Emily Wilson is returning to the text that made her a literary star.
The classicist is at work on a new translation of The Odyssey, nine years after publication of her first translation of Homer’s epic poem, the Associated Press reports.
Wilson was known for scholarly books including Mocked With Death: Tragic Overliving From Sophocles to Milton and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca before translating The Odyssey, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2017. A critic for Kirkus wrote of Wilson’s translation, “More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.”
Wilson was the first woman to publish a full-length English translation of The Odyssey. Her translation again made headlines earlier this year after she harshly criticized Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the poem, calling the writing “abysmal.”
Wilson said that she is halfway through her new translation, which she anticipates will be longer than the first, saying, “It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version.”
Kate Deimling of the American Translators Association told the AP, “I can’t really come up with a previous example of this situation. It’s not unheard of for translators to go back and make some corrections or edits in subsequent editions, but that’s not the same as a retranslation.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
