CONTENTS
THE ILIAD: AN BRONZE AGE STORY ABOUT POWER, LOVE, LOSS, AND LEGEND
A WOMAN CAN TRANSLATE A WAR CLASSIC AS WELL AS 100 MEN
A MODERN HOMER ENSURES CONNECTION AND UNCENSORS
TRANSLATING ANCIENT POETRY IS A TONGUE TWISTER
TRANSLATING ANCIENT POETRY IS ALSO A MUSICAL PUZZLE
WILSON’S ILIAD: MAPS, FAMILY TREES, APPENDICES, AND POETRY
HOW I MET HOMER: THE FIRST FEMALE TRANSLATION OF THE ODYSSEY
CONCLUSION: AN OBSESSION IS THE GREATEST KIND OF FOOL’S ERRAND (UNLESS YOU ARE ACHILLES)
THE ILIAD: AN BRONZE AGE STORY ABOUT POWER, LOVE, LOSS AND LEGEND
It took a woman’s expertise for me to finally want to read the Ancient Greek war poem, The Iliad, a foundational work of Western literature. By the poet Homer, The Iliad is about the final days of the ten-year Trojan war where gods and demi-gods walk among mortals. It also happens to be 20 hours long if read aloud, so I think you can see why I wasn’t that interested in never ending killings and war talk, no matter how charming the immortal visitors were. Professor Emily Wilson’s Translator’s Note made me want to read The Iliad even more, ‘no thought, no feeling, is left unexpressed; men scream, sob, shout, and weep’.
“…even now, when I turn back to lines I have read hundreds of times already, I find that the raw power of the Greek still startles me, like Athena suddenly tugging Achilles by the hair to stop him in his tracks. Often, I am unable to read without goosebumps tears or both.”
The Iliad is a story about power, love, loss and legend in a time where high-born men were trained to fight, and women were trained to raise children to replace the fallen. Stakes were high. The losers were put to death or enslaved. A war that started when a beautiful but married Greek Lady, Helen, runs off with a god-like-handsome and eligible Trojan Prince, Paris. Or was Lady Helen kidnapped? You may have heard of the face that launched a thousand ships: speaking of Helen’s beauty without equal. It was good strategy for the Greeks to amass an army to take back this high-born wife, as well as the Trojan land and its bounty. Yet both sides had the same religion and the same Ancient Greek gods walking among them; Zeus and Hera, Athena and Ares to name just a few. Both sides had the favour of the gods.
This epic poem is the most well-known Ancient Greek tale dating back 2,700 years. We still don’t know if the events were fact or fiction. Experts found evidence that Troy did have a catastrophe 300 years before Homer (or 3,000 years ago in the Bronze Age). Homer’s Iliad may have been composed because those turbulent times were too important to forget, shared by oral tradition to future generations.
The original telling of The Iliad had a rhythmic beat. This is one of the reasons why The Iliad is so challenging to translate. It’s also among the longest poems ever known with near 15,700 lines. Plus, despite the original being straightforward with short lines, the many characters have distinct personalities and emotional lives. At least 100 characters have important roles, another 900 names are there, so as not to be forgotten. That would be comparable to me remembering 1,000 military names from the 1650s Anglo-Scottish War, as well as the dialogue and actions between. Only possible if learnt by repetition. And repetition is exactly what Iron Age bards did, told stories over and over to their communities. Homer’s poems would need to be very interesting to keep people listening through the years. That may explain why today we remain enthralled by this fantastical tale.
The immensity of time passing shows how amazing it is that The Iliad still exists today. The oldest written fragment of Homer’s work is 3rd Century BC or 500 years after Homer lived. Plus, written records were for only the richest rulers and their patrons, so The Iliad was important to future rulers of those lands because they were written down. Amazingly, this is why today we can experience The Iliad and it has not been lost along with the Ancient Greek civilisation, to wars from neighbouring powers.
A WOMAN CAN TRANSLATE A WAR CLASSIC AS WELL AS 100 MEN
The Iliad has been translated into English 100 different ways over the past five centuries. Translators have mainly been classicists (experts in ancient classical texts) and professional poets. In the 16th Century, the first known English translation was in Old English like that of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is fair to say Western culture is obsessed with Homer’s story.
Yet not until 2023 The Iliad was poetically translated (in 5-beat lines) by a female for the first time in known recorded history. Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania in America. Her English translation has been written for the everyday reader plus has notes for any scholarly peer to go deeper. The hardback book has beautifully drawn maps of Ancient Greece and family trees in elegant font, plus a glossary of the many characters and places.
