Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer\u2019s Odyssey into English, is to retranslate the ancient Greek epic poem from scratch less than a decade after the publication of her acclaimed version.<\/p>\n
The announcement comes after Wilson attracted controversy this summer with a scathing assessment of Christopher Nolan\u2019s blockbuster film adaptation of the Odyssey, which she slammed for<\/a> its \u201cabysmal\u201d writing and lack of sex scenes.<\/p>\n Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation<\/a> became a bestseller and was praised for making the 3,000-year-old epic poem modern and accessible.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m now retranslating the Odyssey from scratch, with an approach closer to that of my translation of the Iliad, using somewhat more lines than the original, enabling more varied word-length and pacing,\u201d she told the New York Times.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a complete retranslation. It\u2019s not a revision of the old version,\u201d she told the AP. \u201cI\u2019m about halfway through.\u201d<\/p>\n Nolan cited Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation, including its opening sentence, \u201cTell me about a complicated man\u201d, as an influence on his adaptation of the poem, released in July this year and starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway.<\/p>\n Nolan\u2019s adaptation took the global box office by storm,<\/a> making $264m (\u00a3196m) during its opening weekend, marking the director\u2019s best ever opening. Book sales saw a huge bump too: UK print sales of the poem increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period in 2025<\/a>, after the film\u2019s release in the middle of the month.<\/p>\n Wilson made headlines for her attack on Nolan\u2019s version<\/a>. Writing in the London Review of Books, she said: \u201cNolan\u2019s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great \u2026 The writing is abysmal.\u201d<\/p>\n She continued: \u201cNone of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible,\u201d adding, \u201cI would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.\u201d<\/p>\n Her criticism attracted strong reactions, including from novelist Joyce Carol Oates,<\/a> who accused<\/a> Wilson of \u201chaughty superiority\u201d.<\/p>\n Wilson\u2019s decision to retranslate the poem predates the row over the film. In an interview recorded in the spring for the ancient-history podcast Instant Classics, she discussed her desire to return to Homer and approach the poem differently from her first translation.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m proud of my Odyssey translation \u2026 I think there are lots of good things about the kinds of compression and choices that I was forced into,\u201d Wilson said then.<\/p>\n She has indicated that she will \u201cprobably\u201d keep the opening line, \u201cTell me about a complicated man\u201d. Wilson also added that her original translation relied too heavily on the word \u201cslave\u201d, when more precise terminology could have better reflected the different forms of enslavement depicted in the poem.<\/p>\n The new translation will also give readers far more of Wilson\u2019s scholarly commentary. \u201cI\u2019m also going to quadruple the number of endnotes because endnotes are really fun to write,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n While Wilson\u2019s decision to retranslate Homer\u2019s poem is unusual, it is not without precedent.<\/p>\n \u201cTranslators quite often rework or rewrite their own previous translations,\u201d said Matthew Reynolds, professor of English and comparative criticism at Oxford University. \u201cElizabeth Barrett Browning completely rewrote her translation of Aeschylus\u2019s Prometheus Bound, Ezra Pound repeatedly revised his translations of Guido Cavalcanti, and Yu JongHo (\uc720 \uc885\ud638) translated Jane Eyre into Korean first in 1970 and again in 2004.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cIt shows that translation \u2013 especially literary translation \u2013 is not just a matter of right or wrong, good or bad, but a continual exploratory process of interpretive reimagining and re-making.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilson\u2019s new Odyssey does not yet have a publication date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer\u2019s Odyssey into English, is to retranslate the ancient Greek epic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-603103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}