How Homer Sounds Now: Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad

How Homer Sounds NowEmily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad Emily Greenwood (bio) Every day, the news reminds us of our collective failure as knowers. From history and literature, we have learned over and over that war has a boomerang effect that destroys everything. Yet here we are again: in Ukraine, in Tigray, in Syria. As the scholar-poet-playwright-translator Anne Carson has written, extrapolating from the Iliad, "In war, things go wrong…YOU LOSE YOU WIN YOU WIN YOU LOSE." Carson weaves that pithy lesson into her 2019 play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, an adaptation of Euripides' Helen. In ancient Greek literature, reflections on the inexorable reciprocity of warfare almost always lead back to the myth of the Trojan War and the Iliad, so there is a lot at stake [End Page 146] in the translation of this poem. As Emily Wilson puts it in a note on her new translation of the epic, "There is nothing like The Iliad." It has been eight years since the appearance of the last major verse translation of the Iliad in English (Caroline Alexander's, in 2015). But the landscape of Homer in English includes more than translations: since the turn of the twentieth century, stunning adaptations of the Iliad have shifted the horizons not only of what the poem can mean in English but also how it feels and sounds. These adaptations include the final installments of the poet Christopher Logue's 1962–2005 project War Music, Elizabeth Cook's prose poem Achilles (2001), David Malouf's novel Ransom (2009), Alice Oswald's poem Memorial (2011), Madeline Miller's novel The Song of Achilles (2011), Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare's play An Iliad (2013), and Michael Hughes's novel Country (2018). And the Trojan War has also been revisited in adaptations of Greek tragedies (such as Carson's reworking of Euripides' Helen). Like Wilson's widely acclaimed 2017 translation of the Odyssey, her Iliad is a Norton edition aimed in large part at the high school and college textbook market. Translating for this target group limits the textual freedom that a creative adaptation allows. But any translator aiming for their finished product to be a work of literature in its own right cannot afford to ignore these recent adaptations, which have given the Iliad such aliveness. Wilson, who is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, steers her craft by the fathoms of Homeric scholarship and the constellations of literatures in English, and the result—the fruit of six years of work—is impressive. Most important in a contemporary translation of Homer's Iliad is its ability to compel readers to read on, all the way through, line by line, attentively and with feeling. Many English Iliads fail this test. Some mangle Homer through "a mistaken ambition for exactness" (Donald Carne-Ross's withering criticism of Richmond Lattimore's Homer translations), losing readers' attention for whole sections of the poem. Others previously passed this test, but now the language is no longer contemporary (Robert Fitzgerald's [End Page 147] still-estimable 1974 translation of the Iliad falls into this category). A translation that motivates rereading has the capacity to foster interpretative curiosity, the quality at the heart of all good study. This is the kind of translation of Homer that I covet as a teacher and for my own enjoyment. High school and college syllabuses still include conventional translations, but, wisely, these are now supplemented with freer adaptations in a variety of media. Gone are the days when students were expected to plow dutifully through lifeless translations that, at their worst, make English itself seem like a foreign tongue. As a scholar of translation studies, Wilson is familiar with debates about the theory and practice of translation and is fully aware of translation's slow but sure turning away from unyielding, deadening norms of accuracy, fidelity, and instrumentalism. She embraces the concept of translation as "an interpretative act" (to quote translation theorist Lawrence Venuti in his Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic) and understands that part of the purpose of translating the epic is to illuminate it. Translations have to go further...