Crossing the Wine Dark Sea by Emily Wilson review – a masterclass in translation
The polarising translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad sets out her philosophy in this fascinating collection
Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey in 2017 and the Iliad in 2023 are now the standard English-language versions, acclaimed for their conciseness and fluency. Her infatuation with Homer began at the age of eight, when her primary school put on a production of the Odyssey, with her in the role of Athena, and the excitement hasn’t worn off. You can question some of the choices she makes in her translations (she questions them herself), but you can’t doubt the months and years she has spent finding the “least bad” compromises.
Her new book is a series of essays on the challenges of translation and the pleasures and insights to be gained from reading the classics. She is fascinated by how far the ancient world intersects with the modern. Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus and Aristophanes are here but so are Spike Lee, Erica Jong, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves (a last link to the clever servants in Roman comedy) and Boris Johnson (“an incompetent drunkard” who somehow passed as an intellectual “on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek”). Wealthy white men in Silicon Valley get a look-in, too, for embracing Stoicism (not to be confused with stoicism) in “a watered-down form”. Continuities between then and now pile up: war, cruelty and political turmoil. But there are also important contrasts and she scolds those who look back on antiquity as “a mirror in which we always find ourselves”, even when we’re not there.