Wilson was first drawn to Homer because of his immortal deities but came to love The Iliad for its representation of human mortality—the poem recalls the many ways in which the human body can be pierced and torn, how men are consigned to oblivion or try to extend themselves beyond death through glory, and the pain of inconsolable grief. The Lycian soldier Glaucus famously describes the ephemerality of all people: “The generations / of men are like the growth and fall of leaves. / The wind shakes some to earth. The forest sprouts / new foliage, and springtime comes. So too, / one human generation comes to be, / another ends.” (6.195–200) But as Wilson says in her translator’s note, for all its concentration on death, “The Iliad also makes the whole world feel gloriously alive.” (lxi) In our correspondence, she similarly reflects on the fleetingness of all things, from individual fame to our planet, with tremendous liveliness. Wilson’s Iliad is both tragic and exuberant; its emotional force connects present lives to ancient ones, and propelled by a new vision, it shows that texts are alive for as long as they are read and engaged with.
—Michal Zechariah
Your translation of The Odyssey has made you famous, a position rarely occupied by translators. What was it like to translate The Iliad after that previous, successful project?
I’m only a little bit famous, not Beyoncé-famous! But yes, very few literary translators and very few classicists are even a little bit famous. Plenty of my fellow translators and fellow classicists are far more brilliant than I am but aren’t as well-known. The gods are unpredictable and fickle in who gets awarded a few brief moments of fame. I have a little of it now, and I know it’s a privilege and a responsibility.
Ten years ago, before The Odyssey translation came out, I’d published various books and articles and translations, but they sold the way academic books usually do, and nobody had heard of me. When I first signed up to do The Odyssey, the publishers warned me that it would probably sell a few hundred copies and sink without trace, and in a way that was quite relaxing. You can’t spend many years intensely engaged with the Homeric poems without spending a lot of time contemplating fame or kleos, both its attractions and its terrible dangers.
The desperate longing to win fame and glory, in the world of The Iliad, repeatedly leads people closer to death, and even death doesn’t guarantee undying fame, aphthiton kleos—it can all get washed away. I love the passage in the middle of Iliad where we’re told by the narrator that one day, after the time of the poem’s story, the great Greek wall will be washed away by Apollo and Poseidon, who will move all the rivers to flood the plain and wipe away the marks of human achievement. As with Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: what may seem like the path to fame can easily become the path to shame. Fame, whether it’s a couple of weeks of US media coverage, or a place in an epic story, or a monumental funeral mound, is always evanescent.
I am, tentatively, enormously grateful for the widespread positive coverage, for now. I feel thrilled that so many readers have responded to my translations, and that for a lot of people, my approach has worked. The main thing is not whether or not I personally am famous, but whether more people are reading Homer, and whether my work can play a small part in smashing down walls around the study of antiquity.
Your research covers English as well as ancient literature, and in your New Yorker profile you mentioned other ways in which you belong to two different worlds. How has that affected your translation?
My work is deeply informed by the various ways I’m from and within two worlds: I spent half my life in the UK, and half in the US; I went to both public and private schools; I’m interested in both ancient and later literatures and cultures; I have degrees in both Classics and English.
There are obvious limitations in the training of translators from ancient languages who aren’t classicists—like Stephen Mitchell, whose versions necessarily borrow heavily from other existing translations, rather than offering an original vision of the Greek, or even Robert Fagles, who was an American English professor, not a classicist, and whose very successful translations tend towards fairly radical domesticization, importing lots of American idioms and colloquialisms, and rendering ancient metrical poetry in a version of Whitmanesque free verse. At the same time, there’s a serious limitation in translators of ancient metrical poetry who haven’t spent much or any time studying the long history of metrical poetry in English—which is the case for the majority of published modern classicist translators. Classicists often accept a rather awkward style of English free verse as the “normal” way to render metrical ancient Greek or Latin poetry, not because it has to be that way, but because it became the tradition over the course of the twentieth century, and classicists often don’t care at all about English poetics or the English language. I do care a lot about those things.
As someone who loves Anglophone metrical poetry as well as the ancient Greek and Roman poets, I felt frustrated for many years that the translations I had to use with my students of these ancient texts in translation were almost entirely in American free verse or prose. These translations each definitely have their merits, but I felt it was a shame that none of them provide any equivalent for the regular meter of the originals. At the same time, I definitely didn’t want to make Homer sound sub-Miltonic or sub-Shakespearean, because these epics are based on a long oral tradition; they aren’t full of allusions in the way that Milton’s poetry is. I wanted my love of earlier Anglophone poetry to inform my technique and my handling of meter, the line and the verse paragraph, but not to feel audible as actual allusion or quotation.
