Conversations with Tyler - Emily Wilson on Translations and Language

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

In a recent Twitter thread, Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: "There aren't enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises" (#2 on the list), "It's very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don't connote modern psychology" (#5), and "There is no common English word of four syllables or fewer connoting 'person particularly favored by Zeus due to high social status, and by the way this is a very normal ordinary word which is not drawing any special attention to itself whatsoever, beyond generic heroizing.'" (#7). Using Twitter this way is part of her effort to explain literary translation. What do translators do all day? Why can the same sentence turn out so differently depending on the translator? Why did she get stuck translating the Iliad immediately after producing a beloved translation of the Odyssey? She and Tyler discuss these questions and more, including why Silicon Valley loves Stoicism, whether Plato made Socrates sound smarter than he was, the future of classics education, the effect of AI on translation, how to make academia more friendly to women, whether she'd choose to 'overlive', and the importance of having a big Ikea desk and a huge orange cat. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded March 7th, 2019 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Emily on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, I'm here today with Emily Wilson, who is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has recently translated Homer's Odyssey,

has been a smash hit. It's my personal favorite of all the translations I've read. We'll speak more about some of her other work, but Emily, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Let's just jump right in on the Odyssey. I want you to explain the whole book to me, but let's start small. Does Odysseus even want to return home? He does, as the poem starts, he's spent, as the poem starts, he's spent the last seven years on the island of a goddess called Calypso. originally the poem implies quite willingly. So it seems as if he's changed his mind about whether or not he wants to go home. But as the poem begins, he does want to get back home to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope and his son, to Lemmachus.

Do you think he means it, or is he just self-deceiving? Because he takes the detour into the underworld. He hangs around with Circe for many years. There's a contrast with Menelaus who acts as if he actually does want to get home. Who's lying to whom in this story? Odysseus, of course, is lying all the time. So it's very hard for the reader to get a firm grasp on what are his motives. Also, when he tells Calypso that he desperately wants to get back home, it's very striking to me that he doesn't give his motives. He says, to Calypso, you're much more beautiful than my wife is, and you've promised to make me a immortal. It's a great offer. But I want to go home. And he doesn't explain why, what is it that drives that desire to go home. And you're quite right. He makes many detours. He spends another year quite willingly with Calypso, with Circe, another goddess. So it seems if he's easily distractible from the quest, for sure.

How much should the character of Odysseus actually be viewed as admirable? He's a hero, which of course in an archaic Greek context doesn't necessarily mean an admirable figure. He's a figure who's, as I translate Polytropos, he's complicated. There are many sides to him. He has the extraordinary qualities, which is part of what makes him heroic, that he's different from the rest of us. He's smarter than any other mortal. He's better at disguising, better at telling stories, better at fictionalizing his own life,

better at coming up with a plausible way to get out of any impossible situation. Does that make him admirable? In a way it does. He's a survivor. He has impressive qualities that enable him to survive. But he loses, what, 11 out of 12 ships to the Cyclopes? Isn't he just a bad general? He loses 100% of the men under his care, yes.

Yes. It's a pretty bad track record, yes. And of course, as the father of one of the suitors says to him in book 24, after he's slaughtered all his wife's harassing suitors, says you have this unfortunate habit of killing young men. First, you killed this whole batch of young men who left with you to go to Troy, of whom Zero returned. And now you get back home, you kill a whole bunch more young men. It seems as if there were certain problems with that in terms of both leadership and just being a human being. Early on in the story, why does Telemachus feel at all the need to set off and leave home? Why doesn't he just hang around and protect his mother?

That's a very good question. And ancient commentators on The Odyssey were puzzled over it because it seems both under-motivated and, if anything, a stupid idea, right? Because he puts himself in danger. It's because he's left home that the suitors are then able to lie in wait to ambush and try to murder him. It's a very dangerous and, in the end, futile journey because he finds out nothing in the way of concrete information. about his father. He does it because he's inspired by the goddess Athena, who wants him to go on a quest which in some way will parallel the quest of his father. Maybe it's a way to have some,

the Odyssey is a poem which is very interested in parallel narratives in showing us one way this could go down and then another way this could go down. His one journey around the Mediterranean, here's another way, he's another way that this same story could be both the same and very different. And how grown up is he when he returns home? Is there any kind of moral or spiritual advance? Or is the telemachus you see, is the telemicus you get? He, well, before he leaves, he has a, he makes an attempt to stand up among the, in the Council of Men, speaking out both to the suitors of his mother and also to the men of Ithaca. And it's an attempt at being an adult man in a peaceful environment to speak out in the council. And it's a speech which doesn't go very

well because he explains fairly vehemently what his problem is, that he's surrounded by all these bullies, nobody's helping him, his whole inheritance is being wasted, but he earns the speech bursting into tears. So it obviously is not a particularly successful model of public speaking and of male adulthood. By when he gets back from his trip, I think it's unclear whether he's grown up at all. I mean, he's certainly had the experience of meeting his father's age mates of meeting alternative father figures. And of course, he's grown up without a father figure. He's had the experience of being exposed to different elite households, different marriages, different potential paternal figures, and also being exposed to the experience of having a brother or a quasi-brother in spending time with Nestor's son, Paisistratus.

So he's had certain experiences which, in theory, could be formative or helpful for him. I think it's unclear in what way exactly do they affect him, if any. Could the earlier Telemachus have killed the women raped by the suitors, which he does toward the end of the story? What has changed in him? I think one thing that, I mean, I think the crucial thing that's changed is that he's got to spend time with his father doing something they both love, which is killing people. And so that in fact he's been spending time with his father throughout the previous few days, I think he's very important in terms of his fashioning into some kind of masculinity, some kind of adulthood.

