297 | Emily Wilson on Homer, Poetry, and Translation

0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe. Poor fools, they ate the sun god's cattle and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

0:00:34.1 SC: Some of you may recognize these lines as the opening of The Odyssey by Homer. The Odyssey translated in English, of course. Homer was writing in Homeric Greek over 2,500 years ago. Homer is known for two poems, The Odyssey and The Iliad, both of which have come to play absolutely central roles in the Western canon, the beginning in many ways of Western literature. And these days, of course, we're very interested in expanding the canon beyond Western literature to other literatures as well. That's very very valuable, all in favor of it, but it doesn't mean we throw out the existing canon. We can welcome new things with open arms, but The Iliad and the Odyssey are going to be with us and be centrally informative to how we think about literature for a very long time. They're both very different poems. They're about different things. They're both about incidents from the Trojan War, or incident is probably too minor, but episodes from the Trojan War, but in very different modes and with very different atmospheres about them. Both poems have many characters, but The Iliad centers on Achilles and his wrath. It's right up there in the beginning of the poem, the wrath of Achilles is the thing that we're going to be thinking about here.

0:01:52.2 SC: The Odyssey also has many characters, but centers on Odysseus, and we're told right at the beginning, he is complicated. He is a trickster. He is clever. He is willing to take on many disguises to get what he wants. It's a contrast. The Iliad is based in one place. The Odyssey is, as the word now means in English, a journey that goes over very large distances. And given how formative and important these poems are, the idea of translating them into English is a very important one, because most of us don't read Homeric Greek. Kudos to those out there in the audience who do, but I don't. So, how do you go about this project of translating these ancient poems into English? Many people have done it, but you're instantly faced with so many choices when you translate work like this. For one thing, the world was different in Homeric Greece. The ideas about how nature worked, the ideas about how people dealt with each other, were different. But also, as you notice while reading or listening to the poems, there are so many similarities.

0:02:58.4 SC: We still have a lot in common with our ancient Greek predecessors, but also it's a poem. Poems have meters, or at least they have organization. They have some structure there that prose doesn't have. How do you translate both the meanings of the words, the connotations, as well as the denotations, and the metrical spirit of the poem into English? That's one of the reasons why so many people have tackled the problem. One of the most recent and influential is today's guest, Emily Wilson, who has translated both The Iliad and The Odyssey in a way that she aims to make the poems give us the same feeling now, that they might have given the audience in ancient Greece.

0:03:44.2 SC: That is to say, not something that is manifestly archaic in form, because it wouldn't have seemed archaic to the ancient Greeks. Something that is a stirring story that gets you, that is not colloquial and chatty and sort of cliched, but is modern, contemporary, how you think people might reasonably talk with their vocabulary, and in a way that lends itself to being read out loud. When Homer, who may or may not have existed as a single person, but as a concept of Homer when he was writing these poems, they were translated by an oral tradition. People spoke them out loud in ceremonies, and only later were they written down. So capturing that spirit is an important part of the translator's interest. So, it's a great conversation because we're talking about Homer, we're talking about ancient Greece, we're also talking about poetry and translation, and we're talking about The Iliad and The Odyssey, these two wonderful stories that still have a lot to teach us. The classics, they're classic for a reason. So, let's go!

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0:05:03.3 SC: Emily Wilson, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:05:03.4 Emily Wilson: It's lovely to be here.

0:05:08.6 SC: I want to start with, maybe you get this all the time, I don't know. Which is your favorite, The Iliad or The Odyssey?

0:05:08.7 EW: I do get it all the time, and it's hard to say. I mean, whichever I'm working on is my favorite. If I'm teaching The Iliad, then that's definitely my favorite. I think in my heart of hearts, maybe The Iliad is my even more favorite. But I love both of them very very much. Yeah.

0:05:31.3 SC: It's kind of amazing to me, because they are so different. And for the audience, just talk about the idea that these are written by a person named Homer, which is probably not true. No modern scholar really believes that it was just one person who sat down and wrote them. How did these two poems come to be?

0:05:49.4 EW: Yes. I mean, there are modern scholars who think it was a single person who composed them, but they weren't an author in the sense that Jane Austen was an author, because they weren't making up characters and stories from scratch. There was an oral tradition in the Greek-speaking world for several centuries. So the Greek-speaking world had no literacy after the fall of Mycenaean civilization. So these stories about a great city called Troy and a great expedition of Greek warriors coming from all over the Greek-speaking world to fight in the mythical Trojan War, these heroes called Odysseus and Achilles and Hector, and memorializing them through a particular poetic technique using a meter called Dactylic hexameter. All of that was traditional and something that illiterate bards, singers, had been doing for generations before whoever it was, whether that's a single person or several people got together to use the new technology of writing, which came about in the mid 8th century BCE, the Greek-speaking world borrowed from the Phoenicians, a set of ways of writing down their language in the mid 8th century BCE. So sometime after that, probably in the 7th century, either one or more people composed these monumental written poems out of this long oral tradition.

0:07:11.5 SC: And just to put it in absolute context here. So, the poems are written down hundreds of years before Plato and Aristotle, who were hundreds of years before Jesus and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

0:07:25.9 EW: Exactly. So, mid 7th century-ish is the rough date of the Homeric poems. Plato was from the 4th century. And of course Jesus is, as we know from our calendar, the year dot kind of thing. Yes. So Jesus was a contemporary of people like Seneca Roman empire.

0:07:42.9 SC: And so the idea is, so I actually was...

0:07:45.6 EW: Wait a minute. Let me take that back. He wasn't a contemporary Seneca, but anyway, Jesus was a contemporary... People like the Roman emperors, the beginning of the Roman Empire, Jesus...

0:07:55.1 SC: Augustus, etcetera. Right.

0:07:56.2 EW: Augustus. Exactly.

0:07:58.5 SC: So, I didn't realise there was still people who held out for the idea that Homer was one person who did compose in the sense of put together these poems in the way that they're currently written. Or was the idea that Homer was just the last person to have these poems before they were written down, like he dictated them and then he gets his name on them?

0:08:21.3 EW: Yes. The capital H, capital Q Homeric question is a whole cluster of questions about that kind of thing about, was it one individual? Was it two individuals? One for The Odyssey, one for The Iliad. How exactly was the transition from oral tradition to monumental written poem done? Was it through somebody dictated, that's actually quite a popular scholarly theory that there was a bard who sang the poems to a scribe who wrote it down, or else maybe there was an oral poet who became literate. I would want to just flag that what existed before these written poems wasn't the same as these poems, because these are far too long for a single occasion performance. I mean, I know that you were saying you've listened to the audiobook. The audiobooks, we have these poems are over 20 hours long.

0:09:12.5 SC: Yes.

0:09:12.8 EW: It's much too long for a after dinner. We're having a cup of wine and listening to the poet sing a one or two heroic tales. I mean, it seems to me that the existence of the new technology of writing inspired one or more people to realise they could do something different with the oral tradition from what had been done before. And they let the sort of complexity of narrative composition circles of patterns within patterns within patterns, presumably that style of oral storytelling where you echo one scene with another scene already was part of the tradition, but to do it on this level of complexity and several hours later, here's a story that echoes the one that you might've heard many hours before. You need writing in order to make that replicable. You can't just do it and then repeat it the exact same way the next day.

