Concise, fluent English translations of the Odyssey and Iliad have become standard versions. Translation requires finding the least bad compromises after years of careful work. Essays examine the challenges of translation and the pleasures and insights gained from reading classics. Ancient and modern worlds intersect through recurring themes such as war, cruelty, and political turmoil, alongside contrasts that resist treating antiquity as a mirror of the present. Limited surviving material, especially for Sappho, makes reconstruction difficult. Sappho’s legacy shapes understandings of female homosexuality, and feminist readings have elevated her as an icon. Modern references range from literature and film to politics and technology culture.
"Emily Wilson's translations of the Odyssey in 2017 and the Iliad in 2023 are now the standard English-language versions, acclaimed for their conciseness and fluency. Her infatuation with Homer began at the age of eight, when her primary school put on a production of the Odyssey, with her in the role of Athena, and the excitement hasn't worn off. You can question some of the choices she makes in her translations (she questions them herself), but you can't doubt the months and years she has spent finding the least bad compromises."
"Her new book is a series of essays on the challenges of translation and the pleasures and insights to be gained from reading the classics. She is fascinated by how far the ancient world intersects with the modern. Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus and Aristophanes are here but so are Spike Lee, Erica Jong, PG Wodehouse's Jeeves (a last link to the clever servants in Roman comedy) and Boris Johnson (an incompetent drunkard who somehow passed as an intellectual on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek)."
"Continuities between then and now pile up: war, cruelty and political turmoil. But there are also important contrasts and she scolds those who look back on antiquity as a mirror in which we always find ourselves, even when we're not there. With Sappho the difficulty is that so little of the poetry has survived: reconstructing her work is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw."
"Wilson mostly admires Anne Carson's version of Sappho, as performance art on the page, while finding the characterisation of her disembodied and stripped of same-sex desire. The island of Lesbos was one associated with blowjobs the word lesbiazein means to fellate but it's through Sappho that female homosexuality has come to be understood. Feminists have made her an icon,"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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