In the vision of Homer's Odyssey, how good can politics get? Politics is a tricky word, right? Because of course this is a poem which is set before the city-state. It's before the pollus. But you visit what are in essence different city-states, right? Some may be mythical. Yes. Which are proto-city states, I mean, I guess you could say.

Well, I think there are different kinds of potentially idealized societies. So I think it's sort of unclear does the poem think Nestor's more traditional palace in which the wife doesn't have a name and there are many children and that they seem to spend most of their time performing elaborate sacrifices, is that better than the rich palace of Menelaus? Is that better than the poor but somehow heroized warrior society of Ithaca? Is that better than the matriarchal societies of Calypso or Circe? I think the poem is laying out for us these possible alternatives. I think in some ways the quasi-magical land of the phyations where Odysseus visits.

In some ways, maybe that's the best possible state. But I think the poem is more interested in contrasting than necessarily ranking. How pleasant is life amongst the phoetians? At first, it sounds great. There's a lot of prosperity. But they become increasingly passive-aggressive, you might argue. You start wondering, are foreigners really welcome here? And by the time Odysseus leaves,

there's almost a bit of a mild stench around that political order. Or do you think, well, this is the best, humans can do? And is Faisha even a real polity of any kind, or is it just imaginary? I think it's very clearly figured as imaginary, but then the whole poem is imaginary. It's not like Nestor's Palace existed in precisely this form. It's certainly true that I think from the beginning, the phyatians are defined by some kind of ambivalence about how cut off are they from other people and are they actually welcoming to strangers? Even when Nasukar first introduces Odysseus to her people, she explains, my people are not welcoming to strangers.

And so that's why Odysseus has to walk into town separately from her. So I think already, even before we meet the king and queen of this strange place, we have these mixed signals about how welcoming or not welcoming are they, why is it that they are so good at sailing and yet they seem to have gone nowhere. In what ways is this very isolationist society the ideal or not the ideal? Is there humor and Homer? Oh, there's tons of humor, yes. I mean, I guess we were just talking about the fayations.

So I think one of the funniest parts is when Odysseus has been shipwrecked and he lands on the land of Skaria, the land of the phyatians. And of course, has lost all his clothes in the shipwreck and ends up having to pop up from behind a bush wearing no clothes in front of a beautiful princess. And in order to try and impress her, he has to cover himself up with branches and give a very long speech to distract her from the fact that she's being accosted by a dirty, man. It's a funny scene. Why did Thomas Hobbes translate The Odyssey? Was that part of his political vision somehow? I think so. I mean, I can't give you the expert vision on the expert account of Hobbs' but it's a lot of work, as you know, right? It's a lot of work, yes. Yes. I mean, I think both both Thistides and Homer were projects

for Hobbes that had to do with trying to figure out what what kinds of models and also what kinds of counter models, what kinds of wrong society can be represented by the ancient political worlds. Now that you've spent so much time with this book, does part of you feel Socrates was actually right about Homer, that it's a bad example? You mean about by right about Odysseus or right about, you mean? Well, Homer in general, that he's banned from the ideal republic. He's banned from the second best ideal in the republic, right?

He's not banned from, it's not like Callipolis, is that necessarily the ideal republic? It's a second best compromise ideal. And Socrates in that book says that, of course, both. Both Homer and the Trudedians are problematic for several different reasons. It's both that they water the emotions which would be better dried up, and also that they make us and want to pretend to be in the mindset of, or the persona of people that we shouldn't want to be in the persona of, and also they're not representing reality.

Isn't the underworld also too dreary for heroes? It's also too dreary and also, of course, the gods behave abysmally and Homer. So for all these reasons, it's both theologically and ethically, and psychologically and also metaphysically wrong. And which is actually your worry. You don't agree with any. I think Homer is psychologically truthful and ethically helpful. And I mean, I think the whole question about is it literature's job or poetry's job to train a politician?

I'm not sure that that's quite the right way to see it. I think by inhabiting worldviews which aren't our own, we can grow in some way, which doesn't necessarily have to be, I agree with. Y-Z political gnomon that's articulated in this line or that line of Homer. I think it's a limiting way of reading a poem. But say you're trying to steal Man Socrates and or Plato, whoever you think is responsible. They were pretty smart people, right? So they thought this for some reason. What's the critique of Homer that makes the most sense to you, even if you reject it? I think the critique of Homer that makes the most sense to me is to do with there is some intense

valorizing, even though I think it's also questioning of that, valorizing of the warrior whereby you get maximise honour by killing as many people as possible, which doesn't seem to me a particularly good model for how a community should function, that we should be thinking that that level of military prowess should be put quite so high on the evaluative scale. Once Odysseus returns home, why does it take so long for the whole plot of revenge to unfold? This has bothered me.

You expect a fairly swift ending, but there's book after book after book, and still the suitors aren't dead. What role is that playing in the exposition of the story? What should we infer from that? You're absolutely right. So Odysseus gets back home geographically in book 13, and yet the poem isn't over. We've still got a whole half of the poem to go. We've still got another almost 12 books. I think it has to do both with the poet's self-glorification. Look how amazing this is that I can spin out the story of a Nostos of a journey home, such that it isn't even about the journey anymore. It's about all these elaborately different recognitions between Odysseus and each. important member of the household. And it's also about Athena's plot, right? Athena's plot is to glorify herself and her special mortal. And the best way to glorify Odysseus is not just to have the maximum body count, but also to do it in a way that's as massive and as both temporarily and geographically as possible, that she's spinning it out. So it's even more impressive.