I realized retrospectively that American readers often thought of me as iconoclastic, because I didn’t see any of the Great American Free Verse Translations as sacred—because I was never made to read Fagles or Lattimore in high school or college. To me, the original poems are sacred, not any of these translations, and it was startling to me that so many people in the US saw me as knocking poor dear Professors Lattimore and Fagles off pedestals that I naively, Britishly, hadn’t quite realized they were on. In fact, it’s quite possible to love many different translators and translations; mine don’t erase all those that have come before me!
I’m interested in the academic context of many of these translations. How do you see translation fitting in among other academic activities, like research and teaching?
Translation is often imagined to be an “outreach” activity, requiring no original thought or research; it’s often been considered the kind of work that doesn’t count for tenure, because it’s not “real research.” I see that view as pretty problematic and limited. I think a re-translation in particular, to be worth doing and worth reading, has to have something like an original argument or intervention in the field, just as a new piece of literary criticism or cultural history has to have one. You can do a lazy re-translation that’s fairly similar to one or more previous translations, just as you can write a lazy or unoriginal work of history or lit crit; but if the re-translation is worth it, it should provide something new, and to do that, the re-translator has to be fully cognizant both of earlier or existing translations, and of scholarship and commentary traditions on the original text, and ideally also have some new insights about elements in the text that have been under-served or under-played in those existing interpretative resources.
My translations are designed primarily to be read by students and non-classicist general readers. But I hope they may also be interesting for my colleagues who are teaching them to students. We tend to think that the loop between translation and scholarship and teaching just goes one way—re-translations should draw on scholarship and then inform or enable teaching. But I think it’s more complex; traditional translations of key terms can also provide blocks to new understandings, even for scholars who read the originals. In the scholarship on The Iliad, for instance, as well as in translations, I see a tendency to adopt a somewhat sentimental vision of Hector, as the defender of Troy, and I think traditions of teaching, commentary and translation can work together to enforce one way of reading something that might not be quite as obvious or undebatable (given that Hector’s noble, tragic, shame-driven insistence on pushing ahead towards the enemy, despite his family’s entreaties, causes his city’s fall). A re-translation can articulate a new vision of an old text, which can in turn change how it’s taught and studied in the original. I’ve certainly spoken to classicist colleagues who have told me this has happened for them.
So having multiple re-translations can illuminate different aspects of the original?
I don’t think more translations necessarily means more insights. Many re-translations don’t add all that much that’s significantly different or enlightening. But I do see huge potential for many interesting future re-translations. For one thing, there’s potential for more re-translations of lesser-known texts: why does it always have to be The Iliad again? I love The Iliad most, but I’d also love to see more attention and more re-translations of much less well-known ancient texts. Just sticking with Greek heroic epic, how about a new Quintus of Smyrna, or a new Argonautica?
In general, I’d love to see renewed focus on poetic form and literary form in re-translation and translation. As I’ve said at maybe boring length, one of my main motivations was feeling frustrated at the predominance of no-meter free verse, as the supposedly normal way to render metrical ancient verse. My own solution, using iambic pentameter, is obviously not the only one. I’d love to see more technical poetic experimentation, like the wonderful metrical experiments of earlier literary eras, like those of Philip Sidney or Algernon Swinburne with ancient meters in English, or experiments with new forms.
In your translation of The Odyssey, Homer asks his muse to “tell the old story for our modern times.” How do you hope your Iliad will speak to the present?
First, I hope it will speak to the present by reminding us that the present isn’t all there is. One of the great values of reading ancient literature is that it gives us insight into human cultures and experiences that are very distant from our own world, and yet still recognizably human. I’ve been somewhat frustrated by the idea that my translations are particularly “modernizing,” which I don’t think they are. Other Homeric translators—like Lombardo, Mitchell or Fagles—use a lot more colloquialisms and slang than I do; the choice to use regular iambic pentameter and words like “wrath” are not in any obvious sense modernizing gestures. I hope readers feel Homer come alive in a new way in my versions, and that the translations speak to the present in the sense that they speak to readers who are alive: what other readers are there?
I think of The Odyssey and The Iliad as poems that were both surprising and original re-interpretations of tradition in their own time. Both provide peculiar, startling approaches to the much older, larger body of archaic Greek myth, not least in the ways they leave most of it out: The Iliad notoriously has no Trojan Horse, and focuses on a tiny, ostensibly tangential incident within the much larger war. I hope the clarity and musicality of my translations will help remind people that these poems are old but not primitive, and that mythic storytelling has always been adapted and altered to fit the needs of new generations. I don’t think it’s my job to tell readers how to connect The Iliad directly to any particular current war or upsurge of violent killings. It’s all too easy for any reader to do that for themselves.
I do see resonances with our own moment, not just in the presence of violence and war and rage and grief, and of yearning for fame and glory, but in The Iliad’s presentation of a world where everything, even inanimate objects like spears or stones, has its own kind of life—and yet everything, even the thriving rich city of Troy, is so short-lived. Many of us live, like the Trojans, in places that won’t be inhabitable in another couple of generations or less.
