The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson review – a bravura feat
Translations of Homer matter to cultural history. John Keats once looked into the “wide expanse” of George Chapman’s 1611 translation of the Iliad and breathed “its pure serene”. Alexander Pope’s rhyming version of the Iliad (1715-1720) brought a canonical ancient author to a much larger audience than ever before, its readers now including literate workers and women who had never had the opportunity to learn Greek. It had been through 27 editions by 1790. The early 20th-century Labour MP Will Crooks, who grew up in poverty and was dazzled by a twopenny second-hand copy, later recalled that “pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land.”
New translations also proliferated. There were nearly 50 English-language versions in the 19th century, at least 30 in the 20th, and a dozen or more already in the 21st. Some are outstanding: Richmond Lattimore (1951) brilliantly reproduced Homer’s rolling dactylic hexameters; the trench-traumatised Robert Graves (1959) evoked Achilles’ alienation and brutality; Robert Fitzgerald (1974) grasped the Iliad’s pace and acoustic beauty and Christopher Logue (War Music, 1981) its visceral impact. Robert Fagles’s translation (1990) has relentless forward drive and readability. Do we really need another? If it is this one by Emily Wilson, then we certainly do.
Wilson’s command of ancient Greek vocabulary, dialects and metres lends authority to every aesthetic decision she’s made
Wilson, who has published acclaimed translations of the dramatists Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca, is a scholar of classical Greek at University of Pennsylvania, and it shows. Her translation, like many others, uses the time-honoured English poetic medium of the unrhymed iambic pentameter, but it stands out because her command of ancient Greek vocabulary, dialects, metres and even the manuscript tradition lends authority to every aesthetic decision she has made. (Her substantial introduction includes a fascinating account of the evolution of her Iliadic poetic voice, quite different from the more effervescent tone of her Odyssey.)
She has so deeply assimilated the aural effects made by Homeric enjambment, alliteration and assonance that they seem to come to her writing spontaneously: when the Trojan ally, soothsayer Merops, forbids his sons to enlist in the army defending Troy, “They disobeyed, because their destinies / of death and darkness carried them to Troy”. She revels in the similes, especially those evoking the natural world: Athena leaps down from the sky “like a shearwater with outstretched wings / and shrill, clear cry”. She has taken her cues from the Homeric narrative markers that indicate transition and placed a space between speeches, actions and reflections; these render the poem far more inviting than wodges of hundreds of continuous lines. She sees Homeric formulae as an opportunity, not a problem, always keeping her reader guessing whether she will select a traditional translation or ring the changes on it (in one book we get “Dawn in her saffron dress”, and in another, “In saffron robes Dawn spread”).
Sign up to Inside Saturday
Free weekly newsletter
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
A highly experienced teacher, she has provided exceptionally rich resources for the reader, whether with previous knowledge of Homer or none: maps, a glossary, genealogies and 100 pages of explanatory notes. But her learning would count for little if the translation itself did not seduce with its crystalline clarity, elegance, sensuality, sometimes breathless pace and above all emotional clout. When Achilles says that he is separated from the fertile fields of his Thessalian homeland by “so many shadowy hills, reverberating seas”, his psychological pain finds an exquisite echo in her choice of adjectives.
There are appealing features that distinguish her version from others. She is especially sensitive to the subtle individuation of characters when they are given direct speech (which constitutes a quarter of the poem). We can hear Agamemnon’s narcissism and negativity, Nestor’s senescent garrulity, Thersites’ demagogic snarls, Hecuba’s near-derangement after multiple bereavements and Andromache’s intelligence and despair. Wilson embraces the tenderness of the scenes with tiny children: Hector “kisses his darling son / and took him in his arms to rock and cuddle”. There is humour in the Iliad, especially in the portraits of the selfish immortals, and she fearlessly reproduces it, as when Zeus thinks he is flattering his wife Hera when he says he desires her more than any of the numerous other females he has “got pregnant” and lists to her in insensitive detail.
‘The Iliad may be ancient – but it’s not far away’: Emily Wilson on Homer’s blood-soaked epic
Read more
There is a bravura self-confidence in Wilson’s choices. In the first two lines of the poem, Achilles’ wrath, which sent so many heroes to their deaths, is called oulomenēn. This long, vowelly, mouth-filling participle is usually translated by a much slighter English word such as “direful”, “ruinous” or “destructive”. Wilson’s choice of “cataclysmic” proclaims her independence from tradition and the acuity of her ear. The word is weighty enough, both aurally and in import; its association with deluges also prefigures, subtly, Achilles’ fight with the River Scamander that forms the metaphysical climax of the poem. Often a rarer word breathes new life into an old image, such as “canister” for “bucket”. I enjoyed the fresh, contemporary feel of the dialogue, especially army banter: “delusional behaviour”, “I am done with listening to you”; “master strategist”.
Of course, there are places where I personally would have preferred a different choice. “You see” as a replacement for much less hectoring Greek particles introducing an explanation feels intrusive. The word “aggressive” lacks impact through over-use. The gods’ “ebullient” laughter loses the connotations of eternity in Homer’s “inextinguishable”. Calling the Achaeans “Greeks” is anachronistic and misleading in terms of the ethnic identities and geopolitics of the late Bronze Age. Although absolutely true to his emotional pungency, sometimes Wilson does not rise to the sheer grandeur and sublimity of Homer’s evocations of cosmic scale, meteorological chaos and battlefield pandemonium for which he was so admired in antiquity. But the great literary critic EM Tillyard astutely identified the best criteria for judging the translation of a long work as “whether the translator has durable rhetoric and whether he can follow the main undulations of his original”. In her dynamic lliad, Wilson has demonstrated potently that she does, and can.
Edith Hall is professor of classics at Durham University. The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson, is published by WW Norton (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.