Finding Lost Voices: An Interview with Translator Emily Wilson

A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.

I am reposting this post because today is the last day to apply to the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, where Emily Wilson will be teaching this summer! To apply to for Wilson’s translation workshop at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference July 21-26, fill out an application here.

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Today is the first day of Women’s History Month. I’d like to kick off this month with an interview I got to have with the esteemed translator, Emily Wilson. Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Chair in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007) and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (2014). Her verse translations include Six Tragedies of Seneca, four translations of plays by Euripides in the Modern Library, The Greek Plays, and Oedipus Tyrannos. She is the Classics editor of the revised Norton Anthology of World Literature. Her 2017 translation of the Odyssey, in iambic pentameter, met with wide acclaim, as did her new translation of the Iliad, published in fall 2023.

Emily Wilson

I can still remember the first time I read Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.  I was in my tiny office, looking out at the fog-combed hills when I sat in my chair and opened the hardback edition. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time haunted by Homer’s Odyssey. I read it first in undergrad while I was lifeguarding at the indoor pool at the Embassy Suites in Crystal City, VA. Then again in grad school when I’d fallen so in love with classical texts that I’d incorporated them into my dissertation topic (which looked at Sappho’s use of allusions to the Odyssey in her poetry). Allusions to the Odyssey thread through many of my poems including a lyric sequence in my second poetry collection, There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air where I imagine a widowed farmer retelling Odysseus’s story to her young son as a way to explain the trauma they are experiencing. So needless to say, when I cracked open Wilson’s translation I was already familiar with the text.

The difference between her translation and the ones I had long been accustomed to was visible right away. First, the text flowed differently, now grounded in iambic pentameter. But, while Wilson’s emphasis had been on reestablishing the same verse cadence that Homer had used, by going back to an accepted text and reexamining it to its core – at the word level - she saw it in a way that the previous translators of Homer (all men) had not seen before. What her close examination meant was also that the women who appear in the Odyssey appeared differently, often having more visibility and agency than we had previously seen. It’s because of these differences that so many people have lauded Wilson as a feminist — a title she questions and that I will ask her about her my interview with her.

What strikes me now, is how Wilson approached her translation is much the way one has to approach a biography about someone whose life has been long accepted or misremembered.  Instead of just regurgitating the same facts showcased in previous biographies, one has to go back to the primary documents —the source—-and recreate the story from the ground up.  Oftentimes, this rebooting, this rebuilding, changes the way we see not only the person we are writing about but also all of the people who surround them in their lives. I had this experience when I wrote about Charmian Kittredge London whose story had always been told through the lens of her famous husband, Jack London’s life, and again when I wrote about Sanora Babb. I’m thrilled to get to speak with Wilson about her work and to be able to share this conversation with you.

Did you know that you could study with Wilson this summer? She will be our translation faculty at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference (where I am the Poetry and Translation Director) this summer July 21-26 and applications have just opened! Don’t miss your chance to study with her!

Faculty for the 2024 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference including Emily Wilson

Interview

Dunkle: What drew you to the field of translation? What do you plan on translating in the future? If you could translate any text in the future what would it be?

Wilson: I have a longstanding interest in the history of reception and translation of ancient texts --the whole fascinating question of what happened to ancient literature in later periods, how ancient literature and ancient concepts were read and reinterpreted differently at various points in time and culture. Most of my work has been about that question, in some way or another. But twenty years ago, I didn’t think I was going to be a translator myself -- it didn’t occur to me as an option, until I was asked to do my first translation project, of Seneca’s tragedies. In doing that, I realized how much fun translation is, and how it enables me to draw on multiple different interests and skills: translation is about writing as well as interpreting, and it’s creative as well as scholarly. I also realized that, for at least some ancient texts and authors, even those that have been translated into English many times before, there’s a lot of potential for doing something valuable and new in re-translation, more than I would have thought before I got into the game.

Future projects: I’m signed up to do some translations of Plato, which is fun and very different. But I’m most excited about doing more verse translation because the norms of English translation of metrical verse over the past century have skewed so heavily towards using non-metrical language. I think there’s so much potential for translations to pay much more attention to poetic form, and that’s where I think I can add most value to what’s already out there. So I’d love to do more verse translations – like Apollonius; Argonautica, lyric, and maybe some more drama. Many possibilities.

Dunkle: Your translations have been lauded as taking a feminist approach.  However, in many of your interviews, you downplay this feminist stance.  Could you talk a little bit about what it has been like to be placed into this role? And what role do you feel feminism plays in translation?

