Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 297 | Emily Wilson on Homer, Poetry, and Translation

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Not too long ago, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana starred in a (loose) adaptation of Homer's epic poem The Iliad; next month, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche will headline a film based on The Odyssey. Given that the originals were written (or at least written down) in the 8th century BCE, that is some impressive staying power. But they were also written in a very different time than ours, with different cultural context and narrative expectations. We talk about the issues of translation in general, and these Greek classics in particular, with Emily Wilson, whose recent translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey have garnered worldwide acclaim. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/11/25/297-emily-wilson-on-homer-poetry-and-translation/ Emily Wilson received her Ph.D. in classical and comparative literature from Yale. She is currently Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her awards are the Charles Berheimer Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Web site UPenn web page Wikipedia Amazon.com author page YouTube Substack BlueSky

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Tell me about a complicated man. Mews. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy. And where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe. Poor fools, they ate the sun god's cattle and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old. story for our modern times. Find the beginning. Some of you may recognize these lines as the opening of The Odyssey by Homer. The Odyssey, well, translated in English, of course, Homer was writing in Homeric Greek over 2,500 years ago. Homer is known for two poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad, both of which have come to play absolutely central roles in the Western canon, the beginning in many ways of Western literature. And, you know, these days, of course, we're very interested in expanding the canon beyond Western literature to other literatures as well. That's very, very valuable, all in favor of it. But it doesn't mean we throw out the existing canon. We can welcome new things

with open arms, but the Iliad and the Odyssey are going to be with us and be centrally informative to how we think about literature for a very long time. They're both very different poems. They're about different things. They're both about incidents from the Trojan War, or incident is probably too minor, but episodes from the Trojan War, but in very different modes, with very different atmospheres about them. The Iliad, both poems have many characters, but the Iliad centers on Achilles and his wrath. It's right up there in the beginning of the poem, The Wrath of Achilles, is the thing that we're going to be thinking about here. The Odyssey also has many characters, but centers on Odysseus, and we're told right at the beginning, he is complicated.

He is a trickster. He is clever. He is willing to take on many disguises to get what he wants. It's a contrast. The Iliad is based in one place. The Odyssey is, as the word now means in English, a journey that goes over very large distances. And given how formative and important these poems are, the idea of translating them into English is a very important one, because most of us don't read Homeric Greek. Kudos to those out there in the

audience who do, but I don't. So how do you go about this project of translating these ancient poems into English? Many people have done it, but you're instantly faced with so many choices when you translate work like this. For one thing, the world was different in Homeric Greece. The ideas about how nature worked, the ideas about how people dealt with each other, were different, but also, as you notice, while reading or listening to the poems, there are so many similarities. You know, we still have a lot in common with our ancient Greek predecessors, but also it's a poem, right? Poems have meters, or at least they have organization, they have some structure there that prose doesn't have. How do you translate both the meanings of the words,

the connotations, as well as the denotations, and the metrical spirit of the poem into a English. That's one of the reasons why so many people have tackled the problem. One of the most recent and influential is today's guest, Emily Wilson, who has translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey in a way that she aims to make the poems give us the same feeling now that they might have given the audience in ancient Greece. That is to say, not something that is manifestly archaic in form, because it wouldn't have seemed archaic to the ancient Greeks, right? Something that is a stirring story that gets you that is not colloquial and chatty and sort of cliched, but is modern contemporary how you think people might reasonably talk with their vocabulary. And in a way that

lends itself to being read out loud when Homer, who may or may not have existed as a single person, but as a concept of Homer, when he was writing these poems, they were translated by an oral tradition, right? People spoke them out loud in ceremonies and only later were they written down. So capturing that spirit is an important part of the translator's interest. So it's a great conversation because we're talking about Homer, we're talking about ancient Greece, we're also talking about poetry and translation, and we're talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey, these two wonderful stories that still have a lot to teach us. The classics, they're classic for a reason. So let's go. Emily Wilson, welcome to

the Mindscape podcast. It's lovely to be here. I want to start with maybe you get this all the time. I don't know. Which is your favorite, the Iliad or the Odyssey? I do get it all the time and it's hard to say. I mean, whichever I'm working on is my favorite. If I'm teaching the Iliad, then that's definitely my favorite. I think in my harder parts, maybe the Iliad is my even more favorite, but I love both of them very, very much. It's kind of amazing to me because they are so different. And let's, for the audience, just talk about the idea that these are written by a person named Homer, which is probably not true. No modern scholar really believes that it was just one person who sat down and wrote them. How did these two poems come to be? Yes, I mean, there are modern scholars who think it was a single person who composed them, but they weren't an author in the sense that Jane Austen was an author,

because they weren't making up characters and stories from scratch. There was an oral tradition in the Greek-speaking world for several centuries. So the Greek-speaking world had no literacy after the fall of Mycenaean civilization. So these stories about a great city called Troy and a great expedition of Greek warriors, coming from all over the Greek-speaking world to fight in the mythical Trojan War, these heroes called Odysseus and Achilles and Hector, and memorializing them through a particular poetic technique

using a meter called dactylic hexameter, all of that was traditional and something that illiterate, bards, singers, had been doing for generations before whoever it was, whether that's a single person or several people, got together to use the new technology, of writing, which came about in the mid-eighth century BCE, the Greek-speaking world borrowed from the Phoenicians a set of ways of writing down their language in the mid-eighth century BCE.

So sometime after that, probably in the 7th century, either one or more people composed these monumental written poems out of this long oral tradition. And just to put it in absolute context here, so the poems are written down hundreds of years before Plato and Aristotle, who are hundreds of years before, you know, Jesus and the beginning of the Roman Empire. Exactly. So mid-seventh-century-ish is the rough date of the Homeric poems. Plato was from the fourth century. And of course, Jesus is, as we know from our calendar, the year dot kind of thing. Yes. So Jesus was a contemporary of people like Seneca, Roman Empire. And so the idea is, so I actually,

Let me take that back. He wasn't a contemporary of Senegal. Jesus was a contemporary, you know, people like the Roman emperors, the beginning of the Roman Empire. Augustus, et cetera, right. Augustus, exactly. So I didn't realize there were still, you know, people who held out for the idea that Homer was one person who did compose in the sense of, you know, put together these poems in the way that they're currently written. Or was it was the idea that Homer was just the last person?

to have these poems before they were written down? Like he dictated them and then he gets his name on them? Yes, so the capital H, capital Q, Homeric question is a whole cluster of questions about that kind of thing, about was it one individual, was it two individuals, one for the Odyssey, one for the Iliad, how exactly was the transition from oral tradition to monumental written poem done?

