Telling the Story of Homer's Odyssey with Translator Emily Wilson

Tell me, Muse, of the rover, the man who wandered far and wide after he sacked the holy city of Troy. (music cue) So begins Homer’s Odyssey, the story of Greek hero Odysseus and his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. In one translation, at least. Emily: It seems to me that in the case of ancient texts, sometimes we need retranslations because the translations stop feeling legible to a new culture, a new community. Cultures change all the time. Emily: The Odyssey and the Iliad haven't always meant the same thing to every culture and to every person. For centuries, storytellers and rhapsodes captivated audiences with tales about heroes of the Trojan War—but these stories weren't written down. They couldn't be, since ancient Greeks didn't develop an alphabet until the 8th century BCE. Sometime between 725 and 675 BCE the Odyssey, an epic based on that long oral tradition, was put to paper at last. In the 17th century the poem was translated into Modern English— and today, we have more than 60 English translations to choose from. They’re all from the same source material. But that doesn’t mean they’re identical. 18th-century readers, for instance, tended to be interested in what the Odyssey said about hierarchy and social rules. Emily: The questions that were most pressing in reading and reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey are somewhat different in the 21st century. Emily: These questions about “What are the uses of technology or cleverness or science?” And also these questions about how big or small do we want a community to be, and migration and globalization, those questions are pressing in a new way in the 21st century. Not all translations sound the same, either. The original Odyssey is written in dactylic hexameter: a traditional poetic meter used in ancient Greece and Rome. Emily: A dactyl is a finger, a finger has a long joint and then two shorter joints. In a poetic context is, it's a long and then two shorts. So it's [speaks ancient Greek]. Emily: I wanted as a translator to try to echo the heritage or morality so I try to echo that by using a traditional meter in English, the iambic pentameter. Emily: So that's da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum. This use of meter helps English readers relate to the works of Homer like they do Shakespearean plays: as performance pieces with their own rhythm and musicality. It also shows how translation can breathe new energy into an ancient story. Emily: I think we just tend to come to ancient literature with a certain set of expectations, and sometimes those expectations aren’t the whole truth about what’s there in the original. That's certainly true in the Odyssey but it's an unexpected poem, it’s a surprising poem. And a new translation can invite us to see the surprises in new ways. Here’s how the Odyssey begins—in Emily Wilson’s translation. Emily: 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 on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed, and for their own mistakes they died. 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.