Please try again. Email Address * Subject * Message * Thank you! 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. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. 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. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time. Some of these plays Antigone and the Sophoclean Electra in particular could be moulded to fit repressive contemporary ideals of womanhood, since their heroines demonstrate selfless devotion to dead male family members. Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt. Some of the media coverage has made me uncomfortable, because it reflects Anglophone hegemony. Her mothers experience as a female academic, Wilson said, over lunch the next day at a noisy bistro, was tied up with her colleagues in Somerville, the womens college where she taught. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club thats right for you for free. I read the second half only by means of the Arguments which precede each Book. The Illiad takes place during the last month of the 10 year siege of Troy. Poetry News Guernica Talks to Emily Wilson While She Translates The Iliad By Harriet Staff Guernica 's Ben Purkert interviewed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson! Wilsons unadorned but resonant language plumbs the poems profound pathos and reveals its characters as palpably real, even complicated, human beings. Antigone was, as Prins reminds us, a massive influence on the work of George Eliot, who read the drama in terms of opposition between individual and society; it is a play about political resistance as much as duty. 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. 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. In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. The Odyssey (trans. 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. Emily Wilson is the first woman to take on the daunting task of translating over 100,000 lines of a three-millennium-old poem from Ancient Greek to modern-day English. She wept for her own husband, who was right next to her. Often they are long, rolling words: polyphloisboio thalasses, the much-thundering sea, or rhododaktylos eos, rosy-fingered dawn. Wilsons short line preserves some, but others vanish or survive only as adverbs (pensively Penelope sat down). 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? She and another female colleague who had a child who was the same age as me organized this day care, first in my house and then it moved to this building near Somerville College.. The story is so good/intense it ruined my life for a solid week. Thats one of the things it says. in literae humaniores, classical literature, and philosophy), she undertook her master's degree in English literature 15001660 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1996), and her Ph.D. (2001) in classical and comparative literature at Yale University. When Emily Wilsons translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was fresh, unpretentious, and lean (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)critics lauded it as a revelation (Susan Chira, New York Times) and a cultural landmark (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Id never read an Odyssey that sounded like this. Reviewers will say that.. W. W. Norton & Company. In episode one of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom begin with a beginning, Homer's Iliad: its depictions of anger and grief, of capricious gods and warriors' bodies, and the sheer narrative force of the great epic of the Trojan War.. As well as The Aeneid, the prolific and versatile Ruden has produced wonderfully original versions of Aeschylus (The Oresteia), as well as Aristophanes, Apuleius, Petronius, Augustine and more. [1] In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship (Rome Prize). Some trade-offs are inevitable. The mood and voice needs to be distinctive and entirely itself. A selection of Senecas plays appeared in 2010; four plays by Euripides in 2016. I must confess, I bogged down about halfway through reading this, one of the iconic works of Western literature. Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times -bestselling author of . Guernica: What impact did the success of your translation have on you? She shows that part of the answer concerns the social roles for women that are modelled in Athenian tragedy. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. I should begin by clarifying that Im the first woman to translate a complete edition ofThe OdysseyintoEnglish; other women have translated the poem into other languages. Early arguments about translation were over the Old Testament. Emily Wilson 2021. Wilson. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading." A dramatic reading of BOOK 1 of the poem, in current in-progress iambic pentameter verse translation, followed by Q and A. Thursday, November 7, 4:30-6:00 p.m. And yet I also recognize that a lot of the attention for the book was not unrelated to my being a woman. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! Its all going to be talked out. But now, at long last, we are beginning to see an outpouring of translations of Greek and Latin texts by women. The spell of Greek, for Virginia Woolf and many women of her generation, lay in its near-unintelligibility: it was a language that drew attention to the foreign element that is present in any language and thus facilitated a shift away from Victorian poetics. Odysseus, after slaying the suitors, tells his son, Telemachus, to kill the women. I think its very interesting thats still with us. 