Poured Over: Emily Wilson on The Iliad

By Jenna Seery / December 5, 2023 at 6:00 am

Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad brings to life this divine tale of conflict, love and honor in a way that feels fresh and compulsively readable. Wilson joins us to talk about the universality of Homer’s work, working with gods and epic themes, translating for modern audiences and more with guest host, Jenna Seery.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.              

Featured Books (Episode):
The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson
The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery, the associate producer and a bookseller here at Barnes and Noble. And today on part over, I am so excited to welcome Classicist extraordinaire Emily Wilson. I know everyone remembers her incredible translation of The Odyssey. And she has done it again, with The Iliad, she has captured the beauty, the grief, the rage, the wrath, the divine all in this one text, and I am so excited for people to get to read it. So Emily, thank you so much for being with us today.

Emily Wilson
Thank you so much for having me, Jenna, I can’t wait to talk to you.

JS
So normally, this is where I would ask people to sort of describe the plot of whatever they’ve written. But I think The Iliadworks better in themes, because the plot is the Trojan War, which, you know, there’s this massive conflict between the Greeks, and the Trojans, and the gods are all involved as well. But the themes here are so incredible. We’ve got anger, right rage, grief, so many things all tied into one. So if you want to just set us up there, I think that’d be a great place to start.

Yes, I mean, I love that you’ve focused on themes that have to do with emotions, because I think people can sometimes have the misperception that The Iliad is sort of action story. And of course, a lot happens externally. And people do a lot of killing and massacring. And those sequences are very exciting. But it’s also very much a story. It’s about emotions driving the plot, and also about how do how do individuals get separated from their communities? And how might they get reconciled with their communities. So that theme beyond the wartime setting the themes of conflict and rage and grief, it’s also about how individuals are separated and then reunited with their with their people.

And there’s some pretty big characters that I think many people would know, in this, you have Achilles, of course, the famed hero, with the heel, you have Odysseus, you have Patroclus, you have so many of these names that people probably know, Hector, in Paris, of course, on the Trojan side. But these characters sort of work in this huge net of people and ideas. And getting an insight into that and sort of starting to understand how they all work together is something that your version of The Iliad, I think offers us in a way that we haven’t quite seen before. I mean, obviously, you’ve been working in this field for a very long time, and you have already translated The Odyssey to great acclaim. But when you were sitting down to translate The Iliad, how did that feel taking on this task yet again.

It felt, I mean, it felt daunting, because even though I do think that the best possible training for translating an epic poem is translating an epic poem, and I had just done that. So I felt like it was in the best position I was ever gonna be in to do this. But I loved The Iliad, so much, I didn’t want to let the poem down. So I felt that that responsibility about doing this. And I felt also that even though The Odyssey and The Iliad come from the same culture, they have the same poetic language, they’re from the same era, who knows if they’re by the same person, but you know, we could or could not get into that they have all this affinity in terms of the mythic world and the poetic world they’re in. And yet, they’re also so different. So I felt daunted just about how do I convey the ways that the whole atmosphere of The Iliad is very different, whereas The Odyssey has this very expansive geographical setting where Odysseus is traveling all over the mythic Mediterranean world and encountering all these cool goddesses, slash monsters, or monster goddesses, and all these different peoples who have different food ways like the Cyclops, this particular foodway, whereas The Iliad is set in this very claustrophobic world, where it’s all the time you’re focused on the narrow strip of land of here’s the city of Troy here, the Greeks confined in their encampment, the gods bickering with each other on Mount Olympus. And we’re always focused on those three communities and the ways they intersect with each other. So just in terms of the world, the sound, the intensity of the emotions, it feels different. So I want my translation to feel different.