Was it through somebody dictated? That's actually quite a popular scholarly theory that there was a bard who sang the poems to a scribe who wrote it down, or else maybe there was an oral poet who became literate. I would want to just flag that what existed before these written poems wasn't the same as these poems, because these are far too long for a single occasion performance, right? I mean, I know that you were saying you've listened to the audiobook. The audiobooks three of these poems are over 20 hours long.

Yes. It's much too long, for I, after dinner, we're having a cup of wine and listening to the poet sing a one or two heroic tales. I mean, it seems to me that the existence of the new technology of writing inspired one or more people to realize they could do something different with the oral tradition from what had been done before. And the sort of complexity of narrative composition circles of patterns within patterns within patterns, presumably that style of oral storytelling where you echo one scene with another scene already was part of the tradition. But to do it on this level of complexity and several hours later, here's a story that echoes the one that you might have heard many hours before.

You need writing in order to make that replicable. You can't just do it and then repeat it the exact same way the next day. Can we even talk about something like the intention of the author if this is a bunch of stories that came together in different ways? We can talk about what exactly is going on in the texts we have. I mean, the intention of the author, given that we can't, you know, bring them back through necromancy and many time machines. And even if we could, I mean, people talk about whether we can, there's a separation

between the intentionality of the living poet and the living novelist and what their text says, right? So it's not that it's a problem unique to Homer. Fair enough. And I guess if we put ourselves back in the world of when Homer was around, what was the typical performance like? Was it a theater that you went to to hear something long? Or was it literally like, you know, this is what we did after dinner. Someone was tasked with the idea of treating us with a few stanzas. Yes. So, I mean, again, this is a much debated scholarly question. And the question is different depending on which period between. talking about. But all over, I mean, throughout antiquity, the Homeric poems were experienced in oral performance, and oral performances probably including all of the above. We know that rapsodes. So a rhapsode

is somebody who performs traditional oral poetry, not making it up on the spot, but presumably using a script to memorize and then perform some famous bit or some highlights out of the Homeric poems for a particular performance. And that included performances at religious and civic festivals. We know that from a pretty early date, the Homeric poems were used in poetry competitions. So here's one Rhapsod doing his showpiece celebrity performance, doing all the voices, and then here's another one,

and now the judges are going to decide who gets the crown, who did the best Homer performance this year. And then also, presumably in more private, the drinking party kinds of contacts. And all of the above, I think, is what I would say about what the contexts were in which people heard these poems. So would the typical Greek person on the street be more or less familiar with the content of the poems? Absolutely, yes. I think we can very definitely say everyone knew these stories, yes.

I mean, we know that these stories, of course, we get these stories represented on Greek phases from all over the Greek-speaking world. people knew these characters and these stories. And was it, were they at the time just considered, in particular the Iliad and the Odyssey, just part of a whole bunch of stories that were common? Or was it already clear like this is the best we got? It was, I mean, again, it's the question of when exactly that happened is much debated. But yes, so we're told that at the time of Pysistratus,

who was a tyrant in Athens in the 6th century, that Pysistratius instituted that at his, civic festivals, it would be the Homeric poems, as opposed to other parts of the epic or cyclical heroic tradition that would be used in the festival competition, in the festival poetry competition. So that's just an understanding of something, again, we can debate, was that the Iliad and the Odyssey exactly as we have them, or was there, were those poems revised, edited in some way or other over the next couple of centuries. But there was a sense, certainly, from a pretty early stage,

that the Homeric poems are different. And by the time we get Plato and Aristotle, there's a really clear sense that Homer is special. And so, for instance, in Aristotle's poetics, he discusses the best kinds of plot and insists that the Homeric poems are different from the broader cyclic tradition of dactylic hexameter heroic poetry,

and partly because their plots are better. For instance, The Odyssey doesn't tell you every single myth about Odysseus. There are tons of myths about Odysseus. The poet of the Odyssey is smart enough to leave most of them out. Same way with the Iliad, it leaves most of the stories out. So in order to have a really tight beginning, middle, and end and a focused narrative, the Homeric poems, despite their monumental length, are very, very selective about which stories they tell about the whole myth.

And they do it in this sophisticated way where it's not, let's begin at the beginning and continue till the bitter end. It's let's do stories within stories and moving back and forth. I think actually that's super noticeable to just me. I love listening to the audiobooks of these things. I think that's the way that they were meant to be. And they're good stories. They grab you. You want to hear what happens next.

There's Odysseus arriving on Ithaca and he's kind of lingering. You're like, come on Odysseus. I want to see what happens. Yes. Exactly. There's some suspense because you kind of know he's going to come out of his disguise at some point. But it leaves you hanging until book 22. It's a very long wait where you're rooting for something to happen.

And then it'll happen. Which I think isn't always characteristic of storytelling of that time, right? Like they hadn't quite figured out those, you know, Hollywood techniques for grabbing your attention. You know, I think we project back onto an antiquity. an idea of surely because they were ancient, they must have been primitive and unsophisticated in their narrative techniques. And I really don't think that's necessarily true. I mean, the cyclic poems that we have evidence of, we only have them in fragmentary form, were composed later than the early ad and the Odyssey. So I don't think there's actually evidence to say

at the earliest periods Greek storytelling or Greek poetic technique was less sophisticated than it became later. I think we actually have evidence of the opposite. And of course, the whole spectrum of different things because, you know, some people are better at telling stories than others. And some people are better poets than others. And that's always been the case. Well, it's still true today. I remember I used to live in L.A. for a long time. A lot of my friends were screenwriters. And one of them said, you know, people wonder why Hollywood movies are so popular compared to like art films or European movies or whatever. And it says, because we follow Aristotle. We do the storytelling techniques that have been known for a long time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also that oral thing does affect the words, right? I mean, there's, you'll know better than me, so help us out here. But the style of the poems themselves are written to help people remember them and, you know, have the interesting part of the sentence be at the beginning of it, for example.

Absolutely, yes. So we can talk about multiple different areas with that, both in terms of the ability of Greek to put the important word at the beginning. So maybe we could just do a sort of case study is the beginning of the Eliad, which begins with the theme of the poem, which is menis, Roth. So meninaeida, there are, per lea do a de laos, o la men, manan. her muria caoos algea feca. Polas divisthiomus, aides proeeptsin, her o'o, autuste her loria duke

and eunessin. Oyo noisita daidae deus deleotobulah. Exuddered to proetiae ternertre, and treidest te anaccentron and dios Echilius. Sorry, I didn't mean to the whole thing,

but that's called the proem. And the Iliad and the Odyssey each do this thing of beginning with the word that's the topic of the poem. So the orsi begins, Andra, my ennepa. I'm not to do the whole thing of that,

but Andra, meaning man. And with the Iliad, it's menes, meaning divine wrath. So the wrath of Achilles is quasi-divine. I feel like I didn't actually answer your question, though, which was about oral technique. So that, what I just said, can apply to Greek that's composed

not orally as well. It's a highly-inflated language. so it's possible to put the object at the beginning of the sentence. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects composed out of traditions from all over the Greek-speaking world. So it's this very artificial poetic language. It has a meter, as I hope you could hear when I was just saying a few lines. It has a rhythm to it. It was designed to be sort of chanted rather than just sort of spoken as if it's a novel.

prose is a later invention in the history of literature. And also it has these formulaic phrases as you were hinting at. So, for instance, Achilles is usually swift-puted Achilles or Achilles son of Pellius or both, depending on which position in the line he is, so that it makes it easier to fit the metre. And it also means that if you're composing orally, you don't have to stop and think about, so what adjective shall I use for Achilles this time?