Wilson: I think this is a funny instance of how media headlines can shape and distort a story. As I noted in the previous question, my first published translations were of Seneca’s tragedies --texts that I think are fascinating, and that were very canonical and influential in the early modern period, but that don’t have anything like the cultural prominence of Homer within current Anglophone culture. As a result, there was almost no public interest in a new translation of Seneca -- so nobody bothered to come up with a broad brush marketing/media story about me, like “Emily Wilson is a Woman!” Whereas, in contrast, the Odyssey is a hugely canonical poem in contemporary US culture, and journalists had an easy headline with the fact that I was the first woman to publish a translation of this important poem into English. That fact has nothing to do with my actual work. It’s not unimportant in itself, as a reminder that the field of Anglophone translation of ancient texts has been extremely male-dominated, even though this isn’t the case in other linguistic cultures (like French or Italian, with many female classicist translators), and isn’t the case for Anglophone Classics or Anglophone literary translation in general. But all that’s nothing to do with me. I’ve been relieved that with the Iliad, the framing in terms of my gender has somewhat died down, largely because Caroline Alexander’s Iliad already exists, kudos to her – so the journalists have moved on to the equally unilluminating idea that I’m a “modern” translator, perhaps thanks to my use of regular iambic pentameter (sic).

I’m not sure what it would mean to say that my work has a “feminist approach”. I’ve been asked about it a lot, as you say, so I’ve had to try to come up with a story about it, but I still find it pretty baffling. Feminism can be important for translators in several ways – for instance, some translators focus on neglected women authors – but that’s not me. Feminism has not, in fact, been central in any of my projects, as far as I can see, including my critical work as well as my work as a translator. I have never described myself as a feminist translator, and I’ve always tried to push back on that label when it’s applied to me, as it repeatedly is, no matter what I say or do. Headlines can be very sticky. In terms of personal identity, it seems to me quite implausible to claim that my gender has to matter more for my work than, say, my vegetarianism, or my being from the UK, or my being short-sighted. I’m sure I could find a way to make any of them seem relevant if an interviewer were to insist on it – but none of them are things I think about from hour to hour while I’m actually working.

As far as being placed in this role, and the fact that I get questioned endlessly about feminism and gender, despite those not being central to my work in any obvious way: it’s tricky. I don’t want to be a jerk! So if gender is what people want to talk about, I try to be open-minded about it. If a conversation about my gender can lead to something I actually care about, such as Homer, then it’s worth it. I also don’t want to be dismissive about feminist or gender studies, either in critical interpretation or translation. I have learned a great deal from colleagues who work in those areas, among many others. I do think translator’s personal as well as intellectual and scholarly identities can be relevant for our work, and it’s essential for translators to be self-curious and self-critical about our interests. I also think in general, feminism as a cluster of distinct political movements has been a force for good in the world, and there’s still a long way to go in terms of actual structural and socio-economic gender inequalities, so if people want to take the existence of my translations as some kind of symbol of encouragement, I don’t want to take that away from anyone. There are limits to what “You Go Girl” feminism can achieve, but I don’t want to rain on people’s parade. At the same time, I’m conscious that a good number of the people who describe my work as “feminist” (a framework I’ve never adopted myself) invoke the word in order to try to de-legitimize me and my work, to suggest that I’m not a responsible translator because I’m importing my own “feminist” biases -- an idea that seems to me wrong on several different counts, maybe not worth going into because it’s pretty self-explanatory. Also, I have realized, thanks to these endless questions about gender, that there are definitely some specifically gendered issues with certain passages of some earlier Homeric translations – such as when Helen in the Iliad is made to call herself a “slut” or a “whore” in the Lattimore and Fagles translations, when the Greek suggests literally “dog-face” or “dog-eye”. I hadn’t noticed or thought about this when I first used those translations for teaching, but I notice it now. I don’t think it’s a feminist move as such to approach this term more literally, as I do. It’s my predecessors who are making very gendered, arguably over-interpretative translation choices there, not me.

In general, I don’t see it as exactly “feminist”to approach Homer with the perception that all the characters, of all genders, are treated with deep empathy and that empathy and breadth of understanding should come through in the translation. It’s more about not being unthinkingly misogynistic and imposing that bias onto the text if it isn’t there, or if it isn’t there in quite the same way in an ancient text. Avoiding knee-jerk misogyny isn’t in any obvious sense the same as being “feminist”, the bar surely has to be higher than that.

Dunkle: In my PhD program, I was thrilled to learn about the Roman poet Sulpicia.  She was introduced to me as the only surviving female author who was writing in ancient Rome. However, this seems unlikely. Do you know of any other female poets who were writing during this era? Or during other eras?

Wilson: There were earlier Greek women poets -- of course Sappho, and Corinna, and Erinna, and Melinno who wrote in Greek but lived in Roman times. We know of other Roman women who were literate, and there are surviving Latin letters and bits of letters from various Roman women – and we have the “passion” of the later Christian martyr, Perpetua. Sulpicia’s work survives apparently by accident, so it seems quite likely that there were plenty of others whose work is lost.