And when you enter that world of this war, it’s already been going for years and years, we’re sort of towards the tail end of this conflict. And you can feel that weight of everything that has sort of come to pass already as you begin this book and the struggle that these men have already encountered and have already dealt with in many ways. And yet we start with anger. I mean, I always think when I was learning about the Odyssey in the Iliad, one of my The professor’s sort of framed it for me like when I when I think of the Odyssey I think of sing because that’s one of the first words. And when I think of the Iliad, I think of wrath because that is one of the first words that we hear that that big wrath, that divine wrath. And I think that so often that’s what I come to when I think of this work. And maybe the people are drawn to the Odyssey because of its grand adventure and its grand scale. But I think the Iliad really offers so much humanity and so much depth for the expanses of what this war was like. Absolutely,

Yes, I mean, so the first word in Greek of The Odyssey is Andra, which means man. So it’s sort of focused on a particular male individual, even though it’s also focused on how does the story of Odysseus his homecoming intersect with so many other stories. And the first word of The Iliad is menin, which means wrath. So it’s focused on this semi divine kind of emotion, which is experienced by Achilles, but then makes Achilles who’s Of course, the son of a goddess, approximate to the condition of a deity in that his feelings have so much terrible impact on so many other people. And it’s, as you say about these enormous feelings and deities interacting with human beings. And in a way, it sort of shows you a different perspective on what it is to be human, because you’re constantly contemplating and the ways that humans can be almost like gods, and yet, we’re not because we’re mortal, and we lose things. And we, all of us, even the greatest of us, will lose almost everything.

I can’t even imagine sitting down in front of this work that I mean, that have been translated many times in the past, we have so many versions of these texts with, you know, varying flaws and high points. But to sit down and say, Now, I’m going to put my words to this, I think it’s so important that we continue to revisit and rework and re translate these texts, because I think it may be very easy to just say, well, we’ve got these great versions, we’ve got the Fagles, we’ve got the Lattimores, we have these, you know, other texts, maybe we don’t need to touch them anymore. And yet, as our society continues to change, we need to continue to look back and to rework these texts as well. So I’m so glad people are still putting their own on these.

I’m glad too, I’m glad, I’m really grateful that I got the opportunity to do these Homeric translations and do have a different vision for how Homer might sound in contemporary English. And I guess for me, one of the big things that drove me was the knowledge that all of the major contemporary translations of the Homeric poems, including the Fagles, and the Lattimores, don’t have a meter. So they don’t convey that regular music which the original poems have, they don’t sort of tell you in their sort of visceral, physical, rhythmical way, this is a poem which was strong and should invite performance out loud, because it hasn’t with them, but even if you’re not thinking about meter, you’ll be able to hear that in the words.

I think of it like people always say, Oh, if you don’t think you like Shakespeare, you have to see it performed, because it has so much more depth than you’ll understand. And I think it’s the same for these Homeric texts that if they don’t have that, that meter, that rhythm that meant this was a performance and there was so much more to it than just reading it on the page. I think it’s easy to overlook some of those turns of phrase, or those moments that convey more than what’s just written on the page, if you were to hear it performed, like it was meant to be.

Absolutely, yes, I mean, I think that can be also passages that mean, notoriously, there’s a long list of the all the ships of a Greeks at the end of Book Two where all the ships that are listed, along with the captains and the leaders of each ship, if you don’t have a meter, or you’re not invited to read it out loud, it can look on the page as if it’s just like a phonebook. It’s just a list of names. But if you’ve read them out loud, and you’re you can sort of take them into your body and feel the rhythm, then you can start to understand this is a list of the dead. It’s a memorial poem, and this poem is it is not just telling you about grief, but it’s also enabling you to feel whatever grief you need to feel, as you remember, whatever you’ve lost.