Because you've only got two choices. That is going to be Achilles, son of peter. or it's going to be swift-putted Achilles, depending on which you need to pull up a half-line. And similarly, about almost every object in the Homeric universe. So, you know, sponges are porous, and ships are well-balanced, or they have rowing boat benches on them, and so on. And then on the sort of slightly larger level of types of scenes, there were also just things that you can plug in whenever you do a banqueting scene or a animals getting sacrificed scene or guidance. on the battlefield going to slaughter a lot of people kind of scene, or an arming scene, or a stranger shows up at the gates

and there's going to be hospitality scene, if it's the Odyssey. Those kinds of things always have a pretty much preset set of components, now it I believe, and then the poet can decide in each occasion which of the elements am I going to put in here, and how can I make it fun for the audience by using the conventions, but also every time messing with them in some way. So no two hospitality scenes are exactly the same. In the case of the Iliad, all those battlefield sequences, you don't have the same part of the body pierced twice in a row.

Somebody is going to be stabbed through the lungs. Next time you're going to have someone have their tongue sliced off. Next time we're going to have to go through the ears. You have to have variety within tradition. Well, I think, and you also answered something that I've been wondering about for decades in my life, about, as you may mentioned, poetry seems to have come before prose in the history of narrative. And that just always seemed weird to be because poetry sounds like it's an extra layer of constraint over prose. But if you think that it's because we started this as part of an oral tradition rather than a

written one, then maybe it makes much more sense. It's easier to remember poetry. It's easier to remember. And also, if we think of literature as Marx language, and if you're I think if you're hearing everything out loud, what's marked about how are we talking right now? It's not marked. And so it takes extra levels of sort of thinking through what language is and extra layers of technology to figure out how can we make prose something ornate and marked in the way that poetry has always been because there are markers of poetry that have to do with meter, with sound, with the speakability and performability of it.

Do you find yourself talking in iambic pentameter just by accident sometimes? I sometimes do, yes. I don't know. I'm not going to show off like that. Not intentional. Okay, very good. Okay, so at this point, I guess we should tell some of the audience, if they're not super familiar, what happens in the plot of these stories.

I think that many events in the stories are individually familiar, but the Ilya and the Odyssey just amazed me because they're so different from each other and so compelling in their own ways. So explain to us. you know, what the focus is. Yeah, they're both so different from each other and so complementary. I mean, I think they really invite reading together because they're both long poems about the Trojan War. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War,

but as we've already hinted, it's a weird poem about the Trojan War because it doesn't tell you what happened at the beginning, how did this war get started? We're assumed to already know that, of course, the mythical Trojan War, began when Paris Prince of Troy abducted Helen from her Spartan Greek husband, Menelaus, and took her with him back to Troy.

And then the Greeks got together, Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon, got a whole bunch of Greek warriors together to make war on the rich city of Troy, which is in what's now Turkey, and sail there, besieged the city for 10 years, eventually sack it, using. the wooden horse do all kinds of terrible things in the course of sacking the city, enslaving the women. Then they sail home

and the gods, because they've done terrible things in the course of the sack of the city, curse the journey's home. So the Iliad and the Odyssey sort of take that whole body of myth and find what I think already at the time

in the 7th century was an original and weird take on it. The Iliad focuses not on the sort of famous bits of the beginning of the war or the fall of the city, but on a time, like a month and a half, that isn't either the beginning or the end. It's the start of the 10th year of the war.

And it focuses on a quarrel between two Greek warriors, Achilles and Agamemnon, in the course of which Achilles gets furious with Agamemnon for taking from him the woman that he's been trying to enslave. So Achilles, who's the son of a sea goddess and thinks he should get, the maximum amount of honor out of any of the warriors, because he's the best at running and throwing spears, feels he's been dissed in public among his fellow warriors.

So he asks his sea goddess mother, Thetis, to help him get his honor back. And Thetis, with the help of Zeus, ensures that while Achilles is sitting sulking in his tent, refusing to fight, the Greeks will suffer an enormous massacre at the hands of the Trojans. So the Trojan warrior Hector is on the rise for the first two-thirds of the Iliad, killing the Greeks. And it's only when Achilles realizes very much too late that his prayer to have the Greeks be massacred, he wasn't thinking the Greeks would include anyone he actually cares about. But it turns out he does care about just one Greek, which is his dearest companion, Petroclus, who begs to go out wearing Achilles' armor as sort of his second self.

to try to fight Hector off from the ships. And of course, we can sort of see it coming, but it's still heartbreaking when it happens. Hector kills Petroclus. And then, inspired by that grief and by a transformed version of his original rage, Achilles returns to the battlefield to fight Hector and to try to keep on destroying as many Trojans as possible

until he himself dies. And the poem sort of ends not with Achilles' death, but with a transformation of his rage into something else, into a recognition of his own mortality and of the temporary value that human institutions of grief can provide. And he has a meeting with Hector's father, Priam, who comes to beg for his son's body back from the person who killed him.

And Achilles gives Hector back. So Hector, who's been leaving home throughout the poem, has a kind of homecoming. journey at the end of the Iliad, even though he's, of course, dead when he comes home. And so the Odyssey sort of complements this story about a warrior who's separated from his people, but then eventually finds a way back to community with a focus on Odysseus, who also, like Achilles, has issues with honour. And I said a couple of minutes ago that there were all these myths about the homecoming journeys

of the Greeks from the mythical city of Troy. the Odyssey takes the longest possible homecoming journey, which is the homecoming journey of Odysseus, which lasts for 10 years because he spends seven years, shacked up with one goddess, another year shacked up with another, and then in the course of his journeys by sea, Poseidon curses his journey because Odysseus has blinded Poseidon's son,

the Cyclops Polyphemus. So half the poem is Odysseus, trying to get back to Ithaca. And then the second half of the poem, Odysseus, is back on Ithaca. But the poem is showing us that a homecoming journey is a lot more than a geographical thing. It's also about reestablishing relationships with every member of Odysseus's household and being recognized in all these different ways. So it's a whole sequence of different recognitions with Odysseus as, in a way, different selves.

