysseus do? What is Odysseus' ultimate war triumph? - where the Greek says that he (non-English language spoken), the most terrible kind of war. So how do we describe the most terribleness? So I went back and forth about, should I use dread? Should I use horror? Should I use most maximally violent kind of violence? In ancient Greek, you can use a superlative that's all one word, whereas in English, I think we have to convey these maximal things by different kinds of means.
ROSE: There's another moment in one of these essays where you describe translators digging through the scraps of history, hunting desperately for a piece of these great stories. What do you think will be the great work of our era that might have that effect on classicists in the future?
WILSON: That's such an interesting question and so difficult to predict - right? - because, I mean, one of the big themes of this book is that canons change all the time. We have an idea that, of course, everyone's always been reading Homer. People in Shakespeare's time would have been astonished to realize there would come a day when not every normal school child would have read Plautus and Terence, and there were all these ups and downs in terms of which canons, which culture, which moments of the past become most resonant and then which moments of the past get forgotten or buried again and then get dug up again.
ROSE: It sounds like we don't even really know what the classicists of the future will be reading from the past. Even that has shifted so dramatically.
WILSON: It's shifted very dramatically, yes. I mean, I think that's one of the big things that I'm trying to get out in the book is just that we have an idea of both the past and the present as much more stable than I think they actually are. The past is constantly shifting in response to the present, and the present is also constantly shifting. Neither one of these things is stable. And also neither one of these things is nearly as much of a monolith as people sometimes think. It's not the case that you can make these big generalizations about all ancient Greeks, as if there were such a thing as what all ancient Greeks believed any more than there's such a thing as what everyone in modernity thinks and believes.
ROSE: Emily Wilson is a translator, classicist and the author of the new book "Crossing The Wine-Dark Sea." Thank you very much for joining us.
WILSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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