0:10:04.3 SC: Can we even talk about something like the intention of the author, if this is a bunch of stories that came together in different ways.

0:10:12.7 EW: We can talk about what exactly is going on in the text we have. I mean, the intention of the author, given that we can't bring them back through necromancia and many time machines. And even if we could, I mean, people talk about whether we can, there's a separation between the intentionality of the living poet and the living novelist and what their text says. So, it's not that it's a problem unique to Homer.

0:10:39.5 SC: Fair enough. And I guess, if we put ourselves back in the world of when Homer was around, what was a typical performance like? Was it a theatre that you went? Did you hear something long? Or was it literally like, this is what we did after dinner. Someone was tasked with the idea of treating us with a few stanzas?

0:11:02.2 EW: Yes. Again, this is a much debated scholarly question, and the question is different depending on which period we're talking about. But all over, throughout antiquity, the Homeric poems were experienced in oral performance and oral performances, probably including all of the above. We know that rhapsode. So, a rhapsode is somebody who performs traditional oral poetry, not making it up on the spot, but presumably using a script to memorize and then perform some famous bit or some highlights out of the Homeric poems for a particular performance. And that included performances at religious and civic festivals. We know that from a pretty early date, the Homeric poems were used in poetry competitions. So, here's one rhapsode doing his showpiece celebrity performance, doing all the voices, and then here's another one. And now the judges are gonna decide who gets the crown, who did the best Homer performance this year. And then also presumably, I mean more private drinking party kinds of contexts. And all of the above, I think is what I would say about what the contexts were in which people heard these poems.

0:12:14.1 SC: So, would the typical Greek person on the street be more or less familiar with the content of the poems?

0:12:21.2 EW: Absolutely. Yes. I think we can very definitely say everyone knew these stories. Yes. I mean, we know that these stories, of course, we get these stories represented on Greek forces from all over the Greek-speaking world. People knew these characters and these stories. Yes.

0:12:37.9 SC: And were they at the time just considered, in particularly The Iliad and The Odyssey, just part of a whole bunch of stories that were common? Or was it already clear like, this is the best we got?

0:12:50.7 EW: Again, the question of when exactly that happened is much debated, but yes. So, we are told that at the time of Pisistratus, who was a Tyrant in Athens in the 6th century, the Pisistratus instituted that at his civic festivals, it would be the Homeric poems as opposed to other parts of the epic or cyclical heroic tradition that would be used in the festival poetry competition. So that suggests an understanding of some, again, we can debate, was that The Iliad and The Odyssey exactly as we have them, or were those poems revised, edited in some way or other over the next couple of centuries? But there was a sense certainly from a pretty early stage that the Homeric poems are different, and by the time we get to Plato and Aristotle, there's a really clear sense that Homer is special. And so for instance, in Aristotle's Poetics, he discusses the best kinds of plot and insists that the Homeric poems are different from the broader cyclic tradition of dactylic hexameter poetry, and partly because their plots are better. For instance, The Odyssey doesn't tell you every single myth about Odysseus. There are tonnes of myths about Odysseus. The poet of The Odyssey is smart enough to leave most of them out. Same way with The Iliad. It leaves most of the stories out.

0:14:18.7 EW: So, in order to have a really tight beginning, middle, and end, and a focused narrative, the Homeric poems, despite their monumental length, are very very selective about which stories they tell about the whole myth. And they do it in this sophisticated way where it's not, let's begin at the beginning and continue till the bitter end, it's, lets do stories within stories and moving back and forth.

0:14:41.6 SC: I think actually that's super noticeable to just me. I love listening to the audiobooks of these things. I think that's the way they were meant to be. And they're good stories. They grab you.

0:14:52.2 EW: They are great stories.

0:14:53.2 SC: You want to hear what happens next. There's Odysseus arriving on Ithaca and he's kind of lingering. You're like, "Come on Odysseus! I want to see what happens."

0:15:03.4 EW: Yes. Exactly. Because there's some suspense, because you kind of know he's gonna come out of his disguise at some point, but it leaves you hanging until book 22. It's a very long wait where you are rooting for something to happen and then it'll happen.

0:15:13.9 SC: Which I think isn't always characteristic of storytelling of that time, they hadn't quite figured out those Hollywood techniques for grabbing your attention.

0:15:26.2 EW: I think we project back onto an antiquity, an idea of surely because they were ancient, they must have been primitive and unsophisticated in their narrative techniques. And I really don't think that's necessarily true. I mean, the cyclic poems that we have evidence of, we only have them in fragmentary form, were composed later than The Iliad and The Odyssey. So, I don't think there's actually evidence to say, at the earliest periods, Greek storytelling or Greek poetic technique was less sophisticated than it became later. I think we actually have evidence of the opposite.

0:15:58.8 SC: Yeah. Okay.

0:16:00.3 EW: And of course the whole spectrum of different things, because some people are better at telling stories than others, and some people are better poets than others. And that's always been the case.

0:16:07.6 SC: Well, it's still true today. I remember I used to live in LA for a long time. A lot of my friends were screenwriters, and one of them said, people wonder why Hollywood movies are so popular compared to art films or European movies or whatever, and he says, it's because we follow Aristotle, we do the storytelling techniques that have been known for a long time. And also that oral thing does affect the words. I mean, you'll know better than me, so help us out here. But the style of the poems themselves are written to help people remember them and have the interesting part of the sentence be at the beginning of it, for example.

0:16:52.5 EW: Absolutely. Yes. So, we can talk about multiple different areas with that, both in terms of the ability of the Greek to put the important word at the beginning. So, maybe we can just do as a case study is the beginning of The Iliad, which begins with the theme of the poem, which is menis-wrath.

[foreign language]

0:17:41.1 EW: Sorry, I didn't mean to do the whole thing.

0:17:43.1 SC: I love it. That's great.

0:17:43.5 EW: That's called the Proem. And The Iliad and The Odyssey each do this thing of beginning with the word that's the topic of the poem. So, The Odyssey begins, Andra... Not to do the whole thing of that, but Andra meaning man, and with The Iliad, it's menis, meaning divine wrath. So, the wrath of Achilles is quasi-divine. I feel like I didn't actually answer your question though, which was about oral technique. So, what I just said can apply to Greek that's composed not orally as well, like it's a highly inflected language, so it's possible to put the object at the beginning of the sentence. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects composed out of traditions from all over the Greek-speaking world.

0:18:30.0 EW: So it's this very artificial poetic language. It has a meter, as I hope you could hear when I was just saying a few lines. It has a rhythm to it. It was designed to be sort of chanted rather than just spoken as if it's a novel. Prose is a later invention in the history of literature. And also it has these formulaic phrases as you were hinting at. So for instance, Achilles is usually swift-footed Achilles or Achilles, son of Peleus, or both, depending on which position in the line he is, so that it makes it easier to fit the meter. And it also means that, if you're composing orally, you don't have to stop and think about, "So what adjective shall I use for Achilles this time?" Because you've only got two choices and it's gonna be Achilles, son Peleus, or it's gonna be swift-footed Achilles, depending on which you need to fill up a half line.