Moving from our mortal world to the world of the immortals—you have a familiar way of talking about Homer’s deities, and your translator’s note mentions praying to Calliope, the muse of heroic poetry.
The deities are probably the first element I really fell in love with in Homer, from the moment I played Athena in my school play at the age of eight. I loved how magical they are, and how different they are from one another, and how compellingly this version of polytheism provides a vision of why mortal life is so precarious and so painful.
As a translator, I found the deities provided some of the most interesting challenges. I wanted to be sure that the reader or listener could get a sense of how fully realized each of the divine characters is, but also of how strange and inhuman they are in how they move through space—how Hera travels at the speed of thought, or Poseidon takes three strides and has crossed a mountain. They should feel fully real, totally convincing, physically present in the world, and yet alien, magical, a different order of being from the human.
I haven’t really talked about Achilles yet, so I’ll just say here, the fascination of that central character in the poem is intimately entwined with his special status as the mortal son of a goddess, who knows both how special he is, and that he will die. Homer shows us both what it means to be godlike, and how different that is from being an actual god.
A lot of the media coverage of your Odyssey focused on your being the first woman to translate the poem into English. You must be relieved not to be the first woman English translator of The Iliad! At the same time, your translations of Homer do pay special attention to the conditions of women in the societies they portray, and The Iliad is especially concerned with masculine values such as honor, competition, and excelling at war.
I’m not against talking about gender, though it’s not really my primary interest. But I do think the journalistic focus on my own gender can be pretty limiting. It’s anti-feminist, if it means women writers and women translators have to be put in the gender box, and if it means erasing my predecessors (there are many female Homerists and female Homeric translators, including Caroline Alexander, whose Iliad is totally different from mine). I hope if you were interviewing a male translator, you’d ask him about gender in whatever text he was working on.
It’s a conscious goal of mine to think through and feel my way inside all the characters in the texts I work on, and in the case of Homer, I see it as an essential feature of these poems that they are deeply empathetic to all characters, including the enslaved men and women, and including subordinate and female mortals. But that’s not a position that I magically arrived at, without having to do any work or any thinking, just by the superpower of being a girl. It doesn’t work like that. For instance, the Anne Dacier French prose rendition of Odyssey adds in a lot of extra condemnation of the hanged enslaved women, because she sees them as wicked servants causing problems in the bourgeois household. Gender doesn’t predetermine a translator’s interpretative choices.
It’s also very funny to me that nobody has ever told me my translations of Seneca are “feminist” or offer a “female perspective”—because nobody cares about Seneca, haha. Which is a shame—I love Seneca, whose wonderfully bombastic poetics are entirely different from Homer. So my supposed female perspective seems to pop up only when I’m translating Homer.
Masculinity as an ideal to aspire to is regularly employed on the Homeric battlefield to enjoin men to fight; leaders can mock reluctant troops by telling them “You’re girls, not men!”, and it’s frequent for leaders to push the men forward by telling them, “Be men!” “Be Women” is never used, even for women, because that’s not an aspirational category, whereas Homeric men have to work really hard to be men, and often aren’t sure if they’ve managed to attain it. Hector famously tells Andromache, “War is a task for men,” and presents weaving and woolwork as the equivalent for women. Hector presents the battlefield as the sphere where men are able to be most iconically masculine, just as the loom is where women prove their femininity. But we also get to glimpse men and women doing all kinds of other tasks: Homeric men can be farmers, sailors, hunters, mourners, banqueters, debaters, looters. Men are people, in Homer as in real life. I love the way the narrative imagery includes the possibility of seeing warrior men in war in different categories—Patroclus as a little girl, tugging his mother’s dress, when he’s pleading with Achilles; or Menelaus standing guard over his body, like a mother cow over her newborn calf.
The poem also suggests the hazards of the gendered masculine ideal; there are a set of terms, agenorie and agenor thymos, that are used of individuals, not groups of men, and that suggest excess of masculinity (ag = excess, very much, aner = man). These terms suggest an association between mortal, warrior masculinity and individual pride and rash, potentially self-destructive courage: the desire to push out ahead of everybody else, even if it gets you and everyone else killed, is figured as peculiarly masculine.
I’m glad you mention Seneca—he is another great writer on anger, the emotion that famously drives much of the action in The Iliad.
The works of Seneca and the Homeric poems are probably the ancient texts I’ve worked on most intensively, and there are many affinities: the central awareness that humans are mortal; the desire to make some kind of redemptive sense of mortal human life, through kleos (fame or glory) or virtus (excellence or virtue or integrity); and in the focus on emotions, including both grief and rage, which in The Iliad are so deeply intertwined.