And that question of what does it mean to come home? What is an identity? What is a person and how are we different in different communities is at stake in the Odyssey? Whereas in the early out, I guess, there's sort of these big themes about grief and rage and isolation and community. There is a movie coming out. I don't know if you're familiar with it about the last part of the Odyssey with Ray Fines in it. I saw an announcement about that. I mean, I don't think it's available yet, right?

I don't think it's quite out yet. Yes. Yes. I'm excited to see that. Yeah. It's one of those, you know, cautiously optimistic kind of things. They could be terrible. Yes, it could be great.

Well, fine. It's great. Yes, it would be fun. But yeah, so this is, has anyone suggested that this difference between the two poems is part of the reason why we suspect Homer is not just one person? Because they're so different. I mean, the Iliad, even though they are complementary, just like you said, and maybe it does make sense to read them together. but or listen to them together. But the Iliad is very warlike, very masculine.

Achilles is exactly sort of the action hero stereotype, but kind of mopey about it. And simple, I think, is fair to say, whereas the audits. I think Achilles is very sophisticated. He's the, you know, he plays the liar. He's singing the stories of heroes. His language is full of metaphors. So, you know, he's a poet as well as a fighter.

I think he's complex, but in a different way from Odysseus. Completely bare. I guess what I was thinking about is just he is mopey. You know, he does. Yes. Well, when we first meet Odysseus, what is he doing? Well, yeah, that's true. He's all depending on.

He's sitting beside the sea and crying. For seven years, he was, yeah, just, you know. Fair enough. Okay, okay, that's a very good point. But the lessons maybe, I don't know. Is Homer trying to give us lessons in these stories, do you think? So maybe going back to the first question about the complementarity. Scholars talk about something called Monroe's law,

which is that the stories don't repeat. And people often argue that maybe that means that either they are by the same person or that at the very least, whoever composed the Odyssey knew the Iliad. So that it's composed with an knowledge that, you dear audience, I don't want to bore you. to give you something different. And if you've already heard everything from the Iliad, I want to show you something else. So lessons, I mean, in antiquity, knowing the Homeric poems was an essential part of what was

called Pidae of cultural education, both on the level of children sort of learning about narrative from the Homeric poems, orators learning about rhetoric from the Homeric poems, generals learning about military technique by arguing about, did Nestle did the white thing there or how does a council meeting operate? In all of those ways, the Homeric poems were essential cultural texts. But of course the Homeric poems don't include

anything like the Ten Commandments, say. They don't have lessons that are sort of directly given as if from a divine authority figure that you can sort of write down and say, oh, yes, that shows that I must do this. Insofar as there are lessons, they're spoken by particular characters on particular occasions. And of course, one can always debate whether or not that lesson is the right lesson. And the Greek speakers in antiquities certainly did debate those things. I mean, you probably

know, many of these listeners probably know that in Plato's Republic, the semi-ideal republic envisioned by Plato's Socrates includes casting out homo, and the tragic poets from this semi-ideal republic because these poems teach you the wrong lessons. They teach you to sympathize with infuriated or grief-stricken heroes, heroes in an ancient sense, not necessarily heroes in a modern sense, larger-than-life characters who are doing terrible things and making terrible choices.

And the poems aren't necessarily inviting you, you know, to do anything other than feel for them and to have a lot of feelings, which if you're Plato in that text, you don't necessarily think those feelings are a good idea for the balance of the civic polity. Well, that's a feature of good art, right? I mean, it's portraying complicated people and the lessons if they're there. So, I mean, you gave the answer that I was hoping that you would give from my perspective, which is that one can get lessons, but it's not because the work of, art itself is saying, here's the lesson, you better learn it. Absolutely not. And of course, the lesson is partly about you must go through this journey and you must go through this journey collectively with other people and then you must argue

about it and figure out what it means together and it may mean different things depending on what's the community that's telling this story together and how does this conversation go. And it might mean that it means something different for you than it does for me. And then we have a language to talk to each other about really difficult things through these poems. And it's interesting that so many of the specific issues about honor, duty, whatever, are still absolutely human and familiar to us, even though the world of over 2,500 years ago, 3,000 years ago, is so very different in many ways. Yes. I mean, people still have societies. People still care about other people and also very often feel furious with other people.

We still have mortality. We still have grief. We still have loss. We still have, how do we deal with people who aren't like us? And how do we, if we lose something or someone, what do we do? Is there any kind of compensation for loss that is okay? And if there isn't, then what do we do? Do we just go around and kill everyone else?

Because we're so furious. None of those questions have gone away, even though the terms in which these poems set them up, are, of course, completely different from modern terms. Well, one thing you just can't miss when you're listening to the stories is, how present the gods are. That's very different, right? I mean, it's not a superhero story. It's almost naturalistic, but the gods are there pushing people around.

Is this how Greeks of that time would have thought of the world? Or is that like, oh, no, this is a story, so I get it. It's both, right? I mean, there were, of course, cults and worship and, you know, these gods are not just literary fictions. I think we may be tempted to think of the gods in the Homeric poems as this is just made up for the sake of the story in the same way that kryptonite is just there for the sake of the story and nobody has a religious festival in which we talk about kryptonite. We know about that only from comic books and the movies. Whereas in the case of Athena or Hera, there are real temples, there's real religious practice, there's real sacrifices, and there are real particular parts of the weak-speaking world where this city has a temple, this island. is particularly sacred to this or that goddess.

So that also gives particular passages in the Homeric poems a different resonance for some audiences versus others. But at the same time, the question of exactly how literal should we be about the gods are exactly as they are represented in the poems. Of course, one can debate that. And the question also in different periods of Greek history, there were developing views about the gods. And I also think it's a mistake to, I mean, another common mistake is to think, because there are gods who are supremely powerful and yet not omnipotent, does that take away from human agency?

The poems are very clear that it doesn't, right? They're very clear that at the same time as the gods who are far more visible and tangible to humans than they tend to be in real life. I mean, I personally never seem to have direct encounters with Athena, even if I can sort of censor somewhere around. the corner. I never actually get to look into her bright eyes. But in the poems, people do have those experiences. And yet that doesn't mean that they're not still making choices. I mean, if you think about the first encounter between Achilles and Athena in the Iliad, Achilles is tempted to kill Agamemnon because he's so angry with him. And at the moment that he's about to draw his sword to kill him, Athena grabs him by the hair and speaks to him and says, we I've come down because heroes worried about this.