Professor Emily Wilson, being a classicist academic, has translated from authoritative versions like the Oxford Classical Text (Monto and Allen, 1920) as well as commentaries and scholarly works. Also, there are surviving archaeological fragments across 3,000 years and a few whole copies, the earliest is Byzantine, made 1,000 years ago.
Unlike the recent swell in fictional renditions, a translation doesn’t alter the ancient story or characters to popularise them for modern readers. Examples include, in 2012, the female poet Alice Oswald published, Memorial, a retelling in 90 pages, one tenth of the original’s length. In 2009, novelist, David Malouf, writes about a small but mighty part of the seige of Troy in Ransom (which I have read and heard, and the prose is glorious). This ancient story may never cease to inspire the Arts.
The only other female to translate The Iliad is Caroline Alexander in 2015. Unlike Wilson, Alexander used varied poetic beats. An enormous feat made only slightly easier. Caroline Alexander is also classically trained with some academic record, but her career steered towards journalism. Plus, Caroline Alexander has not (yet) translated The Odyssey, the only other surviving Homer poem. In my view, Professor Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Odyssey are the best modern translations by the same translator and because they more closely honour Homer’s original creative work by not varying the rhythm.
What remains notable is only 2% of English translations of The Iliad in the past 500 years are by women. How Hellenistic! In Homeric times, privileged women’s lives were limited to being wives, mothers, or priestesses. If you were unfortunate, you would be a female slave from a conquered land. The women in Homer’s epic who have vocations are either immortal gods (like Athena and Aphrodite) or are Amazonian; a non-Greek tribe whose archaeology has been found in today’s Russia, 2,000 kms away from Troy. Otherwise, most Ancient Greek women undertook labours suited to disruptive child rearing such as weaving cloth. Even a princess in The Iliad passes time weaving clothes for her family.
In another five hundred years, will there be 50% of Iliad translations made by women? I can also assume future versions will be created by artificial intelligence using machine learning from sources written mainly by men. That’s another topic for another article.
A MODERN HOMER ENSURES CONNECTION AND UNCENSORS
Wilson’s translations are fresh version for today’s ears and cultural standards. That doesn’t mean it’s been hobbled by Plain English, because to create the 5-beat lines for 800 pages needs much linguistic flair to be bound by the ‘authoritative’ ancient texts. In modern English, Wilson’s Iliad may strongly affect readers’ emotions and so strengthen their connection to this great story. We articulate our feelings in today’s language, plus English slowly changes over time.
Online commentary already says the popular 1990 Robert Fagle translation of The Iliad (most likely to be in school curriculum) reads dated and distantly, even though it is novelistic with flexible meter. Fagle’s Odyssey translation also censored the Ancient Greek social norm of female slaves instead using the term ‘maid’. Past censorship is also why contemporary translations are important.
If The Iliad is a story that ‘speaks to you’ it is likely to be remembered. Then its legends will continue to survive through human history and not be forgotten. Imagine The Iliad told in another 2,700 years’ time, that’s the Year 4,724! Plus, English will have morphed into something unrecognisable today’s eyes and ears. That is the marvel of cultural change.
TRANSLATING ANCIENT POETRY IS A TONGUE TWISTER
To answer this, I inadvertently gathered ‘a short history’ of The Iliad’s English translations and their differences. I soon felt like Odysseus journeying home over ten years instead of ten days, thwarted by gods and monsters. What should have taken an hour was amounting to 10 hours, with so much archaeological evidence and centuries of literary analysis. Best left to the classicists. The vast breadth of information available proves this Ancient Greek story captivates your curiosity, as well as everyone who came before you, charmed as if in the presence of gods.
The New Yorker cites that it took expert translator Alexander Pope in the 1700s approximately seven years to finish by working every day! Emily Wilson notes six years for herself and ‘living with The Iliad professionally for 35 years’.
Novelist Anthony Doerr captures the pace of a hobbyist translator in Cloud Cuckoo Land,
“Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one...Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they’re terrible. He shows them to no one.”
And,
“…as far as I can tell, you’ve spent the whole week trying to decide whether to call your drunken shepherd ‘illiterate,’ ‘humble,’ or ‘clueless.’…
‘Humble’ and ‘clueless’ are actually quite different—’ ”
I adore more than ever my 800+ page Emily Wilson translation of The Iliad bound into a hardcover. If it becomes the latest popular translation, I look forward to buying a luxury edition in the future.
TRANSLATING ANCIENT POETRY IS ALSO A MUSICAL PUZZLE
Homer composed the epic poem The Iliad in six-beat rhythm (or dactylic hexameter) in an ancient Greek dialect. Emily Wilson’s Introduction explains,
"a regular pattern of long and short syllables designed to be chanted with the accompaniment of a lyre. A dactyl is a finger, a long beat followed by two shorter ones. In hexameter, this basic metrical unit, the foot, is repeated six times with the final beat missing, to mark the end of the line…Ancient Greek verse did not rhyme but it always used regular rhythm."