It’s a cliché in the history of philosophy that modern ethics has often been focused on abstract norms and consequences of behavior, whereas ancient ethics is frequently focused on the actor, not the action: how to educate people, especially people in positions of power, so they make reasonably good choices. This makes ancient literary depictions of human choices much more closely intertwined with ancient accounts of “ethics.” Of course, Homer is far earlier than Aristotle (and even earlier than Seneca), but I think you can see a concern in all these texts with the question not of, “What should Robot Person do in X-controlled situation, where the trolley will kill either 20 strangers or your own baby?”, but questions we might think of as psychological rather than philosophical: “What kinds of human impulse make people want to kill people?” Both The Iliad and Seneca’s De Ira dig deep into why humans want to destroy each other, and both those texts, I think rightly, identify that human-against-human impulse as an essential social, psychological and political problem.
The Iliad presents this impulse and the horrors of war vividly. What are your thoughts on the aesthetics of war in the poem?
The aesthetics and the horrors go together. There’s a famous simile in Book 4 in which Menelaus is wounded on his leg, and the narrator compares it to a piece of ivory, stained red by a skillful woman who is transforming this white piece of a dead animal into a beautiful object, fit to adorn a king’s chariot. The language allows us to see the painful wound as an aesthetic, beautiful, even glorious thing, and hints at the poem’s own process of transforming violence and physical pain into something artistic and beautiful—and yet it also slows things down so we can fully contemplate the pain. Similarly, the poetic virtuosity of those battle sequences—the wonderfully varied pacing, the synesthetic focus on noise, touch, smell, bright dazzling bronze and black earth, the alliteration and assonance, and the clarity of narrative action, the amazing variety within a tiny canvas, in how many different places in the small human body can be pierced by bronze and lead to death—all these things make the battlefield into something impressive and beautiful, as a poetic artefact, and at the same time, make us see the horrors more clearly. War is always both glorious, and the source of tears, and Homer shows us how both are intertwined.
One of my favorite similes in the poem, also in Book 4, describes the death of the young soldier Simoesius. Simoesius falls down “just like a poplar / that grows upon a vast expanse of marshland” and its trunk is cut down and made into a rim for a chariot wheel. Your paratactic rendition of this simile contributes to its sadness and gravity. Can you say more about translating Homer’s extended similes?
I love the similes. Just on a technical level, I agonized about the typography, and in the end, I used a lot of em-dashes to set them off, because it was syntactically difficult to figure out how to make those long run-on sentences work in English, so that it would be clear where the image begins and ends. In general, Homeric syntax, in the original, tends to the paratactic rather than to subordination—there’s a lot of “and this, and this, this, this”, so each moment in the passage is present as its own thing, now, and now this—relatively little complex subordination. It’s a feature of the oral poetic heritage and it makes for vividness of description and vividness of emotional impact.
I love that particular simile too, and your question made me want to go look at a couple of other versions of it. Richmond Lattimore makes that sentence, which is a separate paratactic clause in the original, into a subordinate clause: “one whom a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining / iron.” This strikes me as quite an odd translation, not least because of the use of “whom” to refer to a poplar tree, as well as the addition of subordination when the original isn’t structured that way, and the wordiness (“a man, a maker of chariots” is just two words in the Greek, harmatopegos aner). Lattimore is much beloved by many, for quite reasonable reasons, but he does also have a tendency to make Homeric syntax sound much more complicated than the original, and to use far more words than Homer does.
Part of what’s so beautiful about that simile, and many of the similes, is that it’s so vivid and clear and direct—and yet there’s also such a world of ambiguity in it, too. For instance, what does the wonderful detail of the trunk drying out by the river add to the whole thing? Simoesius, conceived by the river Simoeis, is metaphorically returned to the river in death—and yet he’s dried out, not returned to the water; he’s shaped in death into an instrument for war. You can see and feel all the vivid images, and feel their emotional impact and the puzzles of the relationship of vehicle to tenor, if the translator is able to work to achieve no less clarity than the original poem has.
There’s so much to say about every simile in The Iliad, which are some of the most magnificent passages of this magnificent poem. One day, I’d like to publish a collection of just the similes, maybe with beautiful illustrations, to serve as a stand-alone poetry collection. Each image is vivid by itself—and acquires different levels of meaning in the context of the whole narrative of the epic.
What are you working on now?
I am doing a translation of some Platonic dialogues—it feels weird to be translating prose! But there are eternal challenges about tone, voice and style. Most centrally, I am working on a fictionalized retelling of the numerous ancient Greek myths about Troy and the Trojan War, as a sequence of what I hope will be vivid short stories, focusing on those that are marginalized or absent from the Homeric poems—such as the abduction of Ganymede, the first Trojan War, the Judgment of Paris, the Trojan Horse, and so on. I am having a lot of fun writing it and immersing myself in a very different kind of writing project. I hope it will be fun for people to read, and illuminating to read alongside The Iliad & The Odyssey themselves.
