Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianĪlready Wilson has set out her stall: clarity and cleanness are her watchwords her epic voice is not one of grandeur or pomposity. So it is with Wilson’s Odyssey.Ĭhris Tandy as Odysseus in the Mark Bruce Company’s 2016 dance version. When Keats first looked into Chapman’s Homer, he felt like “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”. This translation will change the way the poem is read in English. (Wilson studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford – as, full disclosure, did I – and is now a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania.) She has also written a work of limpid, fast-moving verse, in English epic’s home metre of iambic pentameter. Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem. Now comes the first by a woman.Įmily Wilson’s crisp and musical version is a cultural landmark. The first into English was by George Chapman in 1614-15 there have been at least 60 others. The first into Latin was in the third century BC by a slave called Livius Andronicus. H omer’s Odyssey, probably composed around 700BC, is one of the oldest poems in the western tradition, with a concomitantly long history of translation.
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