Emily Wilson is a rockstar the likes of which we have never seen. The tattooed professor of classical studies, shod in metallic gold sneakers, commands the room with her hands outstretched, her deep voice invoking the Muse in Ancient Greek. It’s not unlike Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel warning Frodo about what would happen if she took the ring. Or perhaps a Franz Liszt concert, where one expects some lovely piano music, and instead gets a performance so passionate, another piano must be brought on to replace the broken one. Wilson makes translation badass.
The audience at the Edinburgh Book Festival seems to agree with me. It is mostly women, skewing younger, there to hear Wilson speak to Charlotte Higgins about her new translation of Homer’s The Iliad. For many of us, Wilson burst into our consciousness with her translation of The Odyssey, the first by a woman, which began by describing the hero Odysseus, who before had been the “ingenious” or the “shrewd” or the “ready at need”, as “complicated”. Most exciting of all was the loss of the simply shrill or else distressed women of past translations, now here were three-dimensional heroines, given a voice by an incredibly capable and brilliant artist.
During her talk with Higgins, we were invited in to see the intricate machinery of Wilson’s process. With The Odyssey, she wanted to bring back the poetry that had been translated into prose in most cases. The dactylic hexameter that flowed in Greek was changed to iambic pentameter, the meter of Shakespeare and Milton, for the English ear. She was able to maintain the number of lines in The Odyssey with this meter, but found herself requiring more when tackling the more complex Iliad. There was, for example, the frequent use of “son-ofs”, something that could not be melted down into shorter text to preserve the pentameter because of its importance to the theme of the poem. This is a work about men, their sons and fathers, and the violence they inflict in preservation of their names and honor. The family names would stay in, and the hope for the same amount of lines would be put aside. Wilson often allows the text to tell her where to go. For example, in the speech Hector gives to his wife, Wilson wondered if the word ‘man’ was overused, and if she should replace it with ‘person’ or other synonymous language. She soon realized that the use of ‘man’ was integral to Hector’s character, and how he sees the world:
“Strange woman! Come on now,
you must not be too sad on my account.
No man can send me to the house of Hades
before my time. No man can get away
from destiny, first set for us at birth,
however cowardly or brave he is.
Go home and do the things you have to do.
Work on your loom and spindle and instruct
the slaves to do their housework as well.
War is a task for men- for every man
born here in Troy, but most especially
for me.”
It is realizations like this one that put the characters at the forefront, and allow the text to bloom and take hold in the modern mind.
Wilson’s care for the work extends beyond the act of translating. As part of her research, she spoke with veterans at West Point, the famous American military academy, and found them to be moved specifically by descriptions of burial, or lack of burial, in the Iliad. Where a civilian might read the Iliad and find the poetry in the violent and gory, veterans have a better understanding of what it was like to read it when it was first told, at a time when death and bloodshed were everyday occurrences that everyone witnessed.
There is a reason The Iliad is still so readable today. Times change, but people don’t. In Andromache’s heartbroken pleas to her doomed husband, one can easily imagine an Englishwoman bidding goodbye to her husband as he leaves for No Man’s Land. In Agamemnon’s rash decision to risk defeat due to a personal vendetta against Achilles, there is West Point graduate Robert E. Lee’s insistence to continue forward on the third day of Gettysburg. The petty wars of gods can be felt today in Myanmar as the consequence of shrugging social media billionaires. The relevance of the Iliad is still all around us; we’re very lucky to have Emily Wilson to remind us how much.
Erin Murray Quinlan in an American playwright, amateur beekeeper, and proud confirmed solver of Caine’s Jawbone. Her full biography can be found at www.erinmurrayquinlan.com.