I think, you know, there’s so much about what makes a good translation or what makes an accurate translation. And I should say, the vast majority of translations of ancient works have been by men, white men. And I think there is a commentary on bias, whether it’s conscious or unconscious in translation, and in understanding that, I think, is what merits so much revisiting of these texts of, you know, we have to understand whether or not they are consciously writing these thoughts and feelings of you know, how do we describe the ownership of women in these times? How do we define the spoils of war, the rape that is inherent in many of these texts, the biases are really crucial to understanding that

Absolutely, yes. And I think there’s both potential for bias and potential for just taking for granted. However, it’s usually been done before. I mean, if a particular style of translation or particular approach to how do we translate the language of captivity or the language of enslavement or the language of rape, or even just the language of how do we make this poem sound grand and noble and poetic? If we have a particular set of assumptions about any of those things, it may seem like that’s the only possible way to do it. And of course, it’s not, there are many different when there’s no right answer to how should Homer sound in English, there’s no English translation, which is exactly the same as the Greek that’s impossible. So I think it’s always worth sort of rethinking and reorienting if there is some other way to do it that’s equally responsible and, and truthful. We should try that too.

I think it’s also crucial, because the farther we get from these times, and the farther we move away from these texts, sometimes I think we lose some of that connection, even though when we really sit down like when I look at The Iliad,and you do a great job of explaining this in your introduction, the structure, the different acts, the different groupings, that these scenes, these that all come together. So often, I’m like, Well, of course, that’s so similar to the structure of so much literature from this point on. And yet, we don’t know we can’t make those connections, because, at least in a lot of schools that I know, I mean, you don’t learn Homeric epics, you don’t, you might not get an option to learn about them until at college, and maybe even then you don’t see that even in like English literature programs. So I think it’s so important to be able to understand that structure as we move forward into learn how it affects all of our storytelling.

Absolutely, yes. And I mean, I think Homeric epics are sometimes surprising to people who sort of think it’s very old. So it must be quite primitive, or there must be a sort of linearity to the storytelling, which, if you sort of think about novelistic retellings of The Iliad, like Song of Achilles, which is obviously a wonderful book, it sort of tells the story in a very linear way. Whereas The Iliad doesn’t do that it doesn’t sort of start at the beginning of Achilles, with Achilles as an adolescent blow by blow through his life story, it’s very much not that, it’s let’s start right at the end of the story when the last period of Achilles’ live and tell just a tiny little episode, and make a huge epic out of a story that takes place over a month and a half. So I think that what you started with, this is a poem about the Trojan War. I think that’s true, and also not true, because it really doesn’t tell you the whole story. It assumes, you know, something or other about the wooden horse the poem doesn’t take doesn’t tell you that you have to know as a background, but that’s what’s happening. You have to know as background, what’s been happening in the last nine years. And it’s demanding quite a lot of the listener to be able to leap into this narrative, which we are starting in media res is the Latin phrase that Horace uses in the middle of things is how epics traditionally start. And that’s certainly true of the Iliad. But it’s in a way a challenging work of literature, even though it’s also, I think, quite clear in its storytelling, about emotions, and that it tells you as much as you need to know. And yet it also has these layers of the backstory and the prequel, which you’re assumed to already know about. So I tried to sort of fill that fill the reader in the introduction about the things you’re assumed already to know.

There is and if people like to research while they read The Iliad is great because there are so many references to other myths, other stories within these grand speeches that are given I mean, Nestor references, famously long winded Nestor references, many things and Glaucus in his story of his life and his sort of history and his heritage, you can get all these other offshoots of this entire world of myth. Through this one story. If you want to spend your time googling a million other names and places, it is a great place to start.

You can absolutely do that. But I also I would, I would want to tell people, you don’t have to do that. You can absolutely enjoy the poem without knowing all of that and without when I wrote a lot of endnotes, but you can skip them. You don’t need to read the footnotes. If you don’t want to you don’t need to start with the introduction. You can I tried to give people what they might need in terms of the glossary, and then notes and maps and all that kind of stuff. But you can skip it if you want just to start with having a sense of the speeches, the characters, the stories because the characters and their feelings are something that you can absolutely understand on a human level without knowing all those backstories.

It’s a bit of a choose your own adventure. There’s lots of ways to read this and I think all of them are enriching and all of them are going to give you an incredible insight into the story.