0:19:20.7 EW: And similarly, about almost every object in the Homeric universe. So, sponges are porous and ships are well balanced or they have rowing benches on them, and so on. And then on the slightly larger level of types of scenes, there were also just things that you can plug in whenever you do a banqueting scene or a animals getting sacrificed scene or guy on the battlefield going to slaughter a lot of people kind of scene or an arming scene or a stranger shows up at the gates and there's going to be hospitality scene, if it's the Odyssey. Those kinds of things always have a pretty much preset set of components now that I believe. And then the poet can decide in each occasion, which of the elements am I going to put in here and how can I make it fun for the audience by using the conventions, but also every time messing with them in some way. So, no two hospitality scenes are exactly the same. In the case of The Iliad, all those battlefield sequences, you don't have the same part of the body pierced twice in a row. Somebody is gonna be stabbed through the lungs. Next time you're gonna have someone have their tongue sliced off. Next time we're gonna have to go through the ears. You have to have variety within tradition.

0:20:40.2 SC: Well, I think, and you also answered something that I've been wondering about for decades in my life about, as you mentioned, poetry seems to have come before prose in the history of narrative. And that just always seemed weird to me because poetry sounds like it's an extra layer of constraint over prose. But if you think that it's because we started this as part of an oral tradition rather than a written one, then maybe it makes much more sense. It's easier to remember poetry.

0:21:05.3 EW: It's easier to remember. And also if we think of literature as marked language, and if you're thinking, if you're hearing everything out loud, what's marked about how are we talking right now? It's not marked. And so it takes extra levels of thinking through what language is and extra layers of technology to figure out how can we make prose something ornate and marked in the way that poetry has always been, because there are markers of poetry that have to do with meter, with sound, with the speakability and performability of it.

0:21:42.3 SC: Do you find yourself talking in iambic pentameter just by accident sometimes?

0:21:44.0 EW: I sometimes do, yes. I don't know. I'm not gonna do it right now. I'm not gonna show off like that.

0:21:52.3 SC: That is not intentional. Okay. Very good. Okay. So at this point, I guess we should tell some of the audience, if they're not super familiar, what happens in the plot of these stories. I think that many events in the stories are individually familiar, but The Iliad and The Odyssey just amaze me because they're so different from each other and so compelling in their own ways. So, explain to us what the focus is.

0:22:09.0 EW: Yeah. They're both so different from each other and so complementary. I mean, I think they really invite reading together because they're both long poems about the Trojan War. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, but as we've already hinted, it's a weird poem about the Trojan War because it doesn't tell you what happened at the beginning, how did this war get started. We're assumed to already know that, of course, the mythical Trojan War began when Paris, Prince of Troy, abducted Helen from her Spartan Greek husband, Menelaus, and took her with him back to Troy. And then the Greeks got together, Menelaus and his brother, Agamemnon, got a whole bunch of Greek warriors together to make war on the rich city of Troy, which is in what's now Turkey, and sail there, besiege the city for 10 years, eventually sack it using the wooden horse, do all kinds of terrible things in the course of sacking the city, enslaving the women.

0:23:14.6 EW: Then they sail home and the gods, because they've done terrible things in the course of the sack of the city, curse the journeys home. So, The Iliad and The Odyssey take that whole body of myth and find, what I think already at the time in the 7th century, was an original and weird take on it. The Iliad focuses notion the famous bits of the beginning of the war or the fall of the city, but on a time, like a month and a half that isn't at the beginning or the end. It's the start of the 10th year of the war. And it focuses on a quarrel between two Greek warriors, Achilles and Agamemnon, in the course of which Achilles gets furious with Agamemnon for taking from him the woman that he's been trying to enslave. So Achilles, who's the son of a sea goddess and thinks he should get the maximum amount of honor out of any of the warriors because he's the best at running and throwing spears, feels he's been dissed in public among his fellow warriors. So he asks his sea goddess mother, Thetis, to help him get his honor back. And Thetis, with the help of Zeus, ensures that while Achilles is sitting sulking in his tent, refusing to fight, the Greeks will suffer an enormous massacre at the hands of the Trojans.

0:24:37.9 EW: So. The Trojan warrior Hector is on the rise for the first two-thirds of the Iliad, killing the Greeks. And it's only when Achilles realizes very much too late that his prayer to have the Greeks be massacred, he wasn't thinking the Greeks would include anyone he actually cares about. But it turns out he does care about just one Greek, which is his dearest companion, Patroclus, who begs to go out wearing Achilles' armor as his second self, to try to fight Hector off from the ships. And of course, we can see it coming, but it's still heartbreaking when it happens. Hector kills Patroclus and then, inspired by that grief and by a transformed version of his original rage, Achilles returns to the battlefield to fight Hector and to try to keep on destroying as many Trojans as possible until he himself dies. And the poem ends not with Achilles' death, but with a transformation of his rage into something else, into a recognition of his own mortality and of the temporary value that human institutions of grief can provide. And he has a meeting with Hector's father, Priam, who comes to beg for his son's body back from the person who killed him.

0:26:00.5 EW: And Achilles gives Hector back. So Hector, who's been leaving home throughout the poem, has a kind of homecoming journey at the end of the Iliad, even though he's, of course, dead when he comes home. And so The Odyssey complements this story about a warrior who's separated from his people but then eventually finds a way back to community with a focus on Odysseus, who also, like Achilles, has issues with honor. And I said a couple of minutes ago that there were all these myths about the homecoming journeys of the Greeks from the mythical city of Troy. The Odyssey takes the longest possible homecoming journey, which is the homecoming journey of Odysseus, which lasts for 10 years because he spends seven years shacked up with one goddess, another year shacked up with another. And then in the course of his journeys by sea, Poseidon curses his journey because Odysseus has blinded Poseidon's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus.

0:27:01.8 EW: So, half the poem is Odysseus trying to get back to Ithaca. And then the second half of the poem Odysseus is back on Ithaca. But the poem is showing us that a homecoming journey is a lot more than a geographical thing, it's also about reestablishing relationships with every member of Odysseus's household and being recognized in all these different ways. So it's a whole sequence of different recognitions with Odysseus as, in a way, different selves. And that question of what does it mean to come home? What is an identity? What is a person? And how are we different in different communities? Is at stake in the Odyssey. Whereas in The Iliad, I guess, there's these big themes about grief and rage and isolation and community.

0:27:53.4 SC: There is a movie coming out, I don't know if you're familiar with it, about the last part of the Odyssey with Ralph Fiennes in it.

0:27:58.2 EW: I saw an announcement about that. I mean, I don't think it's available yet, right?

0:28:00.7 SC: I don't think it's quite out yet. Yeah.

0:28:02.9 EW: Yes, I'm excited to see that. Yes.

0:28:04.5 SC: Yeah. It's one of those cautiously optimistic kind of things. It could be terrible.

0:28:11.7 EW: It could be great. Well, Fiennes is great.

