Book of the week
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (Norton, $40)
“‘Celebrity’ and ‘translator’ are not words that occur often in conjunction,” said Naoíse Mac Sweeney in The Washington Post. But most translators aren’t Emily Wilson, a
University of Pennsylvania classics professor who “shot to international stardom” when her 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey became both an unlikely best-seller and a critical sensation. Wilson’s new translation of Homer’s other great epic, the Iliad, has now arrived, and the result lives up to its status as one of the most eagerly anticipated books of 2023. At once grand and modern in its tone, “Wilson’s Iliad is a genuine page-turner,” and it’s “all too easy to gallop through it as one would a beach read.” Is this the definitive Iliad for our times? “My answer is yes.”
The poem itself “contains multitudes,” said Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. It is set in the ninth year of the Trojan War, and ultimately focuses on the killing of the Trojans’ greatest war leader, Hector, by the Greeks’ greatest fighter, Achilles. “Achilles is the poem’s remarkable protagonist, by turns unimaginably brutal and gracefully tender,” and it’s his rage over being denied a woman he’s seized in war that triggers much of the action. Wilson’s translation, in iambic pentameter, “runs as swift as a bloody river,” and “almost every line pulses with endless, terrible loss and mourning: death after death after death.” Wilson’s greatest contribution might be that she recognizes something in the epic that most male translators haven’t, said Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. Rather than venerating the violence, she reveals its tragic source. And “if you learn one thing from The Iliad, it’s that all the insecurities—especially about virility—that generate violence in the world are still the same.”
“Most important in a contemporary translation of Homer’s Iliad is its ability to compel readers to read on, all the way through, line by line, attentively and with feeling,” said Emily Greenwood in The Yale Review. “Many English Iliads fail this test.” But not Wilson’s. “She understands that part of the purpose of translating the epic is to illuminate it,” and she “has a way with flow, shuffling the clauses to clarify what or who is being described.” Even as her version runs to more than 600 pages, it is held together by her deeply felt comprehension that the Iliad is a poem of life and death, an understanding that “courses through every line.” She has done it again. “This is a translation to read and keep reading.”