English translations do not fit well into six beat lines like the Ancient Greek, so most translations are five-beats (or iambic pentameter), including Emily Wilson’s (though she tried two hexameters which ‘felt forced, unnatural and slow' and ‘lacking the quick energy of the original'. Wilson also notes 'the [Ancient Greek] sonic patterns were created by the syllable length rather than by stress patterns as in English verse.’
Richmond Lattimore’s English translation is one rare exception in hexameter, published in 1951. Stephen Fry explains in The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within, that a hexameter in English is more cumbersome. Alexander Pope who translated The Odyssey and The Iliad over 300 years ago, after much deliberation, chose a form of pentameter, and explains the problem using a poem in hexameter.
“A needless alexandrine* ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.”
(*Alexandrine is another name for hexameter since the 14th century.)
Five beats to the English ear are the most favourable. Plus, we've heard five-beat verse for centuries. Great writers like Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Tennyson wrote in iambic pentameter. Poets, Shelley and Browning used five-beats in triple lines with rhyme (called terza rima). According to Britannica,
“iambic pentameter is a line of verse composed of ten syllables arranged in five metrical feet (iambs), each of which consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The line can be rhymed (as in sonnets) or unrhymed… Its unstressed-stressed beat is similar to that of a human heartbeat.”
This is why poems in iambic pentameter are so captivating to the English ear. A rhythm we hear as our first sound; our mother’s heartbeat. Stephen Fry explains in another way in The Ode Less Travelled why pentamer and not hexameter is preferred,
“The pentameter seems to fit the human breath perfectly (which is why it was used not just by Shakespeare but by just about all English verse dramatists)…Most English verse is constructed by syllabic accentuation, the rises and falls of stress.”
Iambic pentameter verse fits the human breath perfectly, and the unstressed-stressed rhythm is like our human heartbeats.
The continual rhythmic pace of Homer's original epic poem is hypnotising but not slow. Was it like the beat of a united marching army? The long story unfolds, steadily at the same beat, like time never ending. I think a veteran warrior in The Iliad would say 'you can rush towards your heroic fate and glory but your life may continue on despite your best efforts'. Shown as The Greeks and Trojans fought intermittently for ten years with many warriors falling and others surviving.
The Iliad has 24 books and today takes 20 hours to recite! In Homer's time it was read orally to audiences. I can imagine it as the original serial spoken aloud for an hour a day across 24 days, or perhaps spread across 24 weeks. In this case, taking almost six months. I imagine robed men sitting side by side around a bard, not wanting to miss an 'episode' of the epic tale of gods, demi-gods, and heroes like, Odysseus, a favourite mortal of the goddess Athena.
WILSON’S ILIAD: MAPS, FAMILY TREES, APPENDICES, AND POETRY
Emily Wilson’s talent with Ancient Greek and English is plain to see in the beauty of her literary toil; ‘Penelope [Odysseus’ wife] cries so desperately that her very being seems to dissolve. In my translation, it reads:
“Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr
scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus
thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell
and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks
dissolved in tears.”
The Yale Review notes, ‘Wilson nails the striking botanical imagery in the Greek:
“Thetis stayed there,
and kept on grasping at his knees, as if
grafting herself to grow there.”
And in Book 5 during Greek warrior Diomedes’ rampage,
“[Diomedes] went to Abas and Polyidus,
sons of Eurydamas, the old dream-seer.
The old man never read their dreams again.
They never went back home to him. Instead,
powerful Diomedes killed them.”
Emily Wilson may be officially an academic professor of classic literature, but it is also clear she has the heart and mind of a poet. Emily Wilson’s website has only indicated a Northern Hemisphere speaking tour so far but I remain hopeful she may sign both my hardcopy first editions. I ordered the same-sized hardcopy of The Iliad to sit perfectly alongside The Odyssey. After two months of delays, the book arrived. I hope it’s a sign the print run has been a raging success, especially since there are half a dozen popular translations in as many decades.
While waited for my hardcopy, I listened to the audiobook which I highly recommend. The narrator, Audra McDonald, is an exceptionally talented voice (actress from TV Series The Good Fight and Private Practice). The actress Claire Danes (from TV series Homeland) reads Wilson’s The Odyssey, but the audio sample does not have the same energetic tone as McDonald that I believe it deserves, and Danes’ voice often cracks giving a scratchy quality. Despite this, I acknowledge Danes is a very talented actor.
HOW I MET HOMER: THE FIRST FEMALE TRANSLATION OF THE ODYSSEY
In 2017, Prof. Emily Wilson made history as the first female to poetically translate (in 5-beat lines) The Iliad’s sequel, The Odyssey. The sea journey of Warrior Lord Odysseus (spoiler: he doesn’t die in the Trojan war) sailing back to his homeland, Ithaca. He goes through ten years of tests by gods, demi-gods and monsters all over the Mediterranean and Argean seas. Quite a different storyline that evidence suggests was composed a lifetime after The Iliad. To my humble ear, The Iliad is about remembrance and reckoning, whereas The Odyssey is pure entertainment for bards to perform.
In 2017, when I was living in Melbourne, I excitedly saw Emily Wilson at an author talk while she was a long way from America, and I cherished my signed hardcopy of The Odyssey. It is in my 'forever library'. I pored over the crisp pages and read aloud Odysseus' adventure, in the rhythmical beat of Wilson's translation, as was the tradition thousands of years ago.
CONCLUSION: AN OBSESSION IS THE BEST KIND OF FOOL’S ERRAND (UNLESS YOU ARE ACHILLES)
Emily Wilson has translated an ancient story using her brilliant intellect, having had the same education as men, unlike the Bronze Age women in this classic. I believe that if Wilson’s Iliad wasn’t more entertaining than previous translations, she wouldn’t have made it public. Wilson also needed support from her academic peers, university faculty, and publisher to confirm that the world needs the hundredth English translation of The Iliad. That Wilson’s translation is too good to sit in a drawer. Her passion is obvious. Interviews have her saying she thinks daily about these characters and their lives as she navigates her own life.
“I first began reading Homer in high school, early in my study of ancient Greek. I liked The Odyssey but I loved The Iliad with a passionate devotion. I have now lived with his poem for some 35 years-rereading it, teaching it in the original and in various translations, and now rendering it into English. For the past six years, I have worked intensively on this translation. But even now, when I turn back to lines I have read hundreds of times already, I find that the raw power of the Greek still startles me, like Athena suddenly tugging Achilles by the hair to stop him in his tracks. Often, I am unable to read without goosebumps tears or both.”
To work for six years intensely on a famous classic text is a culmination of Emily Wilson’s life’s work into great art: the best modern classic. Novelist Anthony Doer in Cloud Cuckoo Land so beautifully frames the endeavour,
"Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand."
Where thousands of Homer obsessives have gone on a fool’s errand over millennia, failing to adequately translate the greatest poems of Western literature, most showing their toil to no one. With only a hundred or so public attempts in half a millennia, Professor Emily Wilson’s words strike you from each page of the most gripping, grotesque, heart-breaking and profound tale ever known. Long Live The Iliad.
REFERENCES
TEXTS
Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land (p. 405). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Fry, Stephen. The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. United Kingdom, Random House, 2010.
Homer. Wilson, Emily: Translator. The Iliad. United States, W. W. Norton, 2023.
Homer. Wilson, Emily: Translator. The Odyssey. United States, W. W. Norton, 2017.
Homer. Lattimore, Richmond: Translator. The Iliad of Homer: (Books I-XXIV). United Kingdom, Macmillan, 1962.
Malouf, David. Ransom. Australia, Knopf, 2009.
Oswald, Alice. Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad. United Kingdom, W. W. Norton, 2012.
Oxford Classical Texts: Homeri Opera, Vol. 1: Iliadis Libros I–XII (Third Edition), edited by D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen (1920; 2023).
ARTICLES
Daley, Jason. “Oldest Greek Fragment of Homer Discovered on Clay Tablet.” Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution, 11 July 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oldest-greek-fragment-homer-discovered-clay-tablet-180969602/ .
Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., Iambic Pentameter, 8 Mar. 2024, www.britannica.com/art/iambic-pentameter .
Greenwood, E. (2023) Emily Greenwood: ‘how Emily Wilson reimagined homer’, The Yale Review. Available at: https://yalereview.org/article/emily-greenwood-emily-wilson-the-iliad.
Hawkins, Derek. “Amazons Were Long Considered a Myth. These Discoveries Show Warrior ...” Amazons Were Long Considered Myth. These Discoveries Show Warrior Women Were Real., 31 Dec. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/31/amazons-were-long-considered-myth-these-discoveries-show-warrior-women-were-real/ .
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Englishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations.” The New Yorker, 31 Oct. 2011, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations.
Wilson, E. (2017) A translator’s reckoning with the women of the odyssey, The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-translators-reckoning-with-the-women-of-the-odyssey.
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