Absolutely, yes. It was interesting because they wanted to just to read \ something of the experiences that people might have had of Homer in antiquity. And we know that, that ancient people listen to the Homeric poems from childhood onwards. And the clarity of the syntax and the gripping-ness of the storytelling is accessible from for people of any age. I mean, as long as you can stand some violence and gore and massacre in the in The Iliad, which obviously should have content warnings about whether or not you want to hear about spears going through bladders and eyeballs, but if you can, if you can stand a lot of violence, then The Iliad is, on some level accessible to anyone with any background at any age.

Some of the most creative violence that I have been able to put my eyeballs to.

Yes, every single part of the anatomy is gonna get speared at some point.

And I’m like that can’t be physically… I’m trying to decipher angles.

Even if it’s not exactly realistic.

It truly is a page turner. Even when I didn’t think it would, you know, you think okay, it’s gotta be a little dry, whatever. Absolutely. Not that you can fly through those battle scenes with so much, you know, interest and intrigue. Because there’s so much there and you’re still getting these interjections of the men speaking on the battlefield and rousing you know, their comrades with these speeches of, you know, don’t feel fear and keep going. And you’re like, Yeah, me too. I’m in it.

Yes, and it’s so much fun.

But my maybe my favorite part of The Iliad, that it offers is this insight into the personification of the gods themselves, and their connections with the mortals, their loves, their personal, you know, pet peeves, their fallibilities, and yet they’re, you know, at the end of the day, they are supreme in these battlefields and in this world. And I think getting to see that and those interactions are something so fun for readers and for people who are maybe just starting to get into classics.

Absolutely, yes, I love the deities too, in both The Odyssey and The Iliad, the whole plot is structured around a goddess in the Iliad, it’s Thetis who wants to honor her mortal son Achilles, when he’s been dishonored by Agamemnon, who’s taken away the enslaved woman that he wants to enslave himself. And so the whole tragic plot of a divine mother trying to honor her mortal child and actually only making it worse for him because statuses plot involves the Greeks having enormous losses while Achilles is off the battlefield. And Hector, the Trojan manages to gain this enormous success. But then, of course, Hector kills Achilles dearest friend Patroclus, I am doing the spoilers. point of departure. I wish I did not mean to do a little bit of a spoiler, but that that sort of tragic story of a mother who wants to help her mortal child and all she can do is increase his grief and increase and bring on the time when his or her short lived swift footed child will die. So that plot, but then also the counter plotting of Zeus, who wants to control everything through his messy plans, and yet he can’t. And Hera and Athena, there are some wonderful scenes. This is a doubling of the wonderful scene of Hera and Athena dressing up with their majestic chariot to go zooming through the battlefield to slaughter lots of people. And Hera putting on her, her the sort of equivalent of an arming scene where where Hera puts on her makeup and her best earrings to seduce Zeus and it’s the armor that you use as a goddess to create massacres by the arms seduction. I think there were so many amazing divine characters, both goddesses and gods and it’s a lot of fun, even though it’s also a serious kind of fun, because it’s also always speaks to these serious issues of mortality and loss.

I know, there was some so many moments I was like, that’s like, almost funny. Like it is funny, but there is humor. But at the same time, then the next page, you’re like, oh, and we’re back to the battlefield. So it’s not funny anymore. But Hera is probably my favorite figure in all of myth. I think she is just incredible in there. She has so many incredible moments in The Iliad. One of my favorites is also Zeus being like Athena, I am mad at you. I can’t be mad at Hera because this is just what she does. And just the idea of this is just what she does is my favorite.

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

That connection, I think, the idea in, in Greek myth, this idea that the gods have just as many fallibilities And just as many struggles as the mortals in many ways that whether they love their half mortal children and whether or not they can save them or you know, they love these cities and whether or not they can save them and how they interact with each other, it just adds such a layer of depth and interest that it takes away from those moments of battle where you’re like, I can’t like I can’t put myself through hearing about another 700 people being speared. And then you get a little bit of a reprieve with, you know, Apollo or Zeus. It just all wraps together so nicely.