0:28:12.0 SC: Yeah. So, has anyone suggested that this difference between the two poems is part of the reason why we suspect Homer is not just one person? Because they're so different. The Iliad, even though they are complementary, just like you said, and maybe it does make sense to read them together or listen to them together, but The Iliad is very warlike, very masculine. Achilles is exactly sort of the action hero stereotype, but kind of mopey about it. And simple, I think, is fair to say. Whereas The Odyssey...

0:28:51.8 EW: I think Achilles is very sophisticated. He plays the liar. He's singing the stories of heroes.

0:28:55.9 SC: All right. That's fair.

0:28:56.9 EW: His language is full of metaphors. So, you know he's a poet, as well as a fighter. I think he's complex, but in a different way from Odysseus.

0:29:04.0 SC: Completely fair. I guess what I was thinking about is just, he is mopey. He does...

0:29:11.4 EW: Yes. But when we first meet Odysseus, what is he doing?

0:29:15.3 SC: Well, that's true. He is also kind of mopey.

0:29:18.8 EW: He's sitting by the sea and crying.

0:29:22.5 SC: For seven years, he was... Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:23.9 EW: Yeah.

0:29:23.9 SC: [laughter] Fair enough. Okay. That's a very good point. But the lessons, maybe? I don't know. Is Homer trying to give us lessons in these stories, do you think?

0:29:30.9 EW: So, maybe going back to the first question about the complementarity, scholars talk about something called Monroe's Law, which is that the stories don't repeat. And people often argue that maybe that means that either they are by the same person or that at the very least, whoever composed The Odyssey knew The Iliad. That it's composed with a knowledge that, "You dear audience, I don't want to bore you. I want to give you something different. And if you've already heard everything from The Iliad, I want to show you something else." So lessons, I mean, in antiquity, knowing the Homeric poems was an essential part of what was called paideia, of cultural education, both on the level of children learning about narrative from the Homeric poems, orators learning about rhetoric from the Homeric poems, generals learning about military technique by arguing about, did Nestor do the right thing there? Or how does a council meeting operate? In all of those ways, the Homeric poems were essential cultural texts. But of course, the Homeric poems don't include anything like the Ten Commandments, say. They don't have lessons that are directly given as if from a divine authority figure that you can write down and say, "Oh, yes. That shows that I must do this." Insofar as there are lessons that spoken by particular characters on particular occasions, and of course, one can always debate whether or not that lesson is is the right lesson.

0:31:10.0 EW: And the Greek speakers in antiquity certainly did debate those things. I mean, you probably know many of these listeners probably know that in Plato's Republic, the semi-ideal Republic envisioned by Plato's Socrates, includes casting out Homer and the tragic poets from this semi-ideal Republic, because these poems teach you the wrong lessons. They teach you to sympathize with infuriated or grief stricken heroes, like heroes in an ancient sense, not necessarily heroes in a modern sense, larger than life characters who are doing terrible things and making terrible choices. And the poems aren't necessarily inviting you to do anything other than feel for them and to have a lot of feelings. Which if you're Plato in that text, you don't necessarily think those feelings are a good idea for the balance of the civic quality.

0:32:10.6 SC: Well, that's a feature of good art. I mean, it's portraying complicated people, and the lessons if they're there... So I mean, you gave the answer that I was hoping that you would give from my perspective, which is that, one can get lessons but it's not because the work of art itself is saying, "Here's the lesson, you better learn it."

0:32:30.1 EW: Absolutely not. And of course, the lesson is partly about, you must go through this journey, and you must go through this journey collectively with other people. And then you must argue about it and figure out what it means together. And it may mean different things depending on what's the community that's telling the story together and how does this conversation go? And it might mean that it means something different for you than it does for me. And then we have a language to talk to each other about really difficult things through these poems.

0:33:00.2 SC: And it's interesting that so many of the specific issues about honor, duty, whatever, are still absolutely human and familiar to us, even though the world of over 2500 years ago, 3000 years ago is so so very different in many ways.

0:33:16.5 EW: Yes. So many people still have societies, people still care about other people, and also very often feel furious with other people. We still have mortality, we still have grief, we still have loss, we still have, how do we deal with people who aren't like us? And if we lose something or someone, what do we do? Is there any kind of compensation for loss that is okay? And if there isn't, then what do we do? Do we just go around and kill everyone else because we're so furious? None of those questions have gone away, even though the terms in which these poems set them up are, of course, completely different from modern terms.

0:33:53.0 SC: One thing you just can't miss when you're listening to the stories is how present the gods are. That's very different. I mean, it's not a superhero story, it's almost a naturalistic, but the gods are there pushing people around. Is this how Greeks of that time would have thought of the world? Or is that like, "Oh no. This is a story, so I get it."?

0:34:16.8 EW: It's both. I mean, there were, of course, cults and worship, and these gods are not just literary fictions, because I think we may be tempted to think of the gods in the Homeric poems as, this is just made up for the sake of the story in the same way that kryptonite is just there for the sake of the story, and nobody has a religious festival in which we talk about kryptonite. We know about that only from comic books and the movies. Whereas in the case of Athena or Hera, there were real temples, there's real religious practice, there's real sacrifices, and there are real particular parts of Greek-speaking world where this city has a temple, this island is particularly sacred to this or that goddess. So, that also gives particular passages in the Homeric poems a different resonance for some audiences versus others. But at the same time, the question of exactly how literal should we be about the gods are exactly as they are represented in the poems, of course, one can debate that. And the question also of, in different periods of Greek history, there were developing views about the gods.

0:35:40.6 EW: And I also think it's a mistake to... I mean, another common mistake is to think because there are gods who are supremely powerful and yet not omnipotent, does that take away from human agency? The poems are very clear that it doesn't. They're very clear that at the same time as the gods who are far more visible and tangible to humans than they tend to be in real life. I mean, I personally never seem to have direct encounters with Athena, even if I can sort of sense her somewhere around the corner, I never actually get to look into her bright eyes. But in the poems, people do have those experiences. And yet, that doesn't mean that they're not still making choices. I mean, if you think about the first encounter between Achilles and Athena in The Iliad, Achilles is tempted to kill Agamemnon because he's so angry with him. And at the moment that he's about to draw his sword to kill him, Athena grabs him by the hair and speaks to him and says, "I've come down because Hera is worried about this. We don't want you killing each other. Think a moment." And so he thinks about it and then he doesn't do it. But it's not that he hasn't thought about it. He does think about it and his decision making is there and he's also persuaded by the goddess.

0:36:45.3 EW: So it's not that he's a puppet of the goddess. And I think that's what's really important to bear in mind, that when the gods intervene, they very often do it in the same way that humans intervene with each other. They do it by persuasion rather than by force.

0:37:02.6 SC: And the gods are often, I mean, they're obviously super powerful, but they're, like you said, not omnipotent. In fact, there's even a couple of examples, was it Diophanes who fought a couple of gods and did okay?

0:37:11.3 EW: Diomedes.

0:37:11.4 SC: Diomedes.

