Classicist Emily Wilson never expected her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which was published in 2017, to be such a hit. Aside from being incredibly well reviewed, it inspired a cycle of works by the great painter Chris Ofili, sparked a handful of theatrical adaptations, was the subject of several mass Homeric reading marathons, and has been mined for the text of a new musical composition. She particularly delights in the letters from readers, she tells me: from parents who read it to their babies, from octogenarians who, after many goes, at last made it through the poem thanks to her version.
Her translation of the Odyssey was the first published version by a woman in English, but that plain fact, remarkable in itself, doesn’t begin to account for its impact. Wilson – whom I first met when we studied classics together at Oxford in the 1990s – has a theory about why readers found it so captivating. “A lot of it’s just that I managed to find a language that was able to speak to different kinds of people,” she tells me by Zoom from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