Look how your hero got home in only a year, or two years. My hero. My hero. My hero. took 20 years to get home, and then look how he managed to come back from this absolute loser position of being one man against over 100, looking like an old beggar, and so on. That it means the whole narrative arc is all the bigger, the longer it takes. What kinds of people, if you had to generalize, prefer the Iliad to the Odyssey. What's that preference correlated with, empirically? I think it's correlated with, I think it's about mood partly. I mean, the Odyssey is much more varied just in terms of scenes and in terms of, I think if you're easily bored, you may prefer the Odyssey because it has more different characters, more different scenes, more different types of things happen. I mean, in the early ad, it's some men are angry. Some people get killed.

Some men are angry. Some people get killed. And it's that relentlessly over and over and over. and it's in this very, very small space, small stretch of time, whereas the Odyssey has far more variety in terms of what kinds of people are speaking, what kinds of events are happening. Is it fair to say that throughout most of the history of Western criticism, earlier critics referred the Iliad to the Odyssey, even though the Odyssey, I would say, is clearly superior.

But why this earlier preference? I think it's... I'm not sure that everybody did. I mean, Dryden criticises the Iliad for being too warmongering. I mean, for being too much and Homer for the same reasons. It's not like it's been a universal preference of the Iliad of the Odyssey until the 20th century, when it all changed around, though I think maybe that is part of the trend. So Longinus, pseudo-Longinus, and on the Sublime says that the Iliad is like Homer at the height of his power,

and then the Odyssey is like the setting sun. It's the old man's poem. It has all these cute incidents. It's like a poem where you learn about character rather than learning about this very, very intense, dramatic arc. So I think it's partly about thinking a poem of warfare with fewer female characters is more impressive, more important than a poem which is more domestic

and has more to do with survival than with killing. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I mean, I think they were both very highly valued in most periods of antiquity. It's not like people skipped the Odyssey. I'm noticing a trend lately. Madeline Miller has a bestseller with Sears, Pat Barker has the silence of the girls, which is a takeoff of the Iliad.

Margaret Atwood, a few years earlier, had her retelling of Penelopee's stale. Why is this a trend now? Well, the Penelope had, I can't know what date it is, but it's about 20 years old. But I think you're right that there's a lot of retellings of myth right now. And I think part of it has to do with a sort of turning back to possible alternative archetypes. I mean, we don't quite know what to do with the great. religious books, so let's look for something else which has cultural authority, and it's going to be meaningful and recognizable to many, many different people from different religious

traditions, and we can somehow have a space of cultural sharedness over that. Are you going to do one? The Iliad? Yes, I'm doing the Uliad. No, not a translation, but a fictional derivation. I've thought about it. I'm not ready to do it right now. I don't have a good, big concept, but maybe one day.

And what's your view on who Homer was? How much oral tradition, how much a single mastermind, a group of editor is one final finisher. What do you think? I think they're written poems. So obviously the puzzle is how did these written poems come into being? I feel that the writing must have been involved in the composition, not just in the recording of something which was already present entire in one genius's mind. Because I think having something present entire without any use of writing, this is monumental as these poems are, seems to me implausible. Beyond that, I don't really have a clear view about, was it a pair of people? Was it a single person? Did the same person do the Iliad and the Odyssey? I don't see how we can possibly know that. I think they're very different poems. But I also think the chances are that they seem to be composed. The Odyssey seems to be composed with some kind of awareness of the Iliad. But to what extent can that fully be proved? I'm not sure.

Can't software tell us if it's the same author? No, no. I mean, it can tell us that there are linguistic differences, which we already knew, but then there were linguistic differences partly because they're different poems. So couldn't somebody – I mean, also, author might not be the right term, right? If we're imagining that it could be an oral poet who's collaborating with a scribe, is that an author? I don't know.

Do we know anything about why Misenenian civilization declined? There were different theories about that. I mean, there seems to have been various cataclysmic events. There may have been weather events. There were clearly conflicts. I mean, there were clearly sieges and sackings of cities. So war and environment? War and environment seems to be the best guess.

But I'm just echoing what I've learned from archaeologists. It's not like I've actually excavated at any of these cities. You think that's not very good evidence then? It's a guess. Oh, no, I think it's good. I'm just saying that I can't speak from personal diggiveness. But I think that seems to be what happened, right? It seems to be that combination of war environment and who knows what,

and chance as well, presumably. Moving forward a number of centuries in time, how well did ancient Athenian democracy work in terms of accountability? Were rulers accountable to those who could vote? What did they just do what they wanted? How should we understand or model that system? How should we model that? I mean, how should we imagine it?

Is it like a democracy, but simply fewer people vote? and the rulers are responsive to public opinion? What does the agenda setter have all the power? Or what's your vision of how ancient Athenian democracy at its peak worked? Well, it was in a way much more, I mean, for those who were citizens, it was in a way much more democratic than our system, which is representational democracy. Because, of course, everybody who was a citizen,

had a voice in the assembly, was able to speak directly to those who were in power. There were several offices were elected by. lot, such that anybody, regardless of background, aristocratic or not aristocratic background, or regardless of wealth, could in theory become one of the generals or one of the leaders of the assembly. Of course, also, it was, you know, a tiny fraction of the population of Athens that was a citizen. Of course, most of the population were enslaved and were not citizens. Women weren't being appointed to be generals or leaders in the assembly. I mean, the critique that Many of our sources from Athens are in a number of different ways hostile to democracy.