0:37:12.3 EW: Diomedes in book five of The Iliad is a great hero, who in some ways parallels Achilles in his quasi-divine capacities to take on gods and be as close as a mortal warrior can be to a god. And yet he's not immortal. He manages to fight against the two gods who are the least honored by the other gods, who are the closest to being divine representations of elements of human impulse that we may not like about ourselves, which is lust and aggression. So it's Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite, god of lust. And Diomedes fights against both of them, and Aphrodite goes whining back to her mother when she gets a little graze on her wrist. And it's funny, but it's also fascinating in the way that it showcases what does it mean to be so close to being divine and yet we're not. There's a difference.

0:38:10.3 SC: And even more than the personalities and the interventions of the gods, it's kind of an enchanted world. You say at one point, I think in the intro to The Iliad, I think it was, that you were careful in the translation not to treat a dead body as a body. It was still considered to be a person. You were dead, but you were still that person.

0:38:31.3 EW: Exactly. I think that's really important. I mean, this sort of gets back to the question of just how the themes are so recognizable and so human, and yet the imaginary world isn't quite the same as ours. And we tend to think of the dead as a different category from the living, whereas in the Homeric poems, they're not. The dead want the same things, they want honor. And the dead Patroclus or the dead Hector is still the dead Hector, is not, corpse of. So when the Greeks are battling over the body, what we might call the body of Patroclus, they're battling in the language the poem uses, "over Patroclus." And similarly, Priam takes his son Hector back to his family. It's not a corpse who was once his son, it's his son.

0:39:17.4 SC: And I don't know the theology well enough. My impression from the Odyssey is that most of these dead heroes are to be found in Hades after they're dead. Is there a Heaven and hell thing, or does everyone go to hell?

0:39:35.0 EW: It's an afterlife thing, but it's also a complex kind of afterlife thing, because the mind-body dualism that we're used to, in the sort of post-platonic mind-body dualism that we're used to, has an idea that the self is the immaterial souly thing, soul-like thing. So in Greek, that's the psūkhē, from which we get the psyche, as in psychology. In the world of the Homeric poems, as you can tell just from the first few lines of The Iliad, that I think I only said in Greek, but maybe people weren't following it.

[laughter]

0:40:16.9 EW: So, in the first few lines of The Iliad, we get the line that, as a result of the wrath of Achilles, I'm just gonna read you that line in my translation for a second, so you can see what I mean. So, the wrath of Achilles caused the Greeks immeasurable pain, and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds. So, the souls, the psūkhē, are sent to Hades. The men are eaten by the dogs.

0:40:51.0 SC: Got it. Yeah.

0:40:52.5 EW: There's a distinction between the people themselves, those are the ones lying on the battlefield being eaten by animals. It's horrific. And then there's this fluttering gray thing that exists and will continue to exist in Hades. And if the man himself gets a proper honorable burial, as Patroclus begs Achilles to give him what he appears to him in that quasi-dream vision later on in The Iliad, then they get to have the honorable time in the afterlife. But it's dependent on the burial of the man himself, which is the physical man. So that question of what is the relationship between the physical self and the psūkhē is somewhat different from how we conceptualize it, because it's not so clear where is the real you, right?

0:41:41.0 SC: Yeah. No, that's very very helpful, because I would not get that just from getting the poem. But yes, that does make perfect sense.

0:41:47.0 EW: Yes. As you say, the Book 11 of the Odyssey focuses on Odysseus encountering the souls, the psūkhē of his dead companions. So we get something also in that about this question, because Achilles, Odysseus's old frenemy, meets him and they have this discussion about whether Achilles is happy because he got to live and die by honor. And Achilles famously says that he would rather live and be the hired man of someone poor on earth than be the king over all the numberless dead. There's something pale and lesser about being a psūkhē in the underworld. Though, of course, Achilles is also happy to hear about the honor of his son, Neoptolemus, who turned out to be an even more brutal killer than Achilles. And so that makes Achilles glad and he's able to stride happily across the Elysian fields. Going back to your question about Heaven and hell, there were different areas within Hades, it seems. There were rivers in the underworld which segregate the different parts. There's the Elysian fields where the heroes who've achieved honor and have honorific burial can live forever being heroes.

0:43:05.0 SC: I like the idea that the afterlife is somehow lesser. It never made sense to me in Christian theology that heaven was so great and yet we don't wanna die. But this version makes perfect sense.

0:43:13.7 EW: It does. Yes.

0:43:14.9 SC: Like the life that we have right now is the important part.

0:43:20.1 EW: Yes. Yes. It is.

0:43:22.6 SC: So we didn't... I guess, one thing I wanted to get because it's so interesting to me for those who are not familiar with the Odyssey is the character of Odysseus. Because one of the most fascinating characters in literature ever, but certainly in ancient literature. And partly because the poetry needs to emphasize the same thing over and over again, but man, we are told a lot about how clever he is.

[laughter]

0:43:49.0 EW: Yes, we are. And he's clever in a particular way about problem solving. And about encountering weird situations and being able to solve his way out of them. And I'm not sure exactly where you want to go with this, but we're told both about cleverness and about multiplicity is really important, I think.

0:44:09.0 SC: Yeah. I guess, if you needed to tell someone who hadn't read the poem, who is this Odysseus person? How would you describe him?

0:44:19.0 EW: So, are we talking to somebody who has read The Iliad and hasn't read The Odyssey or somebody?

[laughter]

0:44:24.0 SC: Nothing at all. They've read nothing.

0:44:25.0 EW: Whoever these people are, in any case. He's a storyteller and he's making up stories about himself and with himself all the time. In contrast, I said already that Achilles is usually described as swift-footed and/or son of Peleus. In the case of Odysseus, he has many, many, many formulaic epithets. So most characters only have one or two. Achilles is swift. He goes directly to the point. He goes fast to what he wants to say. He's going fast on the road to death. Odysseus is not going fast anywhere. He's going roundabout and he's gonna be in disguise as many different things, or maybe the many different things are what it is to be Odysseus.

0:45:19.8 EW: And also in contrast to every other Homeric character, maybe especially Achilles, Odysseus appears in disguise and not with his own name. And he's willing to do that. And so that's also the key to his survival is about this ability to be in hiding and to say his name is nobody and to appear as a beggar rather than be constantly saying as every character and every hero in The Iliad wants to be saying their name all the time, and have everyone be saying their name all the time for the rest of human history, and to build monuments that say their name. Whereas Odysseus is willing to have his name not be said in order to survive and eventually get his name said. So, one of his most important characteristics as well as the cleverness is the patience.

0:45:57.0 SC: Yeah. That's a very good point. And the name thing, like we said before, it doesn't go away. It makes me think of "The Wire" and all the characters on the streets in The Wire who up until Marlow at the end, he's like, "Say my name. This is the most important single thing in the world." Yeah.

0:46:15.0 EW: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. We all want it.

0:46:17.0 SC: Exactly. And you describe very accurately Odysseus as complicated, but you got flack for that.

