![]() In 2017, her Odyssey drew attention for a circumstantial fact-it was the first complete translation of the text into English by a woman to be published-but that book also represented a renewal of the tradition of putting Homer into English verse. When this kind of verse is rendered into prose, we lose precisely the quality that elevated it from mere speech into the collected wisdom of an entire culture, a wisdom that could lay plausible claim to having come from the gods themselves.Įmily Wilson’s work revitalizes an approach to Homeric translation whose primary goal is to preserve that magical quality by prioritizing the experience of Homer as poetry. ![]() Two major features separated it from ordinary speech: a distinctive diction marked by formulaic phrases and even entire formulaic scenes, a system that enabled poets to compose verses on the fly and a distinctive meter, interdependent with the diction, that was used only for the kind of public verse that claimed historical, moral, and even divine authority. Theirs was instead a public verse, sung with a lyre at festivals by bards whose social role was a combination of archivist, prophet, and thaumaturge. But the people who composed and were taken up by the poems of Homer’s epoch did not experience them in a context of silent and interior reading, which such translations suit best. ![]() Such choices have their virtues: Robert Fagles’s editions from the 1990s remain some of the most popular on the English-language market, and they are justly admired for preserving both the formulaic diction and the swift, easy readability of the Iliad and Odyssey. THE TRANSLATOR OF HOMER faces a major difficulty: How does one convey the content and experience of oral poetry to a public that has probably not heard poetry read aloud since grade school? Recently, translators have tended to respond to this challenge by abandoning serious efforts at meter, rendering the poem either in prose or in a free verse that amounts to prose with line breaks. The Loves of Helen and Paris overlayed with text from the Iliad (Composite / Original photos by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
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