And the critique that you find in Plato, for example, has a lot to do with the idea that, because it depends so much on the will of the people and the people aren't necessarily educated people, they're easily swayed by demagoguery. And of course, in an age of the internet, we can see how people are still easily swayed by all kinds of different voices. Should we consider electing politicians by lot today? Is it such a crazy idea? I think it's a great idea. Great idea. Classics enrollment. As you know, at many schools, it's been declining for maybe 20 years or more.

Do you think classics as a distinct field of study will still exist in 30 years? And what will it look like? I don't know. I think it's going to have to look different because you're right. Enrollments are declining. And I think there's also a lot of sort of questioning from within by classical. about the elitist legacy of classics. I mean, about the ways that it's been sort of tied up with the people who end up being

classicists, especially in Britain, but this is true in the States too, are those who've gone to the fancy private schools and who've learnt Latin since they were five years old. And then it's sort of tied up with being of a particular class means that you can speak Latin or that you can read Latin. And that is inevitably, if we can't give a better reason to learn Latin and Greek or to read the ancient text, then this is going to be. entry to a particular social class within our own society, which it no longer is, then, of course, that's not going to be a good reason for people in the future.

So say we elect you by lot to be in charge of all classics education. What would you do? What would you change? I would try and find ways to make it both more attractive and more inclusive to people from different backgrounds. I would talk to more different people about what it might be that might entice them to learn about cultures and languages that are totally different from any that are nowadays extant. I think we should stop selling classics as these are the societies that formed modern America

or that formed the Western canon, which is a really bogus kind of argument. And instead start saying we should learn about ancient societies because they're different from modern societies. And that means that we can learn things by learning about alterity. We can learn about what would it be to be just as, just as human as we are and yet be living in a very, very different society. Now, you have another well-known book. It's called Seneca, A Life. And on reading it, I guess this is my reaction.

Why are the Stoics so hypocritical? So Seneca spends his life sucking up to power. He's very well off, extremely political, and possibly involved in murder plots, right? Yes, that's right. So what is there about Stoicism? Marcus Aurelius is somewhat bloodthirsty, it seems? Yes. So are the Stoics all just hypocrites, and they wrote this to cover over their wrongdoings? Or how should we think about the actual history of stoicism? You know, I see Seneca and Marcus Aurelius as very, very different characters. I think Marcus Aurelius was militaristic and bloodthirsty and expander of the Roman Empire.

But he was happy to slaughter many barbarians, but that's not the, he was fairly consistent about thinking that was a good idea and also fairly consistent in associating his dreams. of cultural and military imperialism with stoic models of virtue. Whereas Seneca was very much constantly sort of unable to fully act out the ideals that he had. And I think one of the reasons he's so interesting as a writer is that he's so precise in articulating what it means to have a very, very clear vision of the good life

and to be completely unable to follow through on living the good life. But why would you accumulate so much wealth if you're a true Stoic. I personally don't think you would, but Seneca has a lot of very wonderfully rhetorically ornate explanations for why, in fact, that's perfectly reasonable because Stoics had this distinction between there were things that act good in themselves. The main thing that's good in itself is virtue, being a good person.

The thing that's bad in itself is being a bad person. But then there are also things in the middle, which are neither good nor bad, but might be preferable. So it might be preferable not to be a slave, or it might be preferable not to be homeless and impoverished. And it might be preferable to have millions and billions of dollars. And so it's not that it's actually bad, as long as you can hang on to virtue despite being in the midst of corrupting power, then even better. Are you surprised that so much of Silicon Valley has turned to the Stoics? Not at all.

Their vision of the Stoics. It fits very well. Yes. What's the hardest thing about translating Seneca? So I translated most of Seneca's tragedies rather than his prose, but I think the same issues would apply for both. I had a hard time figuring out how much I could get away with pulling out all the stops rhetorically. Because he writes in this wonderfully ornate purple style. It's showing off, showing off, showing off, bombast.

And I think the risk is always that it's going to come across as too silly to be impressive. And it has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite. getting there. And do you think Seneca had a role in the murder of the emperor's wife? I think he probably knew about it. I don't know if he actually got his hands bloody or wet, but I think he probably knew about it. Socrates, you've written on Socrates, are Socratic ideals in decline today? Here we are having a conversation. Look at us being so Socratic. It's so hard to say what are Socratic ideals Because of course Socrates didn't write anything

Everything about as we referred to earlier We were talking about the Republic That's Plato's Socrates is Socrates, it's not necessarily Socrates is Socrates or history of Socrates Insofar as the Athenians voted to have Socrates drink the hemlock You could say well maybe that was the low point of Socratic ideals Back then in 399 Maybe it's all been up since then.

And what does the dying Socrates mean to you personally? Someone you admire, someone you think he's a fool, someone who is a martyr, a precursor of a Christ figure? I deeply admire him with some serious reservations. I mean, the reason I'm constantly sort of turned back to thinking about him, partly because as an academic and also as a writer, I'm sort of constantly thinking about what does it actually mean to try to educate people. I'm interested in the Socrates who claims that he isn't teaching anybody anything, and yet he's living this life of being engaged in conversations, which are clearly designed to either draw things out of people or else put things into them insidiously.

So I'm interested in whether all educators are somehow in that double bind of am I actually helping you find something out, or am I imposing my own vision on you? I'm interested also in the figure of the dying Socrates as an image, in a way this is related to the Seneca questions, as an image of integrity of what does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment even when you're just poisoned yourself. Let's say I'm a greater fan of Plato. He's a more systematic thinker. The other versions of Socrates, say, from xenophon, they're not to me very impressive. They're okay? They're silly, yes. And maybe it's a bit like Boswell and Johnson, where Boswell makes Johnson much better. and Boswell, in some ways, is smarter than Johnson, I would say, or sharper. Socrates was just pretty smart, but Plato's the true philosopher.