0:46:24.0 EW: Oh my gosh. I mean, in a way I see that as a success because it got people talking about translation. And I think people sometimes read The Iliad and The Odyssey or read texts in translation in general without thinking about the fact that this is not actually the poem that was originally composed, and the translator made some choices. And so I wanted to make a Marx choice that would generate a conversation, partly because I already said that the Odysseus has many different formulaic epithets. He is Polymetus. He's very wily. He's polymechanos. He's very problem solving. He's polyclass. He's very patient. He's also, and this is a very unusual epithet for Odysseus, in that first line of the Odyssey, he's polytropos. He's very twisty or very circly or there are many turns to him or many disguises. And it seems to me that the choice of that word in that line is an invitation to think about the poem as well as the protagonist.

0:47:24.9 EW: So I wanted a word that's a single word that's gonna fit into iambic pentameter that's ideally the same length as the original, which is 4 syllables, and that will speak to what is the poem and who is its protagonist. Not gonna tell you everything about that, but you're gonna have some questions and you're gonna remember this word. And so I felt complicated, but that's my only possible thing I could do with it.

0:47:48.2 SC: Yeah. Well, it it does... I love the fact that translations are translations and they're works of art for their own sake and and those are different. And so I thought, this might be fun or this might end up being very embarrassing, but I thought that to compare different ways of translating that I would read the opening of the Iliad in two different relatively modern translations, and then you would read yours. Does that sound like fun?

0:48:09.1 EW: Sure. We can do that. Yes.

0:48:15.4 SC: Okay. So, here I have Lattimore, Richmond Lattimore. And this is a famous one. Sing goddess, the anger of Peleus's son, Achilles, and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds. And the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus's son the lord of men and brilliant Achilles. And then we have Robert Fagles who accompanied me, not him personally, but his translations on a cross country trip when I was listening to, I think it was Ian McKellen, who narrated this. Rage, goddess, sing the rage to Peleus's son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death, so many sturdy souls, great fighter's souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds. And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, muse, when the first two broke and clashed, Agamemnon, lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

0:49:22.8 SC: And it's interesting because they're clearly the same stuff, the same substance, and I have preferences for different lines and different ones of them, even though I've never read the original Greek, but why don't you read your version?

0:49:36.8 EW: Sure. Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus, which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades and made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds. And so the plan of Zeus unfolded, starting with the conflict between great Agamemnon, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.

0:50:04.4 SC: Yeah. You're better at it than I am. I think that you have a you have a future doing this. You have practice?

0:50:08.3 EW: Yeah. Yep.

0:50:10.1 SC: So, talk about the differences... I don't know. First, I guess, have you in the process of being a translator for these things, is it your duty to either read other translations, or do you think it's better to try to avoid them?

0:50:23.4 EW: It's my duty to look at them and know them when I'm doing the book proposal, when I'm figuring out, is there any point in spending six years of my life doing this? Because I have to know and I have to persuade the publisher on this and the second or third readers that they send it to, that I'm not doing the exact same thing that Robert Fagles or Richmond Lattimore did. Because otherwise, like, what's the point in doing that. But also that I'm gonna be doing something responsible with the original that is gonna be truthful about some elements of the original that might be inaudible or illegible if you only read this or that existing one. So, I need to know about them from that perspective. And, of course, in the course of my, I don't know how long I've been at this, like, 30 years of teaching these poems in translation as well as in the originals. Of course, I've used several of these in the classroom, and I've seen what seems to work, what doesn't seem to work.

0:51:18.3 EW: But then once I've done the book proposal and done my little sample bit of translation, I then put them away for the next five years because if I'm stuck on something and if I'm thinking, how would I make this line work, here's this phrase which is so beautiful and easy in the original, and yet I can't seem to make it come clear in English. If I then look and see, so what did Stanley Lombardo do with this? Maybe I like what he did. And in that case, I've ruled out something that otherwise I might have thought of by myself and felt alright about it. So, now I don't look at them while I'm working on it. With the exception that with The Iliad in particular, I spend a lot of time agonizing about the less common names and where the most natural place to put the stress would be for an English speaker. So I did a little bit of dipping into not the 20th century free verse ones, because there's no use for this, but the 18th century ones, like, Pope and Cooper, because, of course, they're metrical verse, so I can tell, where were they putting the stresses. But, of course, so that was also useless because they do things like diamide, and nobody's gonna say diamide for diabetes nowadays.

0:52:31.3 SC: Okay. So they just cheated.

0:52:32.6 EW: It was completely useless, but I did waste some time doing that. And it it's always fun to read some popes...

0:52:36.6 SC: That's fair enough. But I guess this is an extra burden for the translator of a poem. There are meter questions, things like that. I know that you made a leap from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter. Why don't we tell the audience what those two things are and why you made that switch?

0:52:56.8 EW: Yes. I mean, in a way, I didn't make a switch such, because most English translators haven't used dactylic hexameter. The only one I know of that's done that consistently is the under-known, but I think it's actually kind of interesting, Rodney Merrill translations. So dactylic hexameter, as the hex suggests, is six, and as the dactylic suggests, is finger. So, dáktylos in Greek is a finger. Most people who are lucky enough to have fingers have a long first joint and then two shorter joints on a finger. So that's what a dactyl is. It's a long and then two shorts.

[vocalization]

0:53:33.6 EW: So, it's that rhythm. So it's like a musical bar, and it's six, la la la, with the exception of the final one has to be la la la la. So, the fifth has to be a dactyl, and the final beat is a spondy, laa, laa, two longs. So you know where the end of the line is, if you're just listening.

0:53:57.9 SC: Good.

0:54:00.2 EW: So that's what a dactylic hexameter is. In ancient Greek and Latin are both quantitative meters. Maybe this is too much in the insider baseball.

0:54:11.2 SC: It's not.

0:54:12.8 EW: As it was the musical bar, it's about the length of the syllables, rather than about the stress. So there was an interplay between stress and quantity in the music of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry, which is different from the primarily stressed way that metrical poetry tends to work in the Anglophone tradition. So, I felt that I wanted to move away from the common norms of 20th and 21st century, ways of translating ancient metrical poetry, which is to more or less ignore meter. So both the Fagles and the Lattimore don't have a regular meter. They're arguably composed sort of for the ear, and they work okay as audiobooks, at least the Fagles, McKellen is fun. It's fun to listen to. But it's not regular meter. So I wanted to honor the fact that the Homeric poems do use regular meter, and that they do that partly because of what we talked about at the start of this conversation. Because these poems are the heirs of a long tradition of poetic storytelling. And so, I felt the only way to do that in English is to use the traditional meter for dramatic and narrative verse in English. So that even if you're not thinking about meter, you can hear this has the same kind of beats as Shakespeare or Milton, even if I'm not using the same lexicon as Shakespeare, I'm still using that rhythm. And so I'm wanting to cue the reader into something traditional about this. It's not like a novel. It's not prose.

0:55:43.4 SC: But how much of that choice is, this is what Shakespeare and Milton did, this is what we were sort of implicitly used to, iambic pentameter, da-da, da-da, da-da, and how much of it is the words in English kind of naturally adapt to that?