We don't want you killing each other. Think a moment. And so he thinks about it and then he doesn't do it. But it's not that he hasn't thought about it. He does think about it. And his decision making is there and he's also persuaded by the goddess. So it's not that he's a puppet of the goddess. And I think that's really important to bear in mind that when the gods intervene,

they very often do it in the same way that human. humans intervene with each other. They do it by persuasion rather than by force. And the gods are often, I mean, they're obviously super powerful, but they're like you said, not omnipotent. In fact, there was, there's even a couple of examples. Was it Diophonies who, you know, fought a couple gods and did okay? Diomedes. Diomedes. Diomedes in book five of the Iliad is a great hero who in some ways sort of parallels Achilles in his quasi-divine capacities to take on gods and be as close as a mortal warrior can be to a god. And yet, he's not immortal. He manages to fight against the gods, the two gods who are the least

honored by the other gods, who are the closest to being sort of divine representations of elements of human impulse that we may not like about ourselves, which is lust and aggression. So it's Ares, God of War, and Aphrodite God of lust. And Diomedes fights against both of them, and Aphrodite goes whining back to her mother when she gets a little raise on her wrist. And it's sort of funny, but it's also sort of fascinating in the way that it showcases

what does it mean to be so close to being divine and yet we're not? And even more than the personalities and the interventions of the gods, it's kind of an enchanted world. You say at one point, I think in the intro to the Iliad, I think it was,

that you are careful in the translation not to treat a dead body as a body. It was still considered to be a person. You were dead, but you were still that person. Exactly. I think that's really important. I mean, this sort of gets back to the question of just how the themes are so recognizable and so human, and yet the imaginary world isn't quite the same as ours. And we tend to think of the dead as a different category from the living, whereas in the

Homeric poems, they're not. The dead want the same thing. They want honor. And the dead Petroclus or the dead Hector is still the dead Hector. It's not corpse of. So when the Greeks are battling over the body, what we might call the body of Patroclus, they're battling in the language the poem uses over Patroclus. And similarly, Pryam takes his son, Hector, back to his family.

It's not a corpse who was once his son. It's his son. And I don't know the theology well enough. My impression from The Odyssey is that most of these dead heroes are to be found in Hades after they're dead. Is it a heaven and hell thing or does everyone go to hell? It's an afterlife thing, but it's also a complex kind of afterlife thing because the mind-body dualism that we're used to, in the sort of post-plotonic mind-body dualism that we're used to, has an eye. idea that the self is the immaterial solely thing, soul-like thing. So in Greek, that's the

psookab from which we get the psyche, right, as in psychology. In the world of the Homeric poems, as in this, just the, as you can tell just from the first few lines of the Iliad that I think I only said in Greek, but maybe people weren't following it. So in the first few lines of the Iliad, we get the line that, as a result of the wrath of Achilles. I'm just going to read you that line in my translation for a second, so you can see what I mean. So the wrath of Achilles caused the Greeks a measurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades and made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds. So the souls, the Psiukai, are sent to Hades. The men are eaten by the dogs.

There's a distinction between the people themselves, those are the ones lying on the battlefield being eaten by animals. It's horrific. And then there's this fluttering gray thing that exists and will continue to exist in Hades. And if the man himself gets a proper honorable burial as Petroclos begs Achilles to give him what he appears to him in that sort of quasi dream vision later on in the Iliad, then they get to have the honorable time in the afterlife, but it's dependent on the burial of the man himself, which is the physical man. So that question of what is the relationship between the physical self

and the sukkah is somewhat different from how we conceptualize it because it's not so clear where is the real you, right? Yeah, no, that's very, very helpful because I would not get that just from getting the poem, but yes, that does make perfect sense. Yes. As you say, so the book 11 of The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus encountering the souls, the Psyukai of his dead companions. So we get something also in that about this question because Achilles gets Achilles, Odysseus's old frenemy meets him. And they have this discussion about whether Achilles is happy because he got to live and die by honor. And Achilles famously says that he would rather live and be the hired man of someone poor on earth than be the king over all the numberless dead.

There's something pale and lesser about being apsuka in the underworld. Though, of course, Achilles is also happy to hear about the honor of his son, Neoptolemus, who turned out to be an even more brutal killer than Achilles. And so that makes Achilles glad and he's able to stride happily across the Elysian fields. Going back to your question about heaven and hell, there were different areas within Hades, it seems, right? There are rivers in the underworld which segregate the different parts. There's the Elysian fields where the heroes who've achieved honor and have honorific burial can live forever being heroes. I like the idea that the afterlife is somehow lesser. I mean, it never made sense to me in Christian theology that heaven was so great and yet we don't want to die.

But this version makes perfect sense, right? Like, you know, the life that we have right now is the important part. Yes, yes, it is. So we didn't, I guess one thing I wanted to get, because it's so interesting to me, for those who are not familiar with The Odyssey, is the character of Odysseus, because, you know, one of the most fascinating characters in literature ever, but certainly in ancient literature. And they, you know, that partly because the poetry needs to emphasize the same thing over

and over again, but man, we are told a lot about how clever he is. Yes, we are. And he's clever in a particular way about problem solving, right? And about encountering weird situations and being able to solve his way out of them. And I'm not sure exactly where you want to go with this, but he told both about cleverness and about multiplicity is really important, I think. Yeah, I guess, I mean, what is, if you needed to tell someone who hadn't read the poem, Who is this Odysseus person? How would you describe him?

So I'll be talking to somebody who has read the Iliad and hasn't read the Odyssey or somebody. Nothing at all. They've read nothing. Whoever these people are. In any case. So he's a storyteller and he's making up stories about himself and with himself all the time. He, in contrast, as I said already that Achilles is usually described as swift-footed and or son of Pileas. in the case of Odysseus, he has many, many, many formulaic epithets.

So most characters only have one or two. Achilles is swift. He goes directly to the point. He goes fast to what he wants to say. He's going fast on the road to death. Odysseus is not going fast anywhere. He's going roundabout and he's going to be in disguise as many different things. Or maybe the many different things are what it is to be Odysseus.

And also, in contrast to everything, every other Homeric character may be, especially Achilles. Odysseus appears in disguise and not with his own name, and he's willing to do that. And so that's also the key to his survival is about this ability to be in hiding and to say his name is nobody and to appear as a beggar, rather than be sort of constantly saying as every character, every hero in the Iliad wants to be saying their name all the time,

have everyone be saying their name all the time for the rest of human history. and to build monuments that say their name, whereas Odysseus is willing to have his name not be said in order to survive and eventually get his name said. He has, so one of his most important characteristics as well as the cleverness is the patience. Yeah, that's a very good point. And the name thing, like we said before, it doesn't go away. It makes me think of the wire and all the characters on the streets in the wire who up into Marlowe at the end. And he's like, you know, say my name. This is the most important single thing in the world.

Yeah. R-E-S-P-U-C-T. We all want it. Exactly. And you describe very accurately, Odysseus, as complicated, but you got flak for that. Oh, my gosh. I mean, in a way, I see that as a success because it got people talking about translation. And I think people sometimes read the Iliad in the Odyssey or read texts in translation in general without thinking about the fact that this is not actually.

actually the poem that was originally composed, and the translator made some choices. And so I wanted to make a marked choice that would generate a conversation, partly because I already said that the Odysseus has many different formulaic epithets. He is polymethes. He's very wily. He's polymachnos. He's very problem-solvey. He's polutlas. He's very patient. He's also, and this is a very unusual epithet for Odysseus, in that first line of the Odyssey, he's polytropos. He's very twisty or very circling, or there are many turns to him or many disguises.

