One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.
Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.
Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.
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Leanne Ogasawara: “Tell me about a complicated man” may be the most debated single line of translation in recent memory—one reader even joked that it sounded more like a relationship status on Facebook. In your book you explain that polytropos can convey versatility, cunning, wandering, and the experience of being turned about by circumstance. How did you finally land on “complicated” and did the intensity of the reactions surprise you?