0:55:58.2 EW: I mean, it's hard to say. I think that an iambic rhythm is definitely much easier in English than a dactylic rhythm or an anapest rhythm come to that. Because just having that words with two short or light beats in a row that frequently, or else two very heavy stress beats in a row, it's hard to do with the English language, if you read any of the Rodney Merrill translations, even if you just sort of dip into them, you can see that he's sort of forced into things like he has to call Agamemnon, scion of Atreus, because son of Atreus doesn't fit, you can't get that into a dactylic line, unless you stress of, which of course you wouldn't. So, it's got to be scion of Atreus. But I don't want to be having to say scion of Atreus every other line, because the original doesn't sound weird in that particular way, and they using completely unlikely combinations of words, it sounds actually traditional, as opposed to this made up, I mean, of course, it's an artificial poetic language, but it's a traditional artificial language.

0:57:08.2 SC: And this is very important how it sounds, because I remember reading that one of your ideas in doing the translation was you wanted the impression that the modern reader gets from it to be kind of analogous to the impression that the Greek listener would've had back in the day, and many translations sound either floral or archaic or overly ponderous.

0:57:34.0 EW: Yes. I mean, it made me very happy to hear that you're listening to the audiobooks, because just the fact of listenability, and read aloud-ability, performability is really important to me. And also, just the fact that we haven't really talked about the fact that there were multiple different voices, different speakers. And before I took on the process of doing the Homeric translations, I had worked a lot on tragedy. I've written quite a lot about tragedy. I'd done some Seneca tragedy translations, and I've done some Euripides and Sophocles as well. I wanted to bring out the proto-dramatic qualities of the Homeric poems, as well as the fact that they're metrical, and that they have this extraordinary sound. And then I also wanted to lean into poetic techniques that the originals do, that English can also do. Even beyond the fact that there's meter, there's also a lot of alliteration. So, in those first few lines, Polus, psūkhē, proýpsin. So there's this pa-pa-pa sound, and then there's Heroon, Heloria. So I want you to try to echo those things, like heroes, Hades, spoil of dogs, banquet for the birds. I want to lean into the possibilities of alliteration in English, which of course is something that is part of the Anglophone tradition as well. Yeah. That didn't exactly answer your question, but those are some of the things I wanted to be thinking about in terms of poetic technique.

0:58:58.7 SC: I would much rather you say interesting things than answer my questions. That's perfectly acceptable. That's a good strategy. Do you feel constrained sometimes by the fact that it is a poem? Do you respect the line structure of the poem? Or do you want to get the same number of lines? I know certainly some people just add in whole bunches of words because they think it sounds better.

0:59:22.8 EW: Yes. Or else, I mean, I haven't got the Fagles' translation in front of me, but when you read the beginning of that, you can sort of see that he really does add in a lot of words. And sometimes in order to make things clear, he does rage, goddess rage. Because of course, as I was saying before, he wants to... The original starts with the object. If you're doing that in English, you can't make clear that rage is the object not the subject of the sentence, unless you repeat it. And he also does, again, I can't do this without having it in front of me, but repeating multiple different possible choices for the destructiveness of the Wrath of Achilles. He has something like deadly and I can't remember what he does. But I don't feel constrained, or at least I find the constraints really interesting and fun to work with. In terms of pacing kinds of questions, I kind of changed my mind between the two poems about that. I felt from the outset that I very much wanted to do what I could to honor the quickness of the Homeric narrative pace and the sense that you get when you're reading the original that you want to hear more, you want to hear more, you want to hear more, there's no point at which you're like, this is kind of boring, and the repetitions feel like they're bogging you down.

1:00:42.4 EW: And so I felt what I could do with the Odyssey was to confine myself to the same number of lines as the original just to make sure that I wasn't making a translation that feels saggier than the original feels. And that was, I think I learned a lot by doing that. And I think it did kind of work because, not least because the Odyssey has a lot of very polysyllabic words, many of which I felt it was okay to translate a word that's five syllables long by one that's three syllables long, and then I can make the make the math work. If I have polymechanos Odysseus becoming crafty Odysseus, then I can still make a hexameter into a pentameter, and I can still keep it cut line for line. And there was this sort of puzzle solving element to doing that. But I got to The Iliad, I thought I'm gonna still try and do that, even though with the Odyssey, I would very often feel I've got a great draft of this book, and then I would go back and realize, okay, I've got to cut the line somewhere. And then I would have to go back and rewrite everything, because I wouldn't only just cut a whole line, but I got to rethink, is there a patch where I can make a couple of epithets slightly shorter words?

1:01:53.2 EW: Is there a way that I can change much enduring into stalwart, and then back into the same syllable, and so on, that kind of thing. But in the case of The Iliad, partly because there were just so many more names in The Iliad. And of course, Agamemnon is a really long name that will take up half a line. And I can't call him Mr. Ag, just to save some syllables. So I used more lines for The Iliad translation than the original has. And in fact, if I were to do it again, I would let myself be a little bit more lax about the line count with The Odyssey, and maybe one day I'll go back and revise it and let myself have just maybe five more lines a book.

1:02:32.6 SC: Couple more lines.

1:02:33.3 EW: Just a couple more, I don't need a lot. But I like constraints, I think they're really useful. And they force you to think about what exactly is really at stake here and not sort of patch in three different things because you haven't made a decision. It means you have to have a clear voice.

1:02:48.6 SC: And then there's a very basic question that I have when it comes to something like ancient Greek, which is, are we sure we know what the words mean? Like, we can't ask a native speaker. Is it all from context? Or do we just feel like maybe we don't know and we go with what we know?

1:03:06.3 EW: That's a great question. I mean, we're pretty sure about most of the words, because of course, most words, a lot of words in ancient Greek coexisted with Latin. And so there were translations from one to another. There are commentaries, there's a huge amount of later ancient Greek. The case of the Homeric poems is different, because of course, we have far less Greek of the archaic period, of the pre-fifth century period than we do of all of much later periods. And the question of what exactly was the connotation of this or that word in the seventh or sixth century? We can ask the linguistics, historical linguistics specialists about what did the roots of this word mean in Indo-European? And what exactly was the etymology? But of course, there are some words in the Homeric poems that even ancient Homeric scholars, we haven't really talked about the fact the existence of ancient Homeric scholarship. But at the time of the Library of Alexandria, in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, which is when the first scholarly process of editing the written Homeric texts and figuring out what goes in this line, here we have some variant readings, do we think that's the better one from this manuscript or that one, all of that. Those scholars at that time were also very much fixated on the existence of a few words which which occur only once throughout the Homeric corpus, which are called the Hapax, which means once.

1:04:42.2 EW: So words that are a Hapax, you can't get it from where are the other occurrences of this word in Homer, because it doesn't occur elsewhere in Homer. So you're kind of messed up. And there are a few, of course, there are some of those. And of course, there are context clues. But of course, there was also, maybe those context clues aren't telling you the whole story, and then there can be some mystery. I mean, I felt that as a translator, in the case of unusual words or words that occur only once or words about which there's some debate in antiquity among the ancient commentators about that. I'm gonna have to go with go with a good scholarly guess and add an endnote. And I also can sometimes use an unusual word in English if it's a word that was clearly unusual within the context of the Homeric poems. So for instance, there are usual words for spears and shields, but there's also, here's a weird word for a shield. And maybe I can call it a buckler, rather than using shield for the for the normal word. Some things like that I can play around with the possibilities of English. But there's no simple solution to what to do with that as a translator.