And it seems to me that the choice of that word in that line is an invitation to think about the poem as well as the protagonist. So I wanted a word that's a single word that's going to fit into a rhythmic pentameter, that's ideally the same length as the original, which is four syllables, and that will speak to what is the poem and who is its protagonist, not going to tell you everything about that,

but you're going to have some questions and you're going to remember this word. And so I felt complicated was actually my only possible thing I could do with it. Well, it does. I love the fact that, you know, translations are translations and their works of art for their own sake

and those are different. And so I thought this might be fun or this might end up being very embarrassing, but I thought that to compare different ways of translating that I would read the opening of the Iliad in two different relatively modern translations, and then you would read yours. Does that sound like fun?

We can do that, yes. Okay, so here I have Latimore, Richmond Latimore, this is a famous one. Sing goddess, the anger of Pellius' son Achilles, and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades, strong souls of heroes,

but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time, when first there stood in division of conflict, Atreus's son, the Lord of Men, and brilliant Achilles. And then we have Robert Fagles, who accompanied me, not him personally, but his translations on a cross-country trip

when I was listening to, I think it was Ian McKellen who narrated this. Rage, goddess, sing the rage of Pellius' son, Achilles, murderous, doomed that caused the Achaean's countless losses, hurling down to the house of death, so many sturdy souls. Great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds. And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin muse, when the first two broke and clashed, Agamemnon, Lord of Men, and Brilliant Achilles. And it's interesting because they're clearly the same stuff, the same substance. And I have preferences for different lines and different ones of them,

even though I've never read the original Greek. But why don't you, read your version. Sure. Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles son of Pileus, which caused the Greeks so measurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades and made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds. And so the plan of Zeus unfolded, starting with the conflict between great Agamemnon, Lord of Men, and glorious Achilles. Yeah, you're better at it than I am. I think that you have a future doing. I like having it up.

You have practice. So talk about the differences. First, I guess, have you in the process of being a translator for these things? Is it your duty to either read other translations, or do you think it's better to try to avoid them? It's my duty to look at them and know them when I'm doing the book proposal, when I'm figuring out, you know, is there a, is it? there any point in spending six years in my life doing this because I have to know and I have to persuade the publisher and the second and third readers that they send it to that I'm not doing the exact same thing that Robert Fagel's of Richmond Latimore did because otherwise what's the point in doing

that, right? But also that I'm going to be doing something responsible with the original that is going to be truthful about some elements of the original that might be inaudible or illegible if you only read this or that existing one. So I need to know about, need to know about them from that perspective. And of course, in the course of my, I don't know, how long I've been at this, like 30 years of teaching these poems in translation as well as in the originals, of course, I've used several of these in the classroom. And I've seen what seems to work, what doesn't seem to work. But then once I've done the book proposal and done my little sample bit of translation, I then put them away for the next five years, because if I'm stuck on something and if I'm thinking, how could

I make this line work, here's this phrase, which is so beautiful and easy in the original, and yet I can't seem to make it come clear in English, if I then look and see, so what did Stanley Lombardo do with this, you know, maybe I like what he did. And in that case, I've ruled out something that otherwise I might have thought of by myself and felt all right about. So now I don't look at them while I'm working on it. With the exception that with the Iliad in particular, I spent a lot of time agonising about the less common names and where the most natural place to put the stress would be for an English speaker. So I did a little bit of dipping into not the 20th century free verse ones, because there's no use for this, but the 18th century

ones like Pope and Cooper, because of course, their metrical verse, so I can tell, you know, where were they putting the stresses. But of course, that was also used to us, because they do things like diomede and nobody's going to say diomede for diomedes nowadays. Okay, it's going to just cheat. It was completely useless, but I did waste some time during that. It's always fun to read some poems. That's fair enough, but I guess this is, you know, an extra burden for the translator of a poem. There are meter questions, things like that. I know that you made a leap from dectylic hexameter to iambic pentameter. Why don't we tell the audience what those two

things are and why you made that switch? Yes, I mean, in a way, I didn't make a switch such, because most English translators haven't used Dactylic Hexameter. The only one I know of that's done that consistently is the kind of unknown, but I think it's actually kind of interesting Rodney Merrill translations. So Dactylic Hexameter, as the hex suggests, is six, and as the dactylic suggests is finger. So Dactylos in Greek is a finger. Most people who are lucky enough to have fingers have a, long first joint and then two shorter joints on a finger. So that's what her dactyl is. It's a long and then two shorts. La, la, la. Menina.

So it's, that rhythm, so it's like a musical bar, musical bar. And it's six la la la, with the exception of a, of the final one has to be la la la. So the fifth has to be a dactyl. And the final beat is a spondy. La, la, la, two longs. so you know where the end of the line is if you're just listening.

Good. So that's what a Dactatic Cicameter is. In ancient Greek and Latin are both quantitative meters. I mean, this is too much in the inside of baseball. It's not. It's not. As with the musical bar, it's about the length of the syllables, rather than about the stress.

So there is an interplay between stress and quantity in the music of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, which is different from the primarily stressed way that medical poetry tends to work in the Anglophone tradition. So I felt that I wanted to move away from the common norms of 20th to 21st century ways of translating ancient medical poetry, which is to more or less ignore meter, so both the fagals and the lattermore don't have a regular meter. that arguably composed sort of for the ear and they work okay as audiobooks at least the Pagels.

McKellon is fun, it's fun to listen to. But it's not regular meter, right? So I wanted to honour the fact that the Homeric poems do use regular meter and that they do that partly because of what we talked about at the start of this conversation because these poems are the airs of a long tradition of poetic storytelling.

And so I felt the only way to do that in English is to use the traditional meter for dramatic and narrative verse in English. So even if you're not thinking about meter, you can hear this has the same kind of beats as Shakespeare or Milton, even if I'm not using the same lexicon as Shakespeare. I'm still using that rhythm. And so I'm wanting to cue the reader into something traditional about this. It's not like a novel. It's not prose.

But how much of that choice is this is what Shakespeare and Milton did? This is what we're sort of implicitly used to. Iambic pentameter, da-da-da-da-da-da, and how much of it is the words in English kind of naturally adapt to that? I mean, it's hard to say, right? I mean, I think that an iambic rhythm is definitely much easier in English than a dactylic rhythm, or anapist rhythm come to that, because just having that words with two short or light beats in a row, like that frequently or else two very heavy stress beats in a row.