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. L ate in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily. Her complex answer is tied up with the history of womens education. , ISBN-10 What happens to all the unelite women?, In the episode that Wilson calls one of the most horrible and haunting of the whole poem, Odysseus returns home to find that his palace has been overrun by suitors for his wifes hand. I asked Wilson why translation isnt valued in the academy. In compensation we get moments of surprising lyricism: the Ethiopians, who live between the sunset and the dawn; a sea gull wetting its whirring wings; seals whose breath smells sour / from gray seawater. Wilson has a fine ear, as when her Penelope waves away a compliment: The deathless gods destroyed my looks that day / the Greeks embarked for Troy. Notice the interplay of d, l and g, interwoven like the threads on the queens loom. 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. The greatest literary landmark of classical antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time. 180 Dr Emily Wilson @EmilyRCWilson Im trying to serve something.. Course readings Week Author Reading Assignment Week 1 Hesiod Introduction to oral poetry; Hesiod Theogony Week 2 Homer Iliad: The Lay of the Wrath of Achilles Iliad books 1-8; focus on 1-6 The most highly praised male classicist translators of our era such as Robert Fagles write with a confident exuberance, often expanding or adding to the original. Though her education there, she says, offered her a strong introduction to literary study, it wasnt lost on her that none of her professors were women. Norgates of many a turn; George Musgraves tost to and fro by fate; the Rev. Among the Ancients with Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jones, writer and editor at the London Review of Books.Medieval Beginnings with Irina Dumitrescu, Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bonn, and Mary Wellesley, historian and contributor to the London . The first English Bibles translator, John Wycliffe, was disinterred and his bones were burned for the heresy of translating into English, and his successor, William Tyndale, was excommunicated, sentenced to death by strangulation and burned at the stake. Wilsons unadorned but resonant language plumbs the poems profound pathos and reveals its characters as palpably real, even complicated, human beings. It would have been helpful to have notes (as is often the case in such texts). I loved Plutarch, but I didnt love him as deeply as I loved Sophocles, Euripides, Milton. As a kid I was just aware of unhappiness, and aware of these things that werent ever being articulated, but the sense that nobody is going to be saying what they feel or encouraging anyone else to say what they feel. If youre going to admit that stories matter, Wilson told me, then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? Emily Wilson Professor of Classical Studies emilyw@sas.upenn.edu Website WILL 721 and ZOOM! Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem.. [6], Wilson has authored five books. The poem lying open before us was Homers Odyssey, the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the Iliad, in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them. Although you can understand, if not condone, how murderous rage at a translator might arise if a believer supposed a sacred text to have been desecrated by a translators hand, it is somewhat surprising that similar vehemence can greet translations of secular canonical texts. Before tenure you have to write, you know, the right kind of book the right kind being one on a subject that your discipline has yet to exhaust. Please try again. [{"displayPrice":"$39.95","priceAmount":39.95,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"39","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"95","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"howbeAbyvyZt3%2FiuXK3k59i2WNxhPWm%2BbYk%2B5hHLIgbb2rAzR6FDfPN0UACm67FfKRZWTS%2F8GhmiECMLjTDyn7Rv%2FmCJqaFFnHaN8JKkKo%2BbuPibAeXBAg%2F%2BSCfADCc4Tcz1x0vvaWY3mSxBDtqz2g%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"}]. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Wilson knew that if she was being smart, she ought to focus on something understudied, like Plutarch. [11] She is also the classics editor for The Norton Anthology of World Literature and The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. Wilson: I was unknown before I publishedThe Odyssey, and then suddenly I had a readership. The story revolves around Briseis of Lyrnessus (a princess captured by Achilles) more than it does Helen of Troy. Young female slaves in a palace would have had little agency to resist the demands of powerful men. When the Trojans learn Achilles is not participating in the siege they counterattack. Following a lengthy introduction, she provides a translation of Homer's work in iambic pentameter. After all, women from a wide variety of backgrounds are now able to enrol at prestigious universities and colleges and learn Latin and Greek from scratch; knowledge of the ancient languages is no longer open only to men. Biography. If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, . [17], Beginning, "Tell me about a complicated man", Wilson's metrical verse includes some creative and unusual phrases (such as "journeyways of fish"), although much of her verse translation uses "plain, contemporary language",[18] attending to both Homer's "fleetness" and "rhythm and musicality". As a young woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning made a melancholy, stuffy, diligently rhyming translation of Prometheus Bound a play that presumably spoke deeply to this immobilised invalid and returned to the play 23 years later to create a far more expansive and fluent version. "[18], Wilson has noted that being a woman did not predetermine her critical work as a scholar, reader or translator, and has expressed discomfort with the media reception of her work in terms of gender, since it tends to obscure her primary goals (such as the use of regular meter and attention to sound), and risks erasing the work of other female Homerists and female translators. Learn more. Last Name. Emily Wilsons translation of Homers Odyssey will be published in the autumn by Norton. I had enjoyed Fitzgerald's verse translation of The Aenied as a result of which I bought this verse translation of the Iliad. Emily Wilson received a BA (1994) and MPhil (1996) from the University of Oxford and a PhD (2001) from . Norton trumpets it as the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman. (Anne Daciers French prose version appeared in 1708.) You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. In fact 'Homer' may not be a real name but a kind of nickname meaning perhaps 'the hostage' or 'the blind one'. Both projects were outgrowths of her old desire to spend a little bit longer with these authors. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. )critics lauded it as a revelation (Susan Chira. ) 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). Definitely worth it. The fact that its possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? And it is a damned refreshing take on Homer! Not all female-translated texts are marketed as such; the Amazon listing of Menschs The Age of Caesar lists Plutarch and James Romm (the classicist who wrote the footnotes) as the primary authors. Basically, it's the first time I'm reading The Odyssey without dozing off on every other page. Complicated: the brilliance of Wilsons choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. As Wilson spoke, I recalled a little formula by the American critic Guy Davenport about the difference between Homers two poems: The Iliad is a poem about force; the Odyssey is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force. Wilson was parsing the nature of that triumph, embedded in the poems very first adjective, a difference in mind that would make for a difference in Odysseuss nature, both as a warrior and as a husband. [1] In 2017 she became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer's Odyssey into English. When Telemachus visits Menelaus, a slave girl brings him bread and many canaps. (Well, there is a wedding in progress.) In the second-wave feminist scholarship in classics, Wilson told me, people were very keen to try to read Penelope as, Lets find Penelopes voice in the Odyssey, and lets celebrate her, because look, here she is being the hero in an epic in ways we can somehow unpack. I find thats a little simplistic. Its very easy to pronounce a French word wrong. But with Latin, Wilson found an instant home. How, I asked, would she address such a complaint from someone in her field? Something went wrong. Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2022. The works of dead, white elite men have largely been translated by living, white elite men. 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. Sorry, there was a problem loading this page. Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. 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. I need to have a better answer to them, because they will certainly review it, and they will certainly have a loud voice. The reader doesnt even see Odysseus until the fifth of the poems 24 books, where we learn that he has been living on an island with Calypso, a goddess, for seven years; that, earlier, he was detained by another goddess, Circe, with whom he also shared a bed; that the Sirens, as he navigates, call to him, desiring him; that a young princess falls in love with him; that, on all sides, women are temptresses, and whereas he submits, we are to understand that Penelope, alone, assailed, remains faithful. Got very confused with son of. 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. It says it is translated by Fagles but it is not. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 26, 2019. In school, Wilson was shy but accomplished. The spare, tightly rhythmical pentameter of Rudens Aeneid contrasts favourably with the loose, haphazard beats of most of her male rivals. [12][13], In January 2020, Wilson joined the Booker Prize judging panel, alongside Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay. I partly just want to shake them and make them see that all translations are interpretations. Most of the criticism Wilson expects, she says, will come from a digging in of the heels: Thats not what it says in the dictionary, and therefore it cant be right! And if you put down anything other than whats said in the dictionary, then, of course, you have to add a footnote explaining why, which means that pretty much every line has to have a footnote. 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!" The wide sea keeps him trapped upon some island, captured by fierce men who will not let him go. I struggled with this because there are those classicists. The Odyssey is notable for the range of its female characters, and for the sympathy and respect with which it treats them. I had a childhood where it was very hard to name feelings, and just the fact that tragedy as a genre is very good at naming feelings. Publisher 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 addition to Homers. Anyone can read what you share. , W. W. Norton & Company (September 19, 2023), Language : , Item Weight Prins gives a fascinating account of the importance of Greek tragedy in translation and theatrical production in the colleges of higher education for women that emerged in this period. : My name is Zameer Ahmed. But altogether its as good an Odyssey as one could hope for. , ISBN-13 In the Odyssey, preoccupations shift, radically. You can do it all in writing. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2021. "She explained what lessons we might take fromThe Iliad, and why the epic remains so compelling to the 'emo teenager'in all of us." I wanted it to feel like an idiomatic thing that you might say about somebody: that he is complicated., I asked: What about the commentator who says, It does something that more than modernizes it subverts the fundamental strangeness of the way Odysseus is characterized. Im sure some classicists are going to say its flat out wrong, Interesting, but wrong., Youre quite right, she replied. 