Absolutely, yes, and but I think that’s one reason to prefer The Iliad over The Odyssey is just that you get so much more of the complexity of the divine world, and the divine community with the various different scheming family members and the ways that Poseidon hates his brother Zeus. And they’ve never really gotten along, and the fury of Poseidon about everything. And Apollo and Apollo sort of always being a little bit distant from everybody is the god of distances, always firing arrows, but never actually being close to anybody. And the ways that Athena sort of manages to manipulate her father into doing everything she wants, and the way that she wants to be the goddess strategy. Even more than her dad is, I think, there’s just so much more of that to the complexity of the Divine community. And as you say that you may be on the edge of finding the human story just too painful. And then we’re taken into the divine story. And it’s, it’s complicated, but it’s not painful in quite the same way. Because these characters are forever.

I sometimes think that like, and there have been movie adaptations of different Trojan War, you know, pieces over the years. But The Iliad itself, if you could find a way to actually adapt and script out the entire thing, it is the ultimate action movie, it is the ultimate prototype for what that. There’s so much tension, even though, like you said, spoilers, I mean, I think it spoils itself pretty early on what’s going to happen, you know, so much of what’s going to come and that doesn’t even ruin the tension. In fact, it ramps the tension up, because you know, the whole time who is doomed? And you read this whole time going, maybe, maybe by the time I get there, it won’t actually happen.

Absolutely, yes. I mean, it’s sort of extraordinary to me that it’s that it manages to work that way. But I mean, of course, you know, as soon as, as soon as Patroclus puts on Achilles armor, you know, he’s not going to come back. And yet, I mean, every time I read that passage in book 16, I’m like, is he gonna make it this time, it’s gonna be okay, surely, it’s going to be okay. I’m the same way with Achilles chasing Hector around the city walls again and again, and he’s almost catching up. And it’s like a dream and one person is facing the other person is always wondering, maybe Hector is gonna get away that time. And you sort of find it, I find myself crying every time because I’ve sort of kidded myself, or the narrative has kidded me again, that maybe they could get away from. And I also think that in a way, it’s like an action movie, but I think it has a lot more layers than in terms of the psychological depth, then, you know, I should move is very about the degree to which each character is a fully realized character. I mean, I do think that in this poem, you always get the feelings and you always get, it’s not just for special effects. Even though as we’ve been saying, there is a poetic virtuosity to the variation of the spear is never going to go into the same body part, it’s always going to be each death is going to be different. And yet, you’re also going to see that each death as a human being who had a homeland and has people who are going to be weeping for that person who’s died far from home. And in every single case, you have, have something off of accuse you into this is a human being who’s lost their life. And this is terrible. And so it’s, it’s both thrilling, and yet, also, you also constantly having goosebumps, over the horror of that.

Especially with the amount of I guess friendship that is in is present between these men, the relationships, the connection, you really become invested in, you know, I know that this person is best friends with this person or their chariot driver. And then when one is killed, the response that overwhelming grief from the other and the vengeance that follows. It’s such, you become so connected to these characters, to these people, even though they’re doing these horrific things. You’re still like, like I have the Ajaxes, you can you know, they’re out there. Perhaps some of the most people, you know, committing these violent acts, and yet you are rooting for them every time something almost happens. You can’t stop the beat, help it be like, and it missed, and then you can take a breath again.

I mean, I love also the way that the poem doesn’t sort of invite you to judge and sort of say, oh, no, they’re very violent. Let me just call for more. It’s not it’s not saying we praise massacre and it’s also not saying let’s condemn violence in every instance is putting you into the experiences of that and as you say the relationships are so fully fleshed out. I mean, we’ve talked to talked about the intimacy of comrade relationships between the Ajaxes is or between Idomeneus and Meriones, or between obviously Achilles and Patroclus which is the most in depth, intimate battle comrade and deep friend relationship in the poem The deepest love in the poem. But then we also have, of course, Hector and his family and Troy, the love of hate his parents who beg him repeatedly to stay inside the city walls and not fight so dangerously not risked his life again, and his wife Andromache and his little boy, Astyanax and that heartbreaking scene and book six, where the little child starts crying, seeing his daddy wearing the scary helmet, and daddy takes off the helmet, but then puts it on again, because then we only know the baby’s right to be afraid, because his daddy is going to die, and the baby is also going to be killed.

