With a major motion picture coming out this summer, there’s renewed interest in the 2,700 year old poem “The Odyssey,” and the first woman to translate the ancient Greek text into English is in Iowa this week.
Emily Wilson, a University of Pennsylvania classics professor, spoke last night at the University of Iowa. Wilson has devoted a large portion of her life to teaching students about the two Homeric poems, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” and creating modern translations.
“It took me just over five years and then another six for ‘The Iliad’ and I’m now doing a re-retranslation of ‘The Odyssey’,” Wilson says. “Ultimately, it’s going to take me, maybe 20 years to do both of them with ‘The Odyssey’ done twice.”
The epics tell the story of the Trojan War and the hero, Odysseus, and his ten-year journey to get home to Ithaca. Wilson says she was inspired to tackle the English translation from the original 8th century B.C. Greek, though “The Odyssey” alone has more than 12,000 lines.
Wilson says, “I realized that just reflecting on my experiences teaching this wonderful poem over many years to undergraduates, that the various translations I’d used, there were things that were similar about them that weren’t necessary and weren’t necessarily corresponding to elements of the original, which I thought I could bring out in different ways.”
While there are many translations in circulation over the decades — and centuries — Wilson says the adventure still comes alive for modern readers.
“This is an engaging and deeply human story, even though it’s also about goddesses and the divine and magic,” Wilson says. “It’s both alien and strange and also has these human themes of homecoming, migration, being lost, being found, relationships, misunderstandings, and the pain of being lost, the pain of conflict between people.”
Christopher Nolan, who won the Academy Award for Best Directing for “Oppenheimer” in 2024, is directing “The Odyssey.” Wilson hopes the silver screen version will generate an even-broader appreciation for the story in its written form.
“I hope that the impact of the Christopher Nolan movie will invite people to have a new look back at ancient literature and to realize this is really exciting stuff,” Wilson says. “It’s not just action movie stuff, but it also has profound human themes and that it’s both thrilling in an action movie way and also exciting and profound and makes you rethink parent-child relationships and what even is the world.”
The movie version of “The Odyssey” is due for release in July and will feature an ensemble cast, with stars including Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope.