Why is Emily Wilson retranslating The Odyssey from scratch?

Emily Wilson, chairwoman of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, best-selling translator, and website-crashing Christopher Nolan hater, is going back to retranslate The Odyssey less than a decade after the publication of her 2017 modernizing take on the epic.

This isn’t just tweaking and refreshing some word choices. Wilson is starting over from the top with a completely new translation. It reminds me of that old myth about the Golden Gate Bridge being in a state of perpetual painting: once you reach the end of one translation of The Odyssey, you gotta go back to “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε.”

The question is why, especially since two editions within a decade is bound to cause some confusion: which one will be the “definitive” Wilson translation? Wilson is aware that this might be an issue, and hopes teachers won’t “curse” her for it. The publisher was apparently not too happy either, according to Wilson, though selling over a million copies of an ancient epic probably won her some wiggle room.

It’s not that she thinks the 2017 version is bad. Wilson told the podcast Instant Classics that she’s “proud” of her previous work, even though it was a bit constrained.

“I think,” she said, “there are lots of good things about the kinds of compression and choices that I was forced into.”

And this isn’t Wilson capitalizing on the poem’s current Matt Damon-sized popularity, either. According to an interview with the AP, Wilson is already “halfway through” this new translation, which has been in the works since at least the spring, according to that same interview with Instant Classics.

One reason for going back to the epic is that Wilson has rethought her approach overall, telling the Times that this new translation will be longer, with “more varied word-length and pacing,” mirroring the approach she took with The Iliad.

She’s also hoping to be more precise in how she presents certain concepts to a modern reader. One example she cited is the word “slave,” which she thinks is not the right noun to communicate how a relationship of bondage would be understood in an Ancient Greek context.

Adding in more context like this is a broader goal of this retranslation. Wilson is promising to “quadruple the number of endnotes because endnotes are really fun to write.” Hell yeah. This is good news for us end and footnotes fans (shout out to David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, and the Folger editions of Shakespeare).

Broader questions about translation are addressed in Wilson’s new essay collection, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, which explores her approach compared to the old standard translators Mendelsohn and Fagles. These new essays also take on the popularity of Stoicism (”I’m quite suspicious that through philosophy you can have security”), the Percy Jackson books (“Here’s this white boy in America who’s going to gather the whole of Western civilization, and there’ll be a hero’s journey, which will really be the heroism of American exceptionalism”), and how Cardi B’s “WAP” echos ancient comedic poems.

I do think ultimately, the real reason why Wilson keeps going back to The Odyssey is that she just loves this poem. She told the Times that “it’s always a huge privilege to get to spend all day reading Homer and wrestling with the endlessly fascinating challenges of how to convey ancient Greek into fluent English verse.”

A good reminder that returning to the books you love is never a waste of time.

Images from Wikipedia and Wikipedia.