Can you talk me out of that? I think that's a perfectly reasonable point of view, yes. I'm sure that Socrates didn't have the whole edifice of metaphysics, and also, obviously, he wasn't the enormously impressive literary stylist that Plato is. I think Plato was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary thinker. It does seem as if there's good evidence, partly because Aristotle seems to confirm this, that Plato did, that Socrates himself did come up with some pretty interesting ideas, such as the idea that nobody willingly does wrong.

That insofar as anybody does anything wrong, it's because of a mistake, we don't realize it's wrong, which I think is actually still something which is worth some ethical, philosophical grappling. It's an idea that's worth some grappling. Now, as you know, your doctoral dissertation, it's on the concept of overliving as you call it. What is overliving and why is that interesting? It's a term that I took from Paradise Lost by Milton and

Adam says after he's eaten the apple and he's fallen he realizes that the only thing to look forward to is death and yet he's not dead. So it's a moment when Milton's character is grappling with what you could see as a continuity

error in the book of Genesis that Adam and Eve don't die immediately after eating the apple which was supposed to result from eating the apple. And he says, why do I overlive? Why am I mocked with death? And so that comes at a moment in Paradise Lost where after the narrator has said, I now must change my notes to tragic. So I was interested in trying to figure out, why does Milton imagine

not death, but a failure to die as being part of a tragic genre, that this sequence of the poem is both tragic and about the failure of Adam and Eve to die right after the fall. So I think it's an interesting idea just to realize that we have this idea from Shakespeare that, of course, tragedy is all about when you have the heaps of corpses up on the stage at the end of Hamlet. But of course, that's not actually all that tragedy is about, especially if you go all the way back to Athenian tragedy. There's a number of tragedies in which there aren't any corpses on stage at the end. And so I'm interested in it both as

thinking through how does narrative represent death, how does narrative represent the experience of not being dead, And also in terms of just imagining what is the tragic genre all about, what does it say about both life and death. Is there an example of overliving, say, from contemporary popular culture? Someone who either who's sin or whose tragic fate is that he or she lived too long? I'm not going to come up with good examples. I should have prepped for that. Michael Jackson. I guess that's, yes.

But there's also post-mortem reckoning very often too, right? I mean, the whole solonic line of call no person have you till they're dead. very often the whole meaning of the life can change, as of course it is right now with Michael Jackson, that the legacy can become totally tainted. And even after you're gone, history itself can revise the earlier meaning of your life. History can change the meaning, yes. Would you accept immortality if offered it at your current age and state of health? You would be intact as you are today, forever.

Do the people I love get to live forever to? No, just you. You have a chance to overlive. Do you want it? Can I also create world peace and solve climate change? No, but you do get to live forever, and people might, Buy even more copies of your books. Can I change my mind in a couple of hundred years?

No. Then I won't take it. Then you won't take it. Let's say you were age 80 and you could be restored to your current physical state. Would you then accept living forever? I think first 80 rules would take it then. So I'm sure I will. What's the year at which you're indifferent where you're not sure whether or not you'd take it?

No, I'm kidding. I'm not going to take it. I would take it, I think. If you took it, do you think you'd end up being bored or are we able to always keep on a music? ourselves as humans? I think we'd probably keep on amusing myself, but it would probably get hard.

Once there were no more humans left, it's going to get tough. And once all the books have wroughted, and once I'm not going to be able to run the electrical power plants all by myself. Now we have a segment in the middle of these conversations called overrated or underrated, and I'll toss out a few items and you give us your opinion if they're overrated or underrated.

The fork, overrated or underrated? Underrated. Why? In fact, my sister wrote a book called Consider the Forks. I love this book, yes. Maybe this is a chance to pluck her book. So it's about kitchen technologies and just the ways that people eat, given that we have both knives and forks, which most people, you know, before fairly recently, people ate without forks.

And it encourages a very different approach to cutting up food into small pieces and therefore being able to not have an overbite in your jaw. and the whole model of eating and even the structure of the face is different thanks to the fork. Caligula, overrated or underrated? Underrated. I mean, he's pretty much under a ladder low. It's not like I think he was great. Yes.

But what's the case for Caligula, so to speak, relative to reputation, that he was a pragmatist, he had no choice. He had to maintain orderly rule. He had to maintain orderly rule, and of course everybody would have said he was, absolutely insane and come up with the worst possible excessive stories, even if he actually wasn't quite as insane as made for a good story. Couldn't he have just been another Tiberius, or was that then impossible politically? He probably could have been, but then psychologically in terms of his personality,

you know, not everybody is Tiberius, not everybody wants to just go off and sit on Capri for the rest of their life. Philip Sidney, the poet and essayist, overrated or underrated? Underrated? He's great. He's great. What do you like about Philip Sidney? Are we doing plugs for every member of my family? If you choose. That's great.

Okay, so my mother, Catherine Duncan Jones, wrote a very good biography of Sir Philip Sidney, partly explaining why he's so underrated. He's underrated, I think it's extraordinary that so many people have read Shakespeare but haven't read Sydney, who was both a formative influence on Shakespeare and also an extraordinary both poet and prose writer. in his own right, he wrote two versions of what in many ways are the most important early proto-novels in English, the old Arcadia and the New Arcadia. He also wrote an amazing sequence of sonnets called Astrophel and Stella.