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. And even though I think translation is a way of being innovative within your field, my colleagues dont see it that way., One way of talking about Wilsons translation of the Odyssey is to say that it makes a sustained campaign against that species of scholarly shortsightedness: finding equivalents in English that allow the terms she is choosing to do the same work as the original words, even if the English words are not, according to a Greek lexicon, correct., What gets us to complicated, Wilson said, returning to her translation of polytropos, is both that I think it has some hint of the original ambivalence and ambiguity, such that its both Why is he complicated? What experiences have formed him? which is a very modern kind of question and hints at There might be a problem with him. I wanted to make it a markedly modern term in a way that much turning obviously doesnt feel modern or like English. Pre-order Price Guarantee! I just felt like I wanted to spend a little bit longer with Euripides.. Wilson's Odyssey was named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018[15] and it was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award. Ruden and Carson are able to reimagine English sentences and English poetry through their tense, difficult encounters with Greek and Roman literature. It is an interesting injunction from Odysseus, who himself, during his 10 years of wandering, was serially unfaithful. : Identical, in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end, according to one account. 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. The play was staged by 19th-century female students keen to show their intellectual worth. It took some time and chapters before I finally knew who the main characters were. Speaker: Emily Wilson (University of Pennsylvania) Professor of Classical Studies Title: "Iliad 24: A Reading from My Translation" There was a problem loading your book clubs. He himself is still I believe the longest leader of the Conservative Party, and served as Prime Minister for three terms, and helped see through the Reform Act of 1867. Greek maenads were the model for a new, uncorseted way of moving, leaping and dancing. Its describing a boys club. I dont know what to say to those people, honestly. Wilson laughed her buoyant laugh. There's a ton of character development and social/interpersonal nuance on every page of the Iliad. 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. I never had a female mentor in classics. Still, the appeal of classics as a discipline was profound, particularly the way that Greek drama presented great emotional tumult. They knew that an encounter with this alien language and culture could help them move, feel, think and write differently. 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. The frustrations of the teenage Telemachus come through clearly. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. 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). Polydamas says, plausibly, this sign means the Trojans should pull back from attacking the Greek wall: casualties will be too high, and gains few." John Giless of many fortunes; T.S. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseuss nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). All English translators of Homer face a basic problem. The reviewer actually says this about Emily Wilson's translation: " And genius is certainly one of the first words that comes to mind when reading Emily Wilson's clean-lined, compulsively readable translation of the Odyssey **, one of the most interesting versions of the epic ever produced in English."**. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content. Maria Dahvana Headley (whose new Beowulf has just appeared) and Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey, now at work on The Iliad) joined LTAC Director Susan Bernofsky for a far-ranging conversation on the radical practice of making translation a space of resistance and joy. So do the breezy complacency of Menelaus, the innocence of Nausicaa, the gruff decency of the swineherd Eumaeus. That tells you something. But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. Today, Wilson is working on several different projects, including a translation of Homer's Iliad and a book about translation itself, titled Faithful.Although she has already finished several books of the Iliad, it has been a unique project."The whole mood of the poem is totally different from the mood of The Odyssey," Wilson explains, "It took quite some time to get my head around how . I think he was a terrible reader of poetry. Emily Wilson. Emily Wilson. (In fact, a handful of women are buried among the classicists; one can find here several studies of Victorian classical scholar Jane Harrison, including a fine one by Beard.). I'm terms of being well-done poetically, I'd recommend Robert Fitzgerald's translation (he also did the Odyssey and the Aeneid).. It's worth mentioning, though, that he's one of the translators Emily Wilson picks out as making some needlessly sexist choices - e.g. Graduate Coordinator: Katelyn Stoler 236 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 (215) 573-0250 kastoler@upenn.edu 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. September brought us Daniel Mendelsohns An Odyssey, his memoir of teaching this poem about fathers and sons to a class at Bard College that included his own father. But there is something inspiring about looking back to the female classical translators of a century ago, because they took the process of translating Greek so seriously. She lives in Philadelphia. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time. 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