It's hard to do with the English language. I mean, if you read any of the Rodney Merrill translations, even if you just sort of dip into them, you can see that he's sort of forced into things like he has to call Agamemnon Sion of Atreus. Because if son of Atreus doesn't fit, right? You can't get that into an actonic line unless you think you stress of, which of course you wouldn't.

So it's got to be Sion of Atreus. But I don't want to be as having to say sion of atrius every other line. Because the original doesn't sound sort of weird in that particular way, right? And they using completely unlikely combinations of words. It sounds actually traditional as opposed to this sort of made up. I mean, of course it's an artificial poetic language, but it's a traditional artificial language. And this isn't very important how it sounds, because I think that I remember reading that one of your ideas in doing the translation. was you wanted the impression that the modern reader gets from it to be kind of analogous

to the impression that the Greek listener would have had back in the day. And many translations sound, you know, either floral or archaic or overly ponderous. Yes, I mean, I made me very happy to hear that you're listening to the audiobooks because just the fact of listenability and read aloud ability, performability, is really important to me. And also, just the fact that we haven't really talked about the fact that there were multiple different voices, different speakers. And before I took on the process of doing the Homeric translations, I'd worked a lot on tragedy. I've written quite a lot about tragedy. I'd done some Seneca tragedy translations, and I've done some Europlies and Sophocles as well. I wanted to bring out

the proto-traumatic qualities of the Homeric poems, as well as the fact that they're metrical and that they have this extraordinary sound. And then I also wanted to lean into poetic techniques that the originals do, that English can also do. Even beyond the fact that there's meter, there's also a lot of alliteration. So in those first few lines, Pallas, Psyukas, proyapsin. So there's this Pah, Pah, P sound. And then there's hero on, heloria. So I wanted to try to echo those things like heroes, Hades,

spoil of dogs, banquet for the birds. I want to lean into the possibilities of alliteration in English, which of course is something that is part of the Anglophone tradition as well. Yeah, I feel like that didn't exactly answer your question, but those are some of the things I wanted to be thinking about in terms of poetic technique. I would much rather you say interesting things and answer my questions. That's perfectly acceptable. That's a good strategy. How do you feel constrained sometimes by the fact that it is a poem? I mean, do you respect the line structure of the poem? Do you want to get the same number of lines? I know certainly some people

just add in whole bunches of words because they think it sounds better. Yes, or else, I mean, I thought I haven't got the Fagel's translation in front of me, but when you read the beginning of that, you can sort of see that he really does add in a lot of words. And in order to, sometimes in order to make things clear, like he does rage, goddess rage, right? Because of course, as I was saying before, he wants to have, the original starts with the object. If you're doing that in English, you can't make clear that rage is the object, not the subject of the sentence, unless you repeat it. He also does, again, I can't do this without having it in front of me, but repeating multiple different possible choices for the destructiveness of the wrath of Achilles, right? He has,

something like deadly and, I can't remember what he does. But I don't feel constrained. Well, at least I find the constraints really interesting and fun to work with. In terms of pacing kinds of questions, I kind of changed my mind between the two poems about that. I felt from the outset that I very much wanted to do what I could to honour the quickness of the Homeric narrative pace and the sense that you get when you're reading the original that you want to hear more, you want to hear more, you want to hear more. There's no point at which you're like, this is kind of boring and the repetitions feel like they're bogging you down. And so I felt what I could do with The Odyssey was to confine myself to the same number of lines

as the original, just to make sure that I wasn't making a translation that feels sagier than the original feels. And that was, I think I learned a lot by doing that. And I think it did kind of work because, not least because the Odyssey has a lot of very polysyllabic words, many of which I felt it was okay to translate a word that's five syllables long by one that's three syllables long. And then I can make the math work, right? If I have polumechanos Odysseus becoming crafty Odysseus, then I can still make a hexameter into a pentameter, and I can still keep it line for line. And there was this sort of puzzle-solving element to doing that. But I got to the

Iliad, I thought I'm going to still try and do that, even though with the Odyssey, I would very often feel I've got a great draft of this book, and then I would go back and realize, okay, I've got to cut a line somewhere. And then I would have to go back and rewrite everything. Of course, everything. I don't just cut a whole line, but I've got to rethink. Is there a patch where I can make a couple of epithets slightly shorter words? Is there a way that I can, you know, change much enduring into stalwart? And then I can save a syllable and so on, that kind of thing.

But in the case of the Iliad, partly because there were just so much. many more names in the Iliad. And of course, Agamemnon is a really long name that will take up half a line. And I can't call him, you know, Mr. Ag, just to say some syllables. So I used more lines for the Iliad translation than the original has. Yeah. And in fact, if I were to do it again, I would let myself be a little bit more lax about the line count with the Odyssey. And maybe one day I'll go back and revise it and let myself have just, you know, maybe five more lines a book. Just a couple more. I don't need a lot. I mean, I like constraints. I think. they're really useful and they force you to think about what exactly is really at stake here and not sort of patch in three different things because you haven't made a decision. It means you have to have a clear voice.

And then there's a very basic question that I have when it comes to something like ancient Greek, which is, are we sure we know what the words mean? Like we can't ask a native speaker, right? Is it all from context? How do we just sort of feel like maybe we don't know and we go with what we know? That's a great question. I mean, we're pretty sure about most of the words because, of course, most words, a lot of words in ancient Greek coexisted with Latin, right? And so there were translations from one to another. There are commentaries. There's a huge amount of later ancient Greek. The case of her the Homeric poems is different because, of course,

we have far less Greek of the archaic period, of the pre-5th century period than we do of all of much later periods. And the question of what exactly was the connotation of this or that word in the 7th or 6th century, we can ask the linguistics, historical linguistics specialists about what did the roots of this word mean in Indo-European

and what exactly was the etymology? But of course there are some words in the Homeric poems that even ancient Homeric scholars, we haven't really talked about the fact the existence of ancient hermoric scholarship. But at the time of the Library of Alexandria, in the third and second centuries, BCE, which is when the first scholarly process

of editing the written hermoric texts and figuring out what goes in this line. Here we have some variant readings. Do we think that's the better one from this manuscript or that one? All of that. Those scholars at that time were also very much fixated on the existence of,

a few words which occur only once throughout the Homeric corpus, which are called the hapax, which means once. So words that are a hapax, you can't get it from where are the other occurrences of this word in Homer? Because it doesn't occur else in Homer. So you're kind of messed up. And there are a few, of course, there are some of those.

And of course, there are context clues, but of course there was also, you know, maybe those context clues aren't telling you the whole story. And then there can be some mystery. I mean, I felt that as a translation, later, in the case of unusual words or words that occur only once or words about which there's some debate in antiquity among the ancient commentators about that, I'm going to have to go with a good scholarly guess and add an end note. And I also can sometimes, you know, use an unusual

word in English if it's a word that was clearly unusual within the context of the Homeric poems. So, for instance, there's a, there are usual words for spears and shields, but there's also here's a weird word for a shield and maybe I can call it a buckler rather than using the shield for the normal word. Things like that I can play around with the possibilities of English. But there's no simple solution to what to do with that as a translator. Do you have any favorite examples of a word?