Dunkle: I wrote my dissertation on the influence of Sappho’s emulation of Homer’s phrases (such as her adaptation of “ isos theosin” in fragment 31) on American poets such as  Amy Lowell and H.D. Of course, I was writing from the perspective of an English major.  I have very little knowledge of Greek and was working from translations of Homer’s Odyssey (how I wish your translation existed back in 2010!) I’m wondering if you can speak to this practice of citing Homer and remaking his work to fit one’s own motif.  Was this common in Greek literature or was it unique to Sappho?

Wilson: Great topic! Allusions to Homer are absolutely all over archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek literature – prose as well as poetry. It’s hard to think of an ancient Greek author who doesn’t make some kind of use of Homer. Sappho’s allusions to Homer can be compared and contrasted with other early Greek poets, such as Mimnermus (who adapts the Homeric simile of human generations like the growth and fall of leaves), or Bacchylides, one of the most Homeric of Greek lyricists, who constantly alludes to Homeric similes and motifs and adapts them for new poetic contexts. There’s a huge amount of borrowing and alluding to Homer all over Athenian tragedy; Aeschylus supposedly said that his work was all slices from the banquet of Homer. I’m sure you’ll have come across the many-layered uses of Homer in Euripides, in working on HD.

Dunkle: Why do you think your translations have made such an impact? For example, after reading an article in the New Yorker about you my book club which typically read bestselling novels wanted to read your translation of The Odyssey.

Wilson: That’s so great about your book club! I love it! I’ve heard of a lot of book clubs reading my Homer translations. I think the “Wilson is a Woman!” marketing was helpful to me and to Homer – despite all my meandering caveats about it in relation to my actual work, as above! Being a woman is something many people can relate to, since a little more than half the population is female and most people know several women, ha ha – which I know sounds like a silly thing to say, but I do think it helped entice potential readers, conveying the idea that these long, ancient, complicated poems might not be inaccessible or boring. It gave people a friendly, easy way in, and that’s valuable. Arguably, too, there was a particular cluster of political and cultural reasons for the impact of a “First Woman!” Homer translation in the US in 2017, right after the country had failed to elect a “First Woman!” president. Who knows, that might not have been a factor, but it’s possible. Beyond that: in terms of my actual work, one of my main goals with Homer was to produce translations that recreate the clarity, psychological insight, quick pacing, and emotional impact of the originals. Homer’s characters are more layered and interesting than they appear in some translations, and if I manage to convey that, then it makes for a more book-club-friendly Homer. The poems also aren’t syntactically difficult in Greek, so I felt they shoudn’t be in English. It takes a great deal of writing/ translating work to make things reasonably easy for the reader, except in cases where the original is hard, where difficulty has a specific payoff. Clarity is not about dumbing down, it’s about thinking through what kinds of difficulties are and aren’t in the original, and how to recreate that experience in the translation. I put in that work, and for many readers, it paid off in terms of readability and pace, and emotional engagement. I wanted, too, to honor the insights of the past generation of Homeric scholars, who have shown the flexibility of narrative point of view in Homer, and the range of different voices – which I hope makes my translations more multi-vocal and in that way more engagingly proto-dramatic than many of my predecessors – not exactly proto-novelistic, but that, too, maybe makes them more inviting to people who usually read novels, not ancient epics. I also, above all, wanted to echo the regular meter and performability of the originals, to invite reading aloud, to honor the oral heritage of the originals. I am absolutely sure that most general readers don’t think of regular meter as an enticing feature of ancient epic, but I also think, once readers got started, the meter is a huge part of what carries them along. Also, in the case of much-re-translated texts, translation styles can become ossified, and there can be many translations that are very similar to one another, either in broad style and approach or even in details borrowed by one from another. That’s definitely the case with Homeric translation into English: a lot of the modern versions are very similar to one another, in ways that aren’t predetermined by the original. I wanted to make a conscious effort to find a new way to give voice to Homer in English, not keep on reinventing the wheel, a pretty pointless exercise. I think for many readers, including some of my colleagues as well as general readers, that worked, and the presentation of these familiar texts in a significantly different translatorly voice enabled a new vision into what’s actually happening in Homer.

But I think the primary reason is that the source material itself is so great. Homer has an impact because these epics are wonderful and impactful, whenever you read them seriously. There has never been a better time to revisit these wonderful poetic narratives and to reconsider how these very ancient, very alien stories about loss, rage, community, grief, violence, honor, masculinity, and belonging might compare and contrast with themes in our own culture and world.

To learn more about Emily Wilson, visit her website.