And I think that scene with Andromache is so important to understanding of the gravity of the situation that Hector knows what’s to come in many ways, whether or not he is hopeful for a different outcome, really, no matter what happens, everything in their lives is about to be drastically changed. And to say to his wife, you will probably be enslaved, you will probably have this terrible future. But I have to do what I have to do, especially since we get so little outside of you know, the divine, there are so few female characters that make any appearance in this story. And to have that be that that crowning interaction of Hector and his wife is so heartbreaking, because you just expand it out to all of the women that are in that town.

And it’s all of them, all of them except for Helen, who, of course, to get home and have a happy ending. I mean, I also think that you’re right, that there are far more, we get far more of the goddesses that is Hera, Athena, even Iris, the rainbow goddess, I think it’s also an awesome character. But the poem also ends with three female voices ends with the with the voices of, of Helen and Hecuba and Andromache, the voices of lament for Hector. So even though a lot of the poems action centers on the emotions and Battlefield activities of warrior men, it, it leaves us with the ones who are going to be alive after all, the men have killed each other, which is these women who are going to, for the most part, be be taken as slaves, and be left to grieve.

And so much of the story is hinging on women in general, I mean, Helen, obviously, is how this all begins, Aphrodite, all of these, you know, people that set off these interactions, but also the women in the Greek camps that are being sort of traded back and forth, and maybe saved and maybe not. And it all hinges all of these interactions between men sort of hinge on their relations to these women.

So the whole sort of premise of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is over these two enslaved women crusaders who gets returned to her to her father, who’s a priest of Apollo. So it’s a sort of rare instance of a captive who gets returned back to her home, which doesn’t happen elsewhere in the poem. Otherwise, captives are just enslaved for life. And then Briseis, who does have a voice in the poem and grieves for Patroclus, when he dies. And has, we sort of know a little bit about how Briseis feels about everything. But we also know that she’s never going to have her freedom again.

And those are, you know, I think sometimes what people focus on being like, Oh, this is so primitive, this is, you know, these warring cultures, but on the grand scale, the, the feeling of the emotions that you get is so transcendent of these, like, smaller interactions that you do feel that in the entirety of the work, the scope of what is really there.

Absolutely, yes. And I mean, I guess I also feel that we’re not so much sort of put unquote, advanced or non-primitive that we’ve got over conflict or partisanship for what the possibility that through emotional, intense, violent emotions can drive people to want to destroy their neighbors or destroy their friends or destroy their communities. There’s never been a human moment in human history when war hasn’t happened. But also even beyond wars, the amount of violence there is, you know, even in the United States, there’s a lot of violence, there’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of grief. I mean, those things are not have not gone away, even if we don’t necessarily want to talk about them that much. Maybe I think The Iliad gives us a language to talk about those terrible things which are still with us.

I think that also leads me to my, like grand thought always, which is like, everyone needs to read the classics like, I have so many friends who they’re so into literature and they love reading, but they’ve never really made it to Homer. They’ve never made it to The Aeneid; they’ve never made it to these big classics. And I think it’s because so often people have this idea that they’re inaccessible or that they’re not, you know, there’s too that’s too much work to sort of endeavor down that. But I think the reward is so great for understanding not only the structure of literature as it would come, but to understanding these themes that we’re still grappling with today.

And I think people sometimes have a perception that it’s kind of gonna be boring and a slog, but Homer is not boring. It really is not. I mean, as you were saying, it’s a page turner, and it has so much action and so much emotion and so many fascinating characters that I think we have people sort of give it half an hour and see if you still want to keep going. And I think you will.

