After the enormous success of her translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, Emily Wilson spent another five years translating The Iliad. The book was released this fall, again to tremendous acclaim.

Wilson is the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classical Studies. She is the recipient of two prestigious fellowships, the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and the Guggenheim, and was chosen to judge the Booker Prize competition. She’s been invited to speak across the United States and Europe.

Wilson’s translations are notable because they are in straightforward, common English, but she also uses a poetic meter to echo that of the originals. To do so, she read both the ancient Greek version and her translation aloud repeatedly as she worked.

For this episode, we asked Professor Wilson to select and read a few passages from The Iliad in Homer’s original Greek and then from her English translation, after first sharing her thoughts about why she chose the passages she did.

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Produced, Narrated, and Edited by Alex Schein
Theme music by Nicholas Escobar, C'18
Additional music by Michael Levy: "Ode to Athena" and "Umbra Morris" (ancientlyre.com) and Blue Dot Sessions: "Cloudbank"
Podcast Logo by Hemani Kapoor

Check out our feature article on Emily Wilson in the Fall/Winter issue of OMNIA Magazine: bit.ly/3SGMVh6