1:05:51.8 SC: Do you have any favorite examples of a word you would love to be able to go back and ask Homer what he was talking about?

[laughter]

1:06:00.3 EW: There are so many, and this is going back to the beginning of the conversation about, was there even a Homer? And how are we going to interview that person? And yes. Or the Homer committee if it was the Homer directorial committee. I mean even just the beginning of the second line, holosminan, which I translate as cataclysmic, but it's a participle and it suggests disastrous or damned, or the commentators from antiquity suggest there's an implication of the speaker cursing it. Like, goddamnit! That terrible wrath. What exactly was the connotation and is there a difference between the colloquial language connotation or the poetic language connotation? What's the relationship between I wish this wrath had been destroyed versus this wrath was itself destructive? I think the word probably suggests both. I don't know how to do that in English, but yeah.

1:07:03.5 SC: And when you're thinking about the contemporary reader, do you allow yourself to lapse into overly contemporary language or do you try to keep it a little bit more timeless?

1:07:14.9 EW: You really phrased that in a very neutral way, like lapse and like overly contemporary. Yes. The question of how to make sure it's as clear and legible as the original is, that the original, even though we've talked about the ways it's traditional, it's metrical, it's clearly marked as poetic. It's got all these poetic markers like meter and alliteration and traditional character stories and so on, and yet it's not syntactically complicated. But it's also not slangy. And yet it's also conveying clear actions and clear emotions. If I had said that wrath, goddammit! I would think that would be too slangy. There were cases where, for instance, where warriors speak to each other on the battlefield and they use terms of affection. Do I have them say, "Hey, buddy? There are translators who do versions of that. The Stanley Lombardo translations have a ton of late 20th century military slang in them. I find that a little bit of a turnoff.

1:08:23.9 EW: I think it's not registering the ways that this language is marked as different from regular speech and that these characters are having real feelings but they're not speaking in a completely naturalistic way. So I think there needs to be some kind of artifice about it, which includes, there's not going to be blasphemy, obscenity, people invoke the gods but they don't say goddammit, and they don't say, F it. The register is different from the register of, say, Athenian comedy or Roman satire. So, I thought there were lots of wrestling with what exactly is the right register within English. And then also what's the right register just sort of emotionally would this character say this and have I made it sound as intense in terms of these curses or insults have to sound really intense and they really land and yet they don't just sound comically ridiculous. They have to be hyperbolic and yet not totally ridiculous. And even here's this man wailing with grief and slapping his thighs, which is not how we expect men to behave, and yet you have to believe it while you're in the world of the poem.

1:09:32.4 SC: Well, I did notice that, because in my mind I know there's a movie coming out, I'm wondering how certain things happen. And there's a lot of scenes where men are just bawling their eyes out of something, and we don't see that in war movies today. It's just such a shift of expectation that it's hard for you, it's hard for the translator to get across the implications, the connotations that the actual Greek audience must have been getting.

1:10:04.9 EW: Right. I mean, also, as we've already said, the actual Greek audience is a lot of different people and varied by time period. And if you're Plato reading that and thinking, oh, no, he shouldn't be bawling his eyes out, he should get a grip, and that's an ancient Greek response to that.

1:10:19.1 SC: Yeah. Sure. Fair enough.

1:10:21.2 EW: And yet there's also a way that within the world of the poems, I don't think we're being invited to think that. I mean, I think we're being invited to see it as absolutely, if you suffer devastating grief, of course you're gonna be rolling around in the dung and bawling your eyes out because that shows how upset you are.

1:10:39.8 SC: Do you think that working as a translator has affected your classic scholarship more broadly? Are you better at reading ancient Greek things now that you've worked hard to translate them into English?

1:10:52.5 EW: I'm not sure. I mean, it's hard to say because I've been reading these poems since I was a teenager. I started Greek in high school. I've been teaching them for decades. I mean, I didn't take on these poems without having read them before.

1:11:07.6 SC: Sure.

1:11:08.5 EW: So I wasn't starting from scratch and it's hard to go back to what did I think before. But I definitely think that just that process of living this closely with these poems for the last 12-plus years, working on them every single day and thinking about the connotations of every single word all the time, and then also the process of talking about them to people like you and realizing what questions do people have and how do I make sure that I'm being honest and respectful to the tradition and to the poems that I still adore and feel, like I want to keep reading them for the rest of my life. I think it definitely reinforced for me just how great they are and also the ways that... The performability. I think I hadn't... Of course, I knew in theory and I did kind of know just how essential it is to think about the Homeric poems as performance texts, but thinking about how to recreate that in English made that alive for me in a different way.

1:12:11.5 EW: And then doing the things like what I just did of reading a little bit of Greek, reading a little bit of my translation, practicing doing that and practicing being a rhapsode, which is... Of course, I tried doing different versions of that in sort of pathetic ways in the classroom, but it's fun to get to do that with different audiences. And it also reinforces to me that audiences like this stuff. It's not just people in antiquity who find it interesting and compelling. Yeah.

1:12:38.0 SC: So, okay. We're at the end of the podcast. I'll close on a completely silly, unfair question. You mentioned Jane Austen earlier as an author who we could identify, and one thing about Jane Austen is there are dozens and dozens of sequels to her books written by fans. So, if you had to write your Homeric epic, like if you had to write your own sequel to The Iliad and The Odyssey, are there any juicy stories out there you think deserve that treatment?

1:13:09.8 EW: Oh, I love this question. So, right now I'm doing something which is not exactly this project, but it's... I'm doing a couple of projects that are a little bit this project. One is a translation of Ovid's Heroides, which in a way is one of the many ancient quasi-sequels to The Iliad and The Odyssey. It's the verse epistles of mythological women writing back to their terrible boyfriends saying how terrible they are. The first one is Penelope writing to Odysseus saying, "What took you so long?" And then the third one is Briseis writing to Achilles, and the ridiculous premise is that she thinks Achilles is her boyfriend rather than her enslaver and rapist. It's sort of funny, but it's really dark.

1:13:51.5 SC: Yeah. Very dark. Good.

1:13:53.2 EW: Anyway, so I'm doing a translation of that, and it's really fun to be thinking about voice in different ways. It's a different poetic form because it's elegiac couplets rather than hexameters. And then I'm also doing a prose retelling of the Trojan War myths that are in the background to the Trojan Wars, so it's a fiction stitched together. But if I was doing an epic poem version, I don't know. There's a lost tragedy called Palamedes, which is about Palamedes, who supposedly was the mythical inventor of the alphabet, who got tricked by Odysseus and killed. And I've often thought Achilles would be an interesting person to do either a story or an epic poem about or rewrite the lost tragedy of Palamedes. It'd be cool.

1:14:36.2 SC: All right. I encourage you to do that. That Odysseus, he was very tricksy, wasn't he?

1:14:40.4 EW: He was real tricksy. Yes, he really was. Very fun character, yes.

1:14:45.7 SC: Emily Wilson, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:14:46.9 EW: Thank you. Thanks so much.

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