I think your translations of all of them that I’ve encountered have that spark that grabs you from the very beginning, you can feel it when you read with the rhythm, and the sort of the repetition that comes but it’s not boring. It’s not rote, it’s not reciting. It’s it all works as these building blocks to create and to understand these characters in this world that is very different from a lot of the contemporary literature we read, but the echoes are still there, it’s still so connected.

I mean, I guess, a lot of my daily work as a translator involves trying to make sure that I am both being truthful to the sound and the emotional experience, but also being truthful to the clarity and the quick pacing of the originals, the originals are not at all boring, they really grab you and make you sort of feel things in your body and you’re in your feelings. They make you feel excited, they make you feel angry, they make you cry. And I sort of wanted to have the reader of my translations have something of that quick pace. And that full body emotional experience, which I think some translations expand too much, or don’t work hard enough to make sure that English is clear if the Greek is clear. So I think it takes some work on the part of the writer to make it a relatively easy, smooth experience for the reader, that if you just plunk down, whatever the dictionary says, it’s not necessarily going to flow. And then when the original does.

I mean, translation is an art in and of itself. I can’t imagine, you know, I’ve seen these original texts that get created into these beautiful, clear, concise works, where you can say I feel good about having, you know, the connection to that original text, because most people will never be able to read and understand ancient Greek or Latin, but they can still feel that visceral connection to the text. I think that’s so important. There’s such a feeling that comes with Homer. I know it’s very alive. That’s all I can say, because it was meant to be performed.

Absolutely, yes, I completely agree with you with this, this whole sort of paradox that a poem, which is so much centered on death, and so much centered on the vulnerability of the mortal body that we’re always coming back to, there are so many ways you can die, it could be through your neck, it could be through your eyeball, it could be through your backs, it could be through your liver. And you could die at any moment on this in this environment. And yet it feels so alive, where people are moving all the time and feeling things all the time. And you as the reader or listener are always feeling things, always feeling more alive for having to contemplate these moments of life before death. And that that whole terrible paradox is so urgent in the Iliad. And I think it’s not true of any other book of literature that I know that urgency and sense that this is a necessary and central story.

And now with the sort of rise in mythological retellings in, you know, there’s so much fiction that is not only about just this era of myth, but just, you know, retelling ancient myth in general. But I wonder so many times like this is your this work, your translations of these words are such a great entry point for anyone who’s read Song of Achilles or Circe, or these other texts, Ariadne, anything of those sort of nature’s now it’s such a good time to step into the real, original texts and to just gain so much more knowledge and then go back and read Song of Achilles again, and it’ll completely change your perception of those works.

And I think you can, really reading them alongside each other. You can sort of see the ways that Madeline Miller or Pat Barker for the Silence of the Girls that they’re drawing on the original Iliad and they’re also doing something different, and you know, there’s a different kind of creativity that are not blessed as in reinventing and remaking the stone worry for a different, a different audience in a different artistic product. And I think for the reader just living in this age of, as you say multiple different mythological retellings, it also shows the ways that people are eager to sort of turn back to ancient literature and reinvent it and reconsider what might it mean in the 21st century, which is maybe different from what it meant in 1950.

And especially with like, Greek myth, there is any type of genre or anything that you read, you can find a type of myth or a type of story that correlates I think, so often, I try to, like lure my friends in to be like, No, you do like, I promise I can find one for you. One time, Apollo killed his boyfriend with a Frisbee. And then that lured them in, if I say funny sentences, but there is just so much and then I hit him with the but it’s also about every human emotion that there’s ever been. And that’s the thing. I mean, I think that in these times where we experienced so much tumultuous existence in our political structures in our social structures, well, that’s always been happening, and people have written about it and how they got through it and what happened there? And I think, sometimes we need to look back to sort of understand and to connect with the greater humanity.

