Features | July 17, 2024

Interview with Emily Wilson

Robert Long Foreman and Stefanie Wortman

SW: Your translation of the Iliad is a massive achievement. When you started the project, what did you find most exciting about the work ahead of you?

EW: I was excited to spend so much time with a poem I love. It had already been a privilege to spend the previous five or six years working on the Odyssey every day, and I felt very lucky to get to do it all over again with the Iliad. I was also excited to spend several more years wrestling with words and meaning through translation, which is interesting even when the source text is less wonderful than the Iliad is.

SW: What is your relationship to other translations of a text while you’re working on your own version? Do you have to sequester yourself with the poem, or do you find it helpful to hear a third voice?

EW: I have to sequester. I have spent time with other translations of the Iliad—I’ve taught a few different ones—and it was necessary for me to do a book proposal, which meant that I had to look closely at the field and know what I might add to the overall market before starting out. But I can’t be always looking over my shoulder while I’m actually working. So I spend a lot of time with commentaries and dictionaries and the original text—but not other translations.

SW: You’ve said elsewhere that one of your aims was to make a translation of the Iliad that was direct and written in the language of the people who would read it. Did you ever consider a free verse translation for those twenty-first-century readers? That’s only a half-serious question, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

EW: No, I didn’t consider it. ​​​I definitely would not ​have signed up for any of my re-translations of ancient metrical poetry unless I’d thought there was something I could offer that wasn’t already readily available to my students and general readers—and that seemed to me obviously the use of regular form, which for a number of different cultural and literary historical reasons fell totally out of favor in the twentieth century. It’s weird and fascinating to me that the use of prose or unmetrical free verse in translations of ancient metrical poetry was more or less unthinkable for seventeenth- or eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century translators, and then became so normalized that people can now review, write, and talk about twentieth-century translators like Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, and Stanley Lombardo without even discussing this important missing element.