He was a great poet, great writer. Monty Python's Flying Circus, overrated or underrated? Correctly rated very high. Okay. Philadelphia. Underrated, love it. How long have you lived here? 16 or 17 years?

Okay. Queen Victoria, overrated or underrated. My father, A.N. Wilson, motorography, Maine, overhaired Victoria. I don't know about Victoria. I don't think I have an opinion. Maybe you can stay in the middle. In the middle.

Bad on imperialism, but good for European peace? That kind of thing, exactly, yes. Here's a question from a reader about translation, and I quote, Greek morphology is a nightmare, but syntax is relatively easy. Latin is opposite. So Latin is more of an intellectual language. Agree or disagree? I don't think it follows that difficulty of syntax implies intellectuality of ideas or concepts or anything else.

I mean, I think they require different kinds of thinking. As artificial intelligence advances and there are more online resources, what will translation even mean in that future world? Will we keep on learning other languages? I hope so. I think it's a great shame that so many languages are dying right now. I think in every language you think differently. You see the world differently.

So the fewer languages that are known by anybody on Earth, the fewer visions that we have of what life's about, fewer ways of thinking. Other than ancient Greek and Latin, what languages interest you? Lots of languages I don't know, but so I'm not going to have time. Thanks to me. my refusal of your lovely offer of immortality.

That's in fact something I would do if I had to. You could learn them all, right? I would learn them all, for sure. I mean, I don't know any Asian languages. I feel guilty about that. I know one semester's worth of Russian. I mean, I read French, German, Italian, little bit of Spanish. My daughters go to a Spanish immersion school, so I know elementary school Spanish.

But I'd love to know some languages which are more different from those I do know. I mean, I'd love to know Chinese, Japanese, Japanese. Arabic would be great. Here's another reader question about translation. Quote, could you please ask her about home? Her translation pulls this word to the foreground more than I remember other translations doing, and that decision made me read the text differently. It also made me realize that home is not a concept that I interrogate nearly as much as I should.

So I'm asking you about home. I love that question. The Greek text has a lot of uses of the noun Nostos, from which we get nostalgia. the journey of homecoming, the event of homecoming, and then of cognate words. And I wanted to use the word home as a way of signaling the centrality of the concept of home and of defining the concept of home in the poem. It's already a very loaded word in English, I think. It's a word which means so much more than just house or place where you live.

I think the honesty is fascinating in the ways that it defines home as something which involves both a living space and a particular kind of community and a space where at least one member of the household has the choice about who to keep in, who to keep out. And you're working now on a translation of the Iliad, is that correct? It's correct, yes. And is that easier or harder than translating The Odyssey? Well, I started doing it right away, or almost right away, after I finished The Odyssey,

because I thought I'm on a role now. It's not that different in terms of language than The Odyssey. And then I got really stuck for the last, for the first few months that I was working on it, I was feeling completely stuck and questioning everything because it's, the mood of the poem is so different. It's not all that different linguistically, but it's different enough that I felt I had to sort of step back and think, think differently about everything I'd already done. I mean, so for the Odyssey, I used aambic pantameter all the way through and I also made it line for line. And I started thinking, should I do something completely different?

I use hexameters? Should I use dactyls rather than Iams? And I think I'm back to iambic pentameter, but it's been through a lot of different struggles and a lot of drafts of different ways of doing it, stylistically, poetically. And what's the process you go through to improve your translation? Is that you show it to people, you simply let it sit, you compare it to other texts, you evaluate it as poetry, what do you do to have it become better? So I usually do a lot of reading and rereading the original and then I usually write a draft of a little bit out in a notebook. I do a lot of looking up different words in different dictionaries and trying to figure out connotations. I read my drafts out loud to myself before I read them out loud to

anyone else and then I fix things and change things and try and change things that didn't sound right and then I change them again. And then after I've tinkered with it for a long time myself, once I've got a whole complete book, I send the complete book to my love. editor at Norton, Pete Simon, and he doesn't know Greek, but he looks at it next to other translations and thinks about does this sentence works in English sentence. And then he sends it back, and then I reread it again, and I fixed lots of things, including things he hadn't commented on, and then I eventually I share it with other people as well. I go through multiple stages of revisions. Now, I have the impression that you're using Twitter in some ways to revolutionize how people

discuss and present translation. Is that a fair assessment of what you're up to? Yes, I think there are some misunderstandings about translation that are really common. So I'm trying to articulate a sort of translation one-on to the audio. And how do you do that in 280 characters? Is it all Tweetstorm or embedded photos or what's your method of using Twitter? My method is, well, I do have some cat photos as well, but my method about translation is to take a tiny bit of mostly the Odyssey, but occasionally some other text, and analyze what does.

different translators, usually if it's The Odyssey, including me, have done with it, and just show how very, very different the meaning of a sentence can be depending on how exactly a translator chooses to choose one word versus another word, and how there can be very, very different interpretations, all of which are valid readings of the Greek. And what do you think translation teaches us, or you in particular? So say I were to talk with an ancient historian about Pericles in Athens, or I could speak with you, and you've done translating of ancient Greek or of Homer's time, what perspectives are you likely to have on those periods that say an ancient historian would not? What kind of

knowledge do you end up specializing in other than the translation itself? I would say I have a pretty deep knowledge of word choice and poetics and style and literary form of each of the texts I've studied. But what will that cash out into? Like if I ask you, what? might you understand about ancient Athens that an ancient historian would not as well? Like what would you say concretely? I would say, I mean, if you're asking about Pericles, I would say that if I'd spent longer studying Pericles' speech in Thucydides, I might have a deeper understanding of the rhetorical tropes that are being used and of the ways that rhetoric interacts with ideology within the

representation in that passage within the representations in multiple literary texts of that period. I think I might have a deeper understanding of how cultural representations operate in classical Athens. But you end up thinking, well, they're funnier than we thought. They're more sardonic than we thought. They're more bitter than we thought. What's the final takeaway in terms of your understanding of that time? Are you doing classical Athens or doing any period you care to Homer's time is fine, but we know more about Athens. We know more about Athens. I would definitely say funnier, but I also say, even though the texts we have are primarily by elite men,

