[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] hello I'm here today with Emily Wilson who is Professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania she has recently translated Homer's Odyssey the book has been a Smash Hit it's my
personal favorite of all the translations I've read we'll speak more about some of her other work but Emily welcome thank you so much for having me let's just jump right in on the Odyssey I want you to explain the whole book to
me but let's start small does odyss even want to return home he does at as the poem starts he spent as the poem starts he spent the last seven years on the island of a goddess called calypso originally the poem implies quite willingly so it seems
as if he's changed his mind about whether or not he wants to go home but as the poem begins he does want to get back home to itha to his wife Penelope and his son tmus do you think he means it or is he just self- deceiving because he takes the detour into the underworld he hangs around with cers for many years uh there's a contrast with menus who acts as if he actually does want to get home who who's lying to whom in this
story adus of course is lying all the time so it's very hard for the reader to get a firm grasp on what are his motives also when he tells Calypso that he desperately wants to get back home it's it's very striking to me that he doesn't
give his motives he says to Calypso you're much more beautiful than my wife is and you've promised to make me Immortal it's a great offer but I want to go home and he doesn't explain why what is it that drives that desire to go
home and quite right he makes many detours he spends another year quite willingly with Calypso with with with Cersei another goddess so it seems as if he's easily distractable from the Quest for sure how much should the character
of aysus actually be viewed as admirable the he's a he's a hero which of course in an iaic Greek context doesn't necessarily mean an admirable figure he he's a figure who's as as I translate polopos he's complicated there's many
sides to him he has the extraordinary qualities which is part of what makes him eroic that he's different from the rest of us he's smarter than any other Mortal he's better at disguising better at telling stories better at
fictionalizing his own life um better at coming up with a plausible way to get out of any impossible situation does that make him admirable in a way it does he's a Survivor he has impressive qualities that enable him to survive but
he loses what 11 out of 12 ships to the cyclopes isn't he just a bad General he loses 100% of the men under his care yes yes he does it's a pretty bad track record yes and of course as um the father of the of one of the sutors says to him in book 24 after he slaughtered all his wife's um harassing sutors says you have this unfortunate habit of killing young men you first you killed this whole batch of young men who left with you to go to
Troy of whom zero returned and now you get back home you kill a whole bunch more young men it seems as if there were certain pance with with that in terms of both leadership and just being a human being early on in the story why does
telemus feel at all the need to set off and leave home why doesn't he just hang around and protect his mother that's a very good question and ancient commentators on the Odyssey um were puzzled over it because it seems both
under motivated and if anything a stupid idea right because he puts himself in danger it's because he's left home that the sutas are then able to lie and wait to Ambush and try to murder him um is a very dangerous and in the end futile Journey because he finds out nothing in the way of concrete information about about his father he does it because he's inspired by the goddess Athena who wants him to go on a quest which in some way
will parallel the quest of his father maybe it's a way to to have to have have some the honestly is a poem which very interested in parallel narratives in showing us one way this could go down and then another way this could go down
his one Journey around the Mediterranean his another way his another way that this same story could be both the same and very different and how grown up is he when he returns home is there any kind of moral or spiritual Advance or is
the telemus you see is the telemus you get um he well before he leaves he has a he makes an attempt to stand up among the in the Council of men speaking out both to the sutus of his mother and also to the men of Etha and it's a an attempt at being an adult man in a peaceful environment to speak out in the council and it's a speech which doesn't go very well because he explains fairly vehemently what his problem is that he's
surrounded by all these bullies nobody's helping him his whole inheritance is being wasted but he ends the speech bursting into tears so it obviously is not a particularly successful model of public speaking and of male adulthood
but when he gets back from his trip I think it's unclear whether he's grown up at all I mean he's certainly had the had the experience of meeting his father's agates of meeting alternative father figures and of course he's grown up
without a father figure had the experience of being exposed to different Elite households different marriages different potential paternal figures and also being exposed to the experience of having a brother or a quasi brother in
spending time with nestor's son pistus so he's had certain experiences which in theory could be formative or helpful for him I think it's unclear in what way exactly do they affect him if any could the earlier telemus have killed the
women raped by the suitors which he does toward the end of the story what has changed in him MH I think one thing that I mean I think the crucial thing that's changed is that he's got to spend time with his father doing something they
both love which is killing people and so that in fact he's been he's been spending time with his father throughout the the previous few days I think he's very important in terms of his his fashioning into some kind of masculinity
some kind of adulthood in the vision of Homer's Odyssey how good can politics get politics is a is a tricky word right because of course this is a poem which is set before the city state it's before the poce um how good our Essence
different city states right you visit communities yes um which are Proto city states I me I guess we could say well I think there are different kinds of potentially idealized societies so I think it's sort of unclear does the poem
think nestor's more traditional Palace in which the wife doesn't have a name and there are many children and that they seem to spend most of their time performing elaborate sacrifices is that better than the rich Palace of Manus is that better than the poor but somehow heroized Warrior Society of itha is that better than the matriarchal societies of calypso or Cersei it's I think the poem is laying out for us these possible
Alternatives I think in some ways the the Quasi magical land of the fans where adicus visits um in some ways maybe that's the best possible state but I think it's the poem is more interested in contrasting than necessarily ranking
Pleasant is life amongst the fans at first it sounds great there's a lot of prosperity but they become increasingly passive aggressive you might argue you start wondering or foreigners really welcome here and by the time Odysseus
leaves there's almost a bit of a mild stench around that political order or do you think well this is the best humans can do and is fisha even a real polity of any kind or is it just imaginary I think it's it's very clearly figured as as imaginary but then the whole poem is imaginary right it's not like nestor's Palace existed in precisely this form it's certainly true that I think from the beginning the f are defined by some
kind of ambivalence about how cut off are they from other people and are they actually welcoming to strangers even when nasuka first introduces adus to her people