{"id":274068,"date":"2026-08-28T17:02:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T17:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/274068\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T17:02:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T17:02:07","slug":"penn-professor-emily-wilsons-odyssey-being-retranslated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/274068\/","title":{"rendered":"Penn professor Emily Wilson’s ‘Odyssey’ being retranslated"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re among the many readers who learned to love\u00a0\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d<\/a>\u00a0through Emily Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation, you might be surprised that she\u2019s going to translate it again.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a complete retranslation. It\u2019s not a revision of the old version,\u201d Wilson told The Associated Press during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cI\u2019m about halfway through.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Regarded as the first major English-language translation of Homer\u2019s epic by a woman, her book was already a bestseller and a culture-wars flashpoint before the release of Christopher Nolan\u2019s\u00a0blockbuster adaptation.<\/a>\u00a0But she says her translation methods have become more sophisticated and that enough time has passed for her to see some flaws in her work \u2014 as an example, she overused the word \u201cslave\u201d when ancient Greek had different terms for different categories of enslaved people. The new edition will be longer, she says, and will better reflect the differing social worlds of Homer\u2019s poem.\n<\/p>\n

Fiction writers and poets, from Henry James to Walt Whitman, have revised and reissued early works. But translators rarely start over on a full-length text \u2014 especially not within a decade of the original work\u2019s completion, and not when the translation has had the success of Wilson\u2019s \u201cOdyssey.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t really come up with a previous example of this situation,\u201d says Kate Deimling, who oversees the literary division of the American Translators Association. \u201cIt\u2019s not unheard of for translators to go back and make some corrections or edits in subsequent editions, but that\u2019s not the same as a retranslation.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Asked how her publisher responded, Wilson says her decision was \u201cvery controversial.\u201d She says she\u2019s \u201cvery much aware\u201d that having two recent editions by the same translator would be a challenge for teachers, and hopes they won\u2019t \u201ccurse\u201d her name. Her editor at Liveright Publishing, Peter Simon, said in a statement that since she \u201chas poured so much of her life and scholarship into \u2018The Odyssey\u2019 \u2026 her new approach is bound to be thrilling.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Fame was of prime importance to the ancient Greeks, and Wilson is the rare classical scholar who has firsthand knowledge of a public life. Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation was praised by many critics for making \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d feel more modern and accessible, but also faced criticism online for making the story \u201cwoke.\u201d Her \u201cOdyssey\u201d has now sold more than a million copies, and Wilson has again become a reason to argue.\n<\/p>\n

Nolan had cited her translation and its opening sentence, \u201cTell me about a complicated man,\u201d as inspiration for his epic film. Wilson, who says she will \u201cprobably\u201d leave the line unchanged in the next edition, did not return his admiration. In\u00a0interviews with the AP<\/a>\u00a0and other media outlets, and in an assessment for the London Review of Books, she called the movie grandiose and superficial, and at times incoherent.\n<\/p>\n

Her reaction to the film has been extensively \u2014 even obsessively \u2014 defended and denounced, including by\u00a0Joyce Carol Oates,<\/a>\u00a0who faulted her \u201chaughty superiority.\u201d Nolan has yet to respond directly, although, while being interviewed by podcaster Zhong Shu, he did speak out against \u201camateur criticism\u201d for lacking the cinematic background essential for understanding the language of movies.\n<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s current prominence aligns with the release of her new collection of essays, conceived well before Nolan\u2019s movie came out: \u201cCrossing the Wine-Dark Sea,\u201d a book that arrives Tuesday with blurbs from\u00a0Salman Rushdie<\/a>\u00a0and \u201cSong of Achilles\u201d novelist Madeline Miller. It features a long section on translating \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d with tough assessments of modern editions by Daniel Mendelsohn and the late\u00a0Robert Fagles<\/a>. Other chapters take on the \u201cslut-shaming\u201d of Helen of Troy, offer tribute to the Roman poet Catullus and point to how some of the most famous words ever spoken by Robert F. Kennedy \u2014 his quoting Aeschylus in the aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King\u2019s assassination \u2014 echoed author Edith Hamilton\u2019s mistranslation.\n<\/p>\n

During her interview, Wilson also discussed her feelings about celebrity, her disdain for Rick Riordan\u2019s\u00a0\u201cPercy Jackson\u201d<\/a>\u00a0books (Riordan, through a spokesperson at Penguin Random House, declined to comment) and her renewed appreciation for Stoic philosophy.\n<\/p>\n

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re among the many readers who learned to love\u00a0\u201cThe Odyssey\u201d\u00a0through Emily Wilson\u2019s 2017 translation, you might be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,4347],"class_list":["post-274068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-university-of-pennsylvania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}