While Wilson was contemplating the Greeks sickening in their camp, and the Trojans caged behind their city walls, the plague of Covid forced her family of five into lockdown. She didn’t want to push the analogy (“I never thought, ‘Oh, no—Achilles has to order online groceries’ ”), but she was conscious of both how volatile confinement can be and how primal the need for company becomes. “You can either rage at the people you’re stuck with or grow more devoted,” she said.
Wilson teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania and lives near the campus in a rambling old house that she shares with her partner of nine years, David Foreman, an administrator at Swarthmore, and her two school-age daughters, Psyche and Freya. (Her eldest daughter, Imogen, is now in college.) When we met last May, she greeted me at her door in running clothes. I was surprised first by her youthfulness, then by the luxuriance of her tattoos. “I didn’t used to read as a tattoo person,” she told me, as we settled on the deck outside her bedroom, which is painted Aegean blue. “When you get tattooed in places that show, it changes your identity.”
Wilson’s tattoos became visible as she worked on the Iliad. They inscribe her closest relationships: with her children; Foreman; her late mother; her younger sister Bee Wilson, the noted British food writer; plus a pantheon of Greek deities and creatures sacred to them. The birds and flowers are emblems of a tender heart, while the armory of spiky weapons—a spear and a bow on her calves, the thunderclouds of Zeus on her shoulder—are badges of a fighting spirit.
That afternoon, Wilson took me for a walk through a neighborhood of abandoned factories, then along the banks of the Schuylkill River, crossing wild meadows to a glade, a route she’d chosen for its “Iliadic contrast of beauty and desolation.” Her Iliad won’t be the first by a woman, but she considers “the first-woman thing” a sexist distraction: “It slights the many brilliant female scholars who’ve worked on the poems. And no one mentions the gender of the men.” What she didn’t say, though her followers do (the flaws and merits of her Odyssey have been vehemently debated on social media), is that it slights her translations’ real singularity.
“The ancient Greeks teach one to be modern,” the poet and classicist A. E. Stallings observed to me. “They taught that to me and to Emily. It was time to strip away all the mannered layers—the tarnish of centuries—and she does that. Her translations have the freshness of the sky after a storm. Their briskness and simplicity are faithful to the oral tradition, and she brings the poems to a new generation, which struggles to read harder texts and wants clarity.” Wilson feels an acute, almost maternal sense of duty to those lay readers: “They need to trust that I’m telling them the truth, both about the language and the psychology. There are no lazy ways to do it.”
On rare occasions in her Iliad, a word would jar me: “flirty,” “flabbergasted,” “inappropriate.” Or a slangy outburst made me laugh at a dramatic moment: “Stop! You are acting crazy, Menelaus!” But that line is worth pausing to consider precisely because none of Wilson’s predecessors would have written it. Among the notable translations of the past century—by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, Peter Green, Caroline Alexander, Stanley Lombardo, Robert Graves (who pivots from prose to poetry to highlight dramatic moments; there’s a lot of mansplaining in Homerdom)—each has its strengths. Their authors are united in presuming that readers will be “improved,” as pious critics used to say, by their encounter with Homer. But Wilson reminds us that a great storyteller conceived the poems as entertainment. Her language is so vitally urgent that even the Iliad’s endless battle scenes feel, to use an un-Homeric simile, like listening to the Super Bowl on car radio. Stallings said, “Does Emily’s clarity betray that element of the epic register that Matthew Arnold calls ‘nobility’? Some critics think a certain grandeur is missing. But every translation is a compromise, even a great one.”
Wilson’s mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, was an eminent scholar of Elizabethan literature who died in October of complications from Alzheimer’s. Her father is A. N. Wilson, the prolific English writer whose subjects as a biographer include Jesus, Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton, Hitler, and Queen Victoria. When I spoke with him in June, at the British Library, he was researching a life of Goethe. His latest book, “Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises,” is the memoir of a writer’s triumphs and travails. Among the latter, his first marriage set the high-water mark.
The Wilsons met at Oxford. Katherine was a teaching fellow, and Andrew was an undergraduate of twenty, a decade her junior. They married hastily in 1971, when she got pregnant with Emily. “Mom did all the housework and cooking and was always apologetic about it,” Wilson said. Andrew Wilson told me that he found talking to his daughter difficult: “Sometimes she was completely mute, and sometimes she would burst into tears.” Even as a little girl, Emily was conscious of her father’s rage at his vassalage to a family, for which she felt he blamed her: “I was the one who had ruined his young life by being born.” For reasons that are a bit inscrutable under the circumstances, the couple had Bee when her sister was two.
The Wilsons lived in poisonous silence, beneath a veneer of civility. (“We had a fatal gift for politeness,” as Andrew put it.) Emily often locked herself in her room, from which she heard Bee sobbing through the wall. “My parents weren’t listeners,” she said, “so it was hard for me to imagine that I could be heard.” Encouraged by her mother, she took refuge in books, and excelled in school, though she refused to say a word in class. Her other sanctuary was a world of fantasy: “For a year or two, I pretended to be a gorilla. I would thrust my lower jaw out, even though it was painful to walk around that way.” Her other alter ego was an orangutan, which referred to itself in the third person. “It felt liberating to speak in another voice,” Wilson told me. “It drove my parents completely crazy, which is also why I did it.”
When Emily was eight, a perceptive teacher saw through her camouflage and cast her as Athena in a school production of the Odyssey. (The headmaster played the Cyclops, and the children relished poking his eye out.) “It was a turning point in my life,” Wilson writes in the notes to her translation. The experience kindled a love of theatre shared by her mother; it also, she suggests, gave her a model of “human and nonhuman” shape-shifting. “Translators have to be chameleons,” she said, “leaping from a green leaf to a brown one.”
Both sisters told me that they were, at times, hostages to their mother’s depression, though they never doubted her devotion to them. Their father could be charming, but he played favorites capriciously. “One day you were the scapegoat, the next you were his chosen one,” Bee told me, over lunch in Cambridge. “It was a toxic game which served to teach us that love is conditional.” It also served to cast them as foils. In Bee’s telling, she was the “normal” one who loved comics and television, didn’t cause much trouble, and cleared her plate. Emily was the brooding “genius.” At around fourteen, she stopped eating, then coming to the table altogether, though neither parent commented on her blatant anorexia, even when she was living on apples. “As E got smaller, I got larger,” Bee wrote in a poignant essay on sisters and their eating disorders.
How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern
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