‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson’s spirited essays celebrate the art of literary translation.

On this episode of Fully Booked, classicist and translator Emily Wilson joins us to discuss Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature (Liveright/Norton, Sept. 1), a sparkling, insightful, accessible essay collection spanning two decades of an extraordinary career in Greek and Roman literature. “Enchanting academic essays about translating the classics,” Kirkus writes in a starred review, calling Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, “a lively exploration of ancient literature. 

Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim fellow, and a MacArthur fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: “Balancing close readings of nuanced passages alongside celebrations of their modern translations, Wilson writes with the sparkling charisma of a favorite college professor and presents each deep dive with a finely tempered fusion of erudition and accessibility. ‘Language is never a neutral tool by which we represent the world: every word and phrase carries with it a tangle of cultural assumptions and connotations,’ she writes and slyly incorporates contemporary touchstones into her analyses.…‘[J]ust as there are many ways to play a single score of music, many ways to paint the same landscape, and many ways to direct a play or deliver a speech,’ Wilson reveals the multifaceted artistry of translation, rendered in an amalgam of both language and history.”

In a lively conversation, Wilson discloses a lifelong passion for the classics, inspired by her childhood experience with the Odyssey. We discuss the important role curiosity plays in reimagining the past, the challenges of representing marginalized voices in ancient texts, and various approaches to minding the gap between antiquity and modernity. We touch on Sappho, Catullus, the complexities of translating comedy versus tragedy, the differences between translation and adaptation, how the art of translation evolves over time and across cultures, and much more.

At the end of our interview, Wilson recommends a book about translating Shakespeare. Follow @kirkus_reviews on Instagram, DM us the title of that book, along with your email and location, and you’ll be entered in a drawing to receive a $100 Visa gift card, courtesy of Kirkus. The giveaway is open to legal residents of the U.S. who have reached 18 years of age or older at the time of entry.

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Fully Booked is produced by Jessica Lockhart and Megan Labrise.