Mother Tongue Emily Wilson makes Homer modern.
Annals of Literature Mother Tongue Emily Wilson makes Homer modern. By Judith Thurman September 11, 2023 “As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible,” Wilson said. Photograph by Hannah Whitaker for The New Yorker Save this story Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means “hostage” is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us. The Iliad’s subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is survival. Both plumb the male psyche and women’s enthrallment to its bravado. “Tell the old story for our modern times,” Homer entreats his muse, in the Odyssey’s first stanza. The translator Emily Wilson took him at his word. Her radically plainspoken Odyssey , the first in English by a woman, was published six years ago. Her Iliad will be published in two weeks. On a recent summer evening, Wilson surveyed the view from a precipice above Polis Bay, in the quiet village of Stavros, on the north...