I liked that you brought up the ways that it both overlaps with today. And when the political tumult and the rage that with it’s there in our society, certainly there in The Iliad, and yet, it’s also earlier than that, you can sort of see both the points of similarity and the points of difference, when I guess another thing that I think about a lot in it as a difference. And similarity is the ways that our culture is so obsessed with celebrities, and so obsessed with like, who gets to be famous, who gets to be the best, who gets to be the one everyone’s staring out and learning about. And in a way, the Iliad is also about that, right? It’s about this society, where it’s a set of three societies that are obsessed with particular individuals who want to be the best. The most famous warrior is Hector, the most famous warriors, Achilles, and how can they sort of perform their famousness in the public eye, but then there’s sort of trap of the public eye, which pushes you into a performance, which might not be a suit performance at all. And you know, the risks are a hallmark warrior of beating the quote unquote best obviously a different risks from the risks of modern celebrities, so one celebrity culture, but I think there’s sort of resonance also with the way the Iliad treats on glory, fame, success, victory, and those sort of themes, which have this terrible dark underside of the possibilities of loss.

Every time I think I’ve worked through all the ways I can look at the texts, I’ve find seven more where I’m like, Alright, I find someone else who’s commented on a different way. And I was like, how did I never think of that? How did I never see those connections, it never ends, sort of all of those inter woven themes. And as time goes on, and our society changes that will only continue to sort of wrap itself around each other and create these bigger moments, these bigger themes. And something I guess, I want to know, because I could never do what you’ve done. And I could never translate these words. And I think most people are probably pretty in awe of that. But as you’re writing and as you’re doing these things, is there ever anything that surprises you? Do you ever find these moments of? Like I didn’t think that that would happen? Or a favorite moment that you come across while you write?

I mean, I love doing it. I love just that process of rereading the Greek over and over and over and over again. And I mean, in a way, it’s the favorite moments are things like what I was already talking about, I’m just realizing, wow, I’ve read this 100 times, and it’s still making me cry. How can that be? I don’t know how that happens. And I mean, I guess also, as a translator, as opposed to, if you write an essay about the area, you can focus on a few scenes, you don’t focus on every single line, every single word. And I think I have a new appreciation for scenes that I might not have thought about that much before. That process of sort of having to wrestle with, I’m not going to just read faster with this bit, I’m going to spend just as much time over this bit as every other bit. So for instance, the sort of semi comic scene where Demetrius and Meriones have gone back to the camp to get new spears and they have a sort of back and kind of bigger than your spear. And it’s kind of hilarious, even though it’s also just a sort of few lines of comic versus page within a sequence where there’s a lot of depth, but I don’t think I’d ever have sort of paid attention to that scene sort of properly until I was translating it. And similarly, I think I had always thought book 23 with the funeral games, Achilles mourning Patroclus obviously is heartbreaking and amazing. But then I am not particularly a sports person? So I’d always sort of thought, chariot race kind of fun, but it’s not really for me. And in the course of translating it, I thought, Wow, I love this chariot race. This is the best call me at this point, everybody, I’m a sports person. After all, this is the best sports fighting game ever encountered. You know, it’s wonderful. And just sort of get to see the characters and see the whole themes of competitive society, and the performance of success and loss, and what does it mean to get a prize and who deserves which prize and who, who counts as the best and by which category, the whole themes of the poem, Volker with without the death in the, in the funeral games, and I just love that. It’s great.

I think that’s absolutely what I loved the most was just finding something new every time every, or finding a new character to sort of follow along and to put, you know, maybe not too much empathy into because they’re probably not gonna make it through the whole thing. But you never know. Maybe you get lucky. But I am so thrilled that this new work is coming out. I’m so thrilled that people will have a new way to connect with The Iliad, with Homer, with this entire world of myth. I can’t wait. The Iliad is out now. also pick up Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. You won’t regret it. Thank you so much for joining me today. I can’t wait for people to read this.

Thank you so much.