You would love to be able to go back and ask Homer what he was talking about? There were so many. This is going back to the beginning of the conversation about Was there even a homo and how are we going to interview that person? Yes. Or the Homo committee, if it was the Homo directorial committee. I mean, even just the beginning of the second line, Ulamen, which I translate as cataclysmic, but it's a participle and it suggests disastrous or damned or the commentators from antiquity suggest there's an implication

of the speaker cursing it. Like, God damn it, that terrible wrath. What exactly was the connotation? And is there a difference between the colloquial language connotation or the poetic language connotation? What kinds of, what's the relationship between, I wish this wrath had been destroyed versus this wrath was itself destructive? I think the word probably suggests both.

I don't know how to do that in English, but yeah. And do you, when you're thinking about the contemporary reader, do you allow yourself to lapse into overly contemporary language or do you try to keep it a little bit more timeless? You really phrase that in a very neutral way, like lapse and overly can do it. Yes. I mean, the question of how to make sure it's as clear and legible as the original is, the original, even though we've talked about, the ways it's traditional, it's metrical, it's clearly marked as poetic. It's got all these poetic markers like metre and alliteration and traditional character stories and so on. And yet it's not syntactically complicated. But it's also not slangy.

And yet it's also conveying clear actions and clear emotions. If I had said that wrath, goddamn it, I would think that would be too slangy. And there were cases where, for instance, where warriors speak to each other on the battlefield, and they use terms of affection, do I have them say, hey, buddy, there are translators who do versions of that? I mean, the Stanley Lombardo translations have a ton of sort of late 20th century military slang in them. I find that a little bit of a turn off. I mean, I think it's not registering the ways that this language is, marked as different from regular speech and that these characters are having real feelings,

but they're not speaking in a completely naturalistic way. So I think there needs to be some kind of artifice about it, which includes there's not going to be sort of blasphemy obscenity. People invoke the gods, but they don't say, go damn it. And they don't say, F it, you know. The register is different from the register of, say, Athenian comedy or Roman satire. So I felt there were lots of wrestling with what exactly is the right register within English. And then also what's the right register just sort of emotionally would this character say this?

And have I made it sound as intense in terms of these curses or insults have to sound really intense and like they really land? And yet they don't just sound comically ridiculous. They have to be hyperbolic and yet not totally ridiculous. And even here's this man wailing with grief and slapping his thighs, which is not how we expect men to behave. And yet you have to believe it while you're in the world of the poem. Well, I did notice that because, you know, in my mind, I know there's a movie coming out. I'm wondering how certain things happen.

And, you know, there's a lot of scenes where men are just bawling their eyes out, right? Out of, you know, something. And we don't see that in war movies today. And that's just such a shift of expectation that, it's hard for you. It's hard for the translator to sort of get across the implications, the connotations that the actual Greek audience must have been getting. Right. I mean, also, as we've already said, the actual Greek audience is a lot of different people and buried by time period. And if you're Plato reading that and thinking, oh, no,

he shouldn't be bawling his eyes out. He should get a grip, right? And that's an ancient Greek response to that. And yet there's also a way that within the world of the poems, I don't think we're being invited to think that. I mean, I think we're being invited to see this, to see it as absolutely, if you suffer devastating grief, of course you're going to be rolling around in the dung and bawling your eyes out, because that shows how upset you are. Yeah. Do you think that working as a translator has affected your sort of classic scholarship more broadly? Are you better at reading ancient Greek things now that you've worked hard to translate them in English? I'm not sure

I mean it's hard to say because I've been and I've been reading these poems since I was a teenager I started Greek in high school I've been teaching them for decades I mean I didn't sort of take on these poems

sort of without having written before so I wasn't started from scratch and it's sort of hard to go back to what did I think before but I definitely think that just that process of living this closely with these poems for the last 12 plus years,

working on them every single day and thinking about the connotations of every single word all the time. And then also the process of talking about them to people like you and sort of realizing what questions do people have and how do I make sure that I'm, you know, being honest and respectful to the tradition

and to the poems that I still adore and feel, you know, like I want to keep reading them for the rest of my life. I think it definitely reinforced for me just how great they are and also the ways that the performability. I think I hadn't, of course, I knew in theory and I did kind of know just how essential it is to think about the Homeric poems as performance texts,

but thinking about how to recreate that in English made that alive for me in a different way. And then doing the things like what I just did of reading a little bit of Greek, reading a little bit of my translation, practicing doing that and practicing being a rhapsode, which is, of course, I tried doing different versions of that in sort of pathetic ways in the classroom,

but it's fun to get to do that with different audiences. And it also reinforces to me that audiences like this stuff. It's not just people in antiquity who find it interesting and compelling. So, okay, we're at the end of the podcast, so we can, I'll close on a completely silly, unfair question. You mentioned Jane Austen earlier as an author, who we could identify. And one thing about Jane Austen is there are dozens and dozens of sequels to her books

written by fans. So if you had to write your Homeric epic, like if you had to write your own sequel to the Iliad and the Odyssey, are there any juicy stories out there you think that deserve that treatment? Oh, I love this question. So right now I'm doing something which is not exactly this project, but I'm doing a couple of projects that are a little bit this project. One is a translation of Ovid's Herodies, which in a way is one of the many ancient quasi sequels to the Iliath and the Odyssey. It's

the verse epistles of mythological women writing back to their terrible boyfriends saying how terrible they are. The first one is Phinellope writing to Odysseus saying, what took you so long? And then the third one is Briseus writing to Achilles. And the ridiculous premise is that She thinks Achilles is her boyfriend rather than her enslaver and rapist. It's sort of funny, but it's really dark, as often very dark. Anyway, so I'm doing a translation of that, and it's really fun to be thinking about voice in different ways. It's a different poetic form because it's allergite couplets rather than hexameters. And then I'm also doing a prose retelling of the Trojan war myths that are in the background to the Trojan Wars,

so it's sort of fiction stitched together. but if I was doing an epic poem version, I don't know. I mean, there's a lost tragedy called Palamedes, which is about Palamedes, who supposedly was the inventor of the mythical inventor of the alphabet, who got tricked by Odysseus and killed. And I've often thought, he would be an interesting person to do either a story or an epic poem about,

or rewrite the lost tragedy of Palamedes. It would be cool. All right. I encourage you to do that. That Odysseus, he was very tricksy, wasn't he? He was real tricksy, yes, he really was. We're in a very fun character, yes. Emily Wilson, thanks so much for being in the Mindscape podcast.

Thanks so much.