Emily Wilson’s “Iliad”
Also: The government sues Amazon, David Mamet’s clandestine world premiere, English music in the nineteenth century, and more.
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad was published yesterday. Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey was widely praised. Madeline Miller wrote in The Washington Post that it was “at once so effortlessly easy to read and so rigorously considered.” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein wrote in The Atlantic that it preserved “the musicality of Homer’s poetry, opting for an iambic pentameter whose approachable storytelling tone invites us in, only to startle us with eruptions of beauty.”
Most critics praised her plain language, though some in a slightly backhanded way. Gregoary Hays wrote in The New York Times that her “words are short, mostly monosyllables. Almost none have French or Latin roots. None is independently striking; their force comes from their juxtaposition with one another — pat pat pat, like raindrops on a metal roof.” Richard Armstrong remarked in The Los Angeles Review of Books that she was “consistent . . . to a fault” in removing “ornamental” features.
The reviews of her Iliad are positive so far. In Slate, Johanna Hanink expresses doubt about some of her choices but likes the work overall:
There are translation choices that will be controversial, particularly for those versed in Homeric Greek. Readers (and the internet) made much of Wilson’s translation of polutropos, the epithet given to Odysseus in the first line of the Odyssey, with the relatively pedestrian “complicated.” (The adjective literally means “of many turns,” in the sense of versatility and wiliness.) In the Iliad her use of “cataclysmic” for oulomenē, which describes Achilles’ wrath, is likewise provocative. Oulomenē is a word that usually describes someone or something that is hated and cursed by the speaker, while “cataclysmic” is more suggestive of an unstoppable force of nature—a cataclysmic earthquake or flood. The comparison of Achilles’ wrath to a natural disaster is fitting. On the other hand, “cataclysmic” amounts to a more objective-sounding, and elevated, epithet for a turn of events that the narrator reviles.
And then there are moves that are truly inspired. Geras, a spoil of war and so the material evidence of a hero’s glory in battle, becomes “trophy,” which nicely captures the warriors’ regular use of the word to refer to women they have enslaved. In Book 9, Achilles’ articulation of his dilemma—whether to live a long, unremarkable life or die young but covered in glory—contains the sole appearance in the Iliad of what is arguably the poem’s core concept, kleos aphthiton. The phrase has often been translated as something like “undying glory,” but Wilson’s “a name that lasts forever” honors the etymological root of kleos in sound: kleos is connected to glory and fame, but it is literally “what is heard” about someone (the related verb is kluein, “to hear”).
In The Washington Post, Naoíse Mac Sweeney writes that “Wilson has produced an Iliad that speaks . . . directly to our 21st-century sensibilities” and praises her style as being “like the proverbial mountain stream — clean and clear, and bubbling along at pace.” It is, Mac Sweeney writes, “the definitive Iliad for our times.” The review in The New York Times is equally positive.
I haven’t read Wilson’s translation yet, but I have read Fitzgerald’s, Fagles’s, Lombardo’s, and Alexander’s and used them all in class over the years. Compare the opening lines from Wilson’s translation with the other four. Here are Wilson’s:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prufrock to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.