I think even from those texts which are already a tiny demographic, we can say they're more diverse in terms of how do they look at the world than we might have thought. That they don't, generalizing about this is the Athenian worldview, doesn't actually make any sense if you look at the array of different opinions that are articulated in the text. And when you translated the Odyssey, as a reader, think of your approach as pretty clean and direct and very easy to read, but also with a lot of psychological depth. And I prefer that in the Odyssey. But when I read, say, the Hebrew Bible, I want something a little more maybe stentorian in tone or a little more Baroque, actually.

I think a lot of people feel the same way. Why that difference? Why do we want something different from a Bible translation often? Hmm. Have you read the Robert Alter? Yes. Do you like them? Very much so. So they're also fairly clear, right? It's not that they're...

I don't find them very clear. Maybe they're as clear as they can be. Yeah. But you're easier to read than he is. That may be the difference in the authors. I think Homer's pretty easy to read. I mean, Homer syntax is really very easy, and that's part of what I wanted to bring out.

I mean, I hope that in a way I would like it if my Seneca translations are less easy to read than my Homo translations. That's correct. They are less easy to read. I hope so, because stylistically, those authors are very different. I mean, so I think it's partly just about the source text, and it's also about the cultural perception of the source text, right? I mean, we don't touch.

Most people in contemporary society don't believe in Athena. So we have a different idea about how should divinity be represented in this text versus in a text where there are people who still worship the God of the Hebrew Bible, right? Sure. Which poets have influenced your translations? Other than the poets of the time, obviously Homer. Obviously Homer. Yes. So my translation of the Odyssey is all in Nyambic pentameter, and as I said earlier, my first book, which is my dissertation, came out of a set of questions about Milton's Paradise Lost.

I was very much aware that English already has epic poems. And I also was very much aware that I didn't want to make Homer sound like sub-Miltonic. I didn't want to make it sound like Paradise Lost. I didn't want to make it sound like the Fairy Queen. I didn't even want to make it sound like the Fairy Queen. I didn't even want to make it sound like it sound like. Tennyson, even though I love Tennyson's idylls as well as his Ulysses and Loeus and so on. He has one of the most ambiguous characterizations of Ulysses, which to me makes perfect sense. Yes, it's a wonderful poem. So I wanted to try and to obscure my love for Shakespeare and Milton in the style I was writing, but also for it to be there on the down low. I wanted to try and write a kind of narrative verse that was informed by pre-20th century narrative verse, but that was not archaizing. So in some ways, I wanted to try and make it more like

Elizabeth Bishop or Orden than like Shakespeare, even though I also have spent a huge amount of time reading Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson once opined that no one ever wished paradise lost to be longer than it is. Do you agree, or did you wish that? I wish it were longer, but I also wish the last two books were better. What's wrong with them? It's just a lot of summary of how the world's going to be terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. And then, yes, it's going to be terrible some more, which isn't in terms of narrative and characterization, it's much less interesting than the first ten books. I much prefer Samson Agonistis to Paradise Lost.

Am I crazy? Very interesting. I love Samson Agonistis, but I don't much prefer it. Now that you've achieved a high degree of fame, glory, and income also, and you think about how the ancient Greeks understood fame and glory, how is it to be from a position of fame and glory yourself, evaluating their views? I guess it depends which ancient Greeks we ask, right? I mean, if you ask Odysseus, he'd say, great, you should get as much stuff as possible.

You should try to come home not just broken in a borrowed boat, but with as much treasure as possible. If you asked Socrates, who went around with no sandals and one cloak summer and winter, maybe not so interested in the accumulation of kudos. Some more questions about you. how important do you think it is having more female mentors in academia? And how do we get there? I think it's very important, and I don't think I have an easy answer to how we get there. I mean, I think part of it has to do with family-friendly hiring policies,

family-friendly retention policies, because they're also glass ceilings, right? I mean, in terms of how many women get tenure, as opposed to how many get hired, as opposed to how many finish their PhDs, women drop off at every stage. Should we just abolish tenure and have five-year contracts? I don't know. I don't know. Pay all the adjuncts. I mean, pay all the adjuncts.

That's the area that I think really needs to get fixed in general. Of course, there's the trend towards these people who not only don't have tenure, but also don't have any kind of contract beyond the single course, which is a terrible deal. But other than just having more money, which everyone would want. How should we change the rules of the system? I don't know. I mean, I think there should be more equity. I mean, I don't feel like there should be such a disparity between the people who are, people like me who are lucky enough to have, you know, a good salary and guaranteed medical benefits for the rest of my career unless I go crazy and, you know, quit.

And then the adjuncts who get none of those things. I feel like there should be something closer to a leveling. And I don't know what I can do to fix that. But I nearly. When you were 17, what in the world have I? Were you obsessed with? Whether the unexamined life is worth living? I mean, I thought I was...

And what did you conclude? I needed another few years examining it to figure it out. Worth living as long as it's not too long, right? Yes, right. When you were 14, what was your favorite book? When I was younger than 14, I loved all books that had magic in them, so I loved the Narnia books, Diana Win Jones. I didn't want to read anything that didn't involve going through a portal to another

world. And then I think that sort of started to change when I was 14 and I started to read Jane Eyre, maybe around that age and I loved it. Jane Austen, I read Dickens. I went through a very religious phase and I read the Bible. It might have been my favorite book at 14, that kind of thing. Yes, yes. And how did you decide to become a classicist? You could have taken a number of paths, right, if you're going to be an academic. I could have taken many parts. And in fact, I think I wouldn't have been an academic, I think I considered not being an academic at all. That's another possible path. I mean, I consider good.

What would you have done if not academia? That's partly why I stuck down because I didn't quite know. I mean, I considered going to med school, but I realized that I'm actually not very good with blood. I considered going to law school, but then I actually thought I want to spend more time in the library than I think I'm going to get if I do that. I considered also being a literature scholar but not a classicist. I knew I wanted to read poetry and keep on studying poetry, but I didn't necessarily think it had to be ancient poetry. I thought it could be later poetry as well. It would be fine. You have many writers in your family background. How did that shape you?

It made me know that it wasn't weird to want to read all the time. So that in itself was a formative, realize it was a formative thing. I didn't have to learn that it's okay to be reading all the time. Now, there's some books you're working on. I'll ask you about, on your homepage, you list one called Classics Reborn, a book on the reception of classical literature in the early modern period, Oxford University Press. What will you cover? It's going to be a sort of survey of how did people in what people used to unself-consciously called the Renaissance?

I always hesitate over that word because Americans say Renaissance, and I say Renaissance. Anyway, so in that period, the rebirth of classical antiquity, what exactly was it to imagine that classical antiquity was being reborn? So it's going to be about what was that weird idea about? Is there a simple figure, country time? No, it's going to be a broad but selective account of how that played out in, I mean, it's going to be primarily Britain and Europe. and probably more Britain than anywhere else, but I can't skip Italy. And going through primarily literary texts and discussing the ways that literary authors of that period both build on and talk back to ancient authors.

And there's another book listed titled Faithful described as a book about translation. What will that be or what is it? That's a much shorter book and not covering the whole of. the whole of the renaissance. It's a sort of stump piece in a way trying to do the same kind of thing that I'm doing on Twitter in terms of trying to explain to the general reader what exactly is translation,

what do translators do all day, what are literary translators do all day? And also trying to figure out, why is it, which to me was puzzling when I realized it was true. Why is it that, for instance, that I'm the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English or to publish a translation of the Odyssey into English?

I was surprised when I realized that, and then I realized this is part of a much broader gender disparity. That it's not that there aren't any female homerists. Of course there are. Of course, there are plenty of female classicists. And yet, the field of literary translation within classics is really skewed towards men. And I wanted to figure out why is that? What kinds of issues are there within the field of literary translation in general and classical literary translation in particular? Why is that a stronger skew in the English language world?

I'm not sure. I mean, it's very striking that there's been a translation of The Odyssey by a woman into French since the 18th century. There were several by women into Italian, this one by a woman into Turkish. I think the whole culture of translation is different in European countries to what it is in the States. Do you think women translators have a higher relative standing when translation is less professionalized, less bureaucratized? It's something you just do? Or is when we conducted through academic. Maybe that but swim in translators at a disadvantage? Sure. I think it's a combination of that academia in the states, much more than perhaps in France or Italy, devalues translation, so that you don't get tenure for translation, which then also means if you're a category of person who might already be less likely to get tenure, then maybe you're even less likely to do this kind of work which is valued as useless. Why do we devalue translation in academia?

What's wrong with our incentive scheme? The whole incentive scheme is messed up because the kind of writing that's valued almost exclusively is the peer-reviewed monograph, which is, I think it's partly that the humanities are supposed to come up with the kind of original, quote-unquote original research, which is imagined to work in exactly the same structure as peer-reviewed research in STEM fields, which then means that it has to qualify in the same way. And then if you do a different kind of work, which is not the peer-reviewed monograph, it doesn't look as much analogous to the research in the stem fields, so we don't count it. And the different books you're writing, The Iliad translation, Faithful, Classics Reborn. Do you work on them all at once, or what's your method? You come back to them? I still struggle with that all the time.

Right now I'm not teaching, so I'm able to spend the morning doing one and the afternoon doing another. I like it if I can do at least some translating in the course of a day. and then some writing in the course of a day. So I like to sort of balance out because they feel like they use different parts of my brain. And just physically, what does your translation look like? Is it simply you sitting at a computer, typing and staring? Is it a room full of papers and books?

Is it you've had to buy a separate house? What's the production function for translation? Describe the factory. I have a very big desk from IKEA, and I have a huge orange cat who's mostly on it. And I also have a couple of Greek dictionaries. usually a couple of commentaries, the Greek text, a notebook, a laptop. So I usually do some writing of a draft by hand in the notebook first, and then I type it up

on the laptop, and then I revise it, and I consult the various texts that have spread around me on my big desk at various points. Very last question. Let's say you're very smart, female undergraduate comes to you, say she's 19, and And she says, I want to be the next great Homer translator, say, 30, 40 years from now. And we need another translation just because our language has changed. And she asks you for advice or some kind of insight that you have, having done what you've done. What is it you would tell her that other people wouldn't?

I would tell her I read lots of English poetry. I think it's very common for for classicists to be a little bit too over-specialized and have just read ancient literature and have not read enough literature that isn't. And she should start where? She should read things that interest her that she loves. I don't think it has to be that I prescribe her canon. But she should be reading in her own language as well as in ancient Greek. Emily Wilson, thank you very much.

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