Office Hours: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ITWAWPXKjDn2CaB5IGbow07gIF3hOvFt6tRSZMzdIo/edit Education: FAAR 2006-2007 Ph.D. (Classics and Comparative Literature) Yale University, 2001 I'm terms of being well-done poetically, I'd recommend Robert Fitzgerald's translation (he also did the Odyssey and the Aeneid).. It's worth mentioning, though, that he's one of the translators Emily Wilson picks out as making some needlessly sexist choices - e.g. Only last year came this new English translation by Emily Wilson, an American academic and allegedly the first woman to translate Homer into English. : Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College, B.A., and Corpus Christi College, M.Phil.) Department Colloquium: Emily Wilson (Penn) "Iliad 24: A Reading from My Translation" Thursday, November 4, 2021 - 4:45pm to 6:15pm 402 Cohen Hall and also on Zoom, registration below. I think its very interesting thats still with us. I'm posting this review because Amazon keeps emailing me asking how many stars I would give the Iliad and every time I see that email come up I just think "oh my god stop asking me this book ripped my soul to shreds and rendered me void of any spirit for a week PLEASE DON'T REMIND ME." That tells you something. But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. But the legacy of male domination is still with us inside the discipline of classics itself and in how non-specialist general readers gain access to the history and literature of the ancient world. Here is how Wilsons Odyssey begins. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2020. It is the Pope translation. In it, she shows how the idea of wild women who dance in nature formed an essential model for female aesthetes, including Harrison and contemporary female choreographers, including Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, who found in Euripides a way to legitimise their own rejection of traditional ways of being a scholar, a dancer, or even an embodied woman. Dedicated to her grandmother Elsie, Wilsons first book, Mocked With Death, grew out of her dissertation and was published in 2004. My name is Zameer Ahmed. In one noteworthy choice, enslaved characters, described as "dmoiai" or "dmoioi" in the Greek, are often referred to as "slaves" in Wilson's versions, instead of "maids" or "servants"; Wilson has expressed surprise that so many modern North American translations obscure the social structures, noting "how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible. I wanted there to be a sense, Wilson told me, that maybe there is something wrong with this guy. [1] In 2017 she became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer 's Odyssey into English. Graduate Coordinator: Katelyn Stoler 236 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 (215) 573-0250 kastoler@upenn.edu Identical, in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end, according to one account. The Odyssey is the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Perhaps the most famous such expression is in Matthew Arnolds On Translating Homer, his series of lectures in 1860 when he was Oxford professor of poetry. The story is so good/intense it ruined my life for a solid week. Which, of course, is absurd and rather pseudo-feminist. [7] Her next book, The Death of Socrates (2007), examines Socrates' execution. We feel sadness on both sides when Odysseus sleeps with the nymph Calypso, not wanting her / though she still wanted him. We feel sympathy for Helen, and even for Odysseus slave women, executed for sleeping with the enemy or as Wilson puts it, the things the suitors made them do with them. (This goes further than the Greek, but not further than is allowable.). It looks at the way mortality was imagined, in the tragic tradition, by Milton, Shakespeare, Seneca, Sophocles and Euripides. In them, he offered a takedown of existing translations of Homer and then asked in what faithfulness exists: The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.. The words are short, mostly monosyllables. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading." A dramatic reading of two early books of the poem, in current in-progress iambic pentameter verse translation, followed by Q and A. Thursday, November 7, 4:30-6:00 p.m. Cohen Hall, room 402 Emily Wilson. Victorian classical scholar Jane Harrison. Iliad remains not only among the greatest adventure stories ever told but also one of the most compelling meditations on the human condition ever written. [2] Early life and education [ edit] In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. So the question, Wilson continued, of whether hes the turned or the turner: I played around with that a lot in terms of how much should I be explicit about going for one versus the other. and Yale University (Ph.D.). University of Pennsylvania Professor Emily Wilson in the School of Arts and Sciences has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the humanities category for her translations of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. , ISBN-13 Wilson: I was unknown before I publishedThe Odyssey, and then suddenly I had a readership. Here's what happened when a woman took the job", "The first English Translation of the Odyssey by a woman was worth the wait", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emily_Wilson_(classicist)&oldid=1135613612, Scholar, professor, writer, translator, poet, "Ah, how miserable!" I n The Iliad, a poem about the terrible destruction caused by male aggression, the bodies and pretty faces of . Wilson is more understated: Tell me about a complicated man. Too understated, one might think at first but gradually the adjective comes to feel just right. The Aeneid, perhaps the most canonical Latin text, was translated into English by a woman (Ruden) for the first time in 2009. If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, . Her complex answer is tied up with the history of womens education. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. [19] Following many other Homeric scholars, she has argued that the hierarchical societies depicted in the Homeric poems are not viewed uncritically by the narrator, and that the poems include many voices and many distinct points of view. [2], Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading.". Wilson, whose own translation appears this week, has produced the first English rendering of the poem by a woman. I love that about it., Although Wilson was undecided on a direction after taking her undergraduate degree she had thoughts of doing law she ultimately chose to do further studies in English literature at Oxford while she figured her way forward, rereading some of her favorite books, particularly Miltons Paradise Lost. Emerging with a sense that the writers she appreciated most were in dialogue with antiquity, Wilson pursued a Ph.D. in classics and comparative literature at Yale. Among the Ancients with Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jones, writer and editor at the London Review of Books.Medieval Beginnings with Irina Dumitrescu, Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bonn, and Mary Wellesley, historian and contributor to the London . Emily Wilson. She made me hear for the first time the veiled menace when the disguised Odysseus answers an insult from one of the nastier suitors: Crafty Odysseus said, How I wish, Eurymachus, that we could have a contest in springtime in the meadow, when the days are growing longer; I would have a scythe of perfect curvature and so would you. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we dont use a simple average. There was a problem loading your book clubs. [2], Wilson "comes from a long line of academics",[2] including both her parents, A. N. Wilson[3] and Katherine Duncan-Jones,[4] her uncle, and her maternal grandparents, including Elsie Duncan-Jones. And there are numerous translators who have attempted to translate the Iliad, each with their own advantages and vices. 63)", "The Norton Anthology of Western Literature", "The Norton Anthology of World Literature", "Child, Busby and Sissay join 2020 Booker Prize judging panel", "Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation is short listed for the national translation award", "MacArthur 'Genius' Grant Winners Attest to 'Power of Individual Creativity', "Historically, men translated the Odyssey. He studied at Berkeley and Harvard and taught for 34 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Bascom-Halls Professor of Classics Emeritus. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2021. [1] In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship (Rome Prize). Maria Dahvana Headley (whose new Beowulf has just appeared) and Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey, now at work on The Iliad) joined LTAC Director Susan Bernofsky for a far-ranging conversation on the radical practice of making translation a space of resistance and joy. Lovelace Bigge-Withers many-sided-man; George Edgingtons deep; William Cullen Bryants sagacious; Roscoe Mongans skilled in expedients; Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Langs so ready at need; Arthur Ways of craft-renown; George Palmers adventurous; William Morriss shifty; Samuel Butlers ingenious; Henry Cotterills so wary and wise; Augustus Murrays of many devices; Francis Caulfeilds restless; Robert Hillers clever; Herbert Batess of many changes; T.E. It could be that hes the turner.. : Called Septuagint after its 70 translators, this Greek version became a foundational text, both for the early Christian church and for the impossible standard to which all subsequent translations are held: faithfulness. Her mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Shakespeare specialist, taught English literature at Oxford; her mothers brother, Roman history at Cambridge; her mothers father, a disappointed philosopher disappointed because, though he went to Cambridge, he couldnt get a job there taught at Birmingham; and her mothers mother, Elsie Duncan-Jones, also at Birmingham, was an authority on the poetry of Andrew Marvell. John Giless of many fortunes; T.S. They just seem to be coming from such a simple and fundamental misunderstanding., What a translation is doing and what it should do has been a source of vigorous debate since there were texts to translate. Greek maenads were the model for a new, uncorseted way of moving, leaping and dancing. Only Norgate (of many a turn) and Cook (of many turns) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them poly (many), tropos (turn) answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. Euripides Hippolytus in which Phaedra falls in love with her stepson, who wants to remain asexual was read by John Addington Symonds in male homoerotic terms (since Hippolytus rejects heterosexuality), but the play was reread by his correspondent, a young student and poet named Agnes Robinson, as a way to discover her lesbian desires, through the thwarted, impassioned desire of Phaedra. They knew how much was at stake, not only for their status as intellectuals, but for their artistic and literary vision. It says it is translated by Fagles but it is not. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. [14], Wilson is perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed translation of The Odyssey (2017), becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. One trap for translators lurks in the poems first line, where its hero is called, untranslatably, polytropos the cunning hero (Lombardo) or the man of twists and turns (Fagles). Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2022. I partly just want to shake them and make them see that all translations are interpretations. Most of the criticism Wilson expects, she says, will come from a digging in of the heels: Thats not what it says in the dictionary, and therefore it cant be right! And if you put down anything other than whats said in the dictionary, then, of course, you have to add a footnote explaining why, which means that pretty much every line has to have a footnote. Prins gives a fascinating account of the importance of Greek tragedy in translation and theatrical production in the colleges of higher education for women that emerged in this period. Because there is no perception that its serious intellectually. I don't know why people are so into the Odyssey as a tale of ~*the human condition*~ and why I so often hear that the Iliad is just a story about a war. I struggle with this all the time, Wilson said. $39.95. She and another female colleague who had a child who was the same age as me organized this day care, first in my house and then it moved to this building near Somerville College.. Introduced by: Amy Stolls. [1] Her thesis was entitled Why Do I Overlive? The first English translation of The Iliad by a woman (Alexander) came out last year. : Greek, Latin and English Tragic Survival. The general plainness of the language makes longer or unusual words stand out. , Hardcover The poem lying open before us was Homers Odyssey, the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the Iliad, in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them. Its imagined as a subset of outreach. Please try again. The most highly praised male classicist translators of our era such as Robert Fagles write with a confident exuberance, often expanding or adding to the original. Perhaps then more of us will begin to shed the Promethean chains of translationese to show a new generation of readers what these texts, translated by classicists who are also women, can sound like and how this alien, alienated encounter can help reshape our own language. The story revolves around Briseis of Lyrnessus (a princess captured by Achilles) more than it does Helen of Troy. Emily Wilson. Emily Wilson, recipient of The MacArthur Fellowship "genius grant" has received attention worldwide as the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey. The work of translation could turn from a bond to a mode of literary and conceptual freedom. Throughout her translation of the Odyssey, Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented radical in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. , by Milton, Shakespeare, Seneca, Sophocles and Euripides though she wanted. The adjective comes to feel just right and make them see that all translations are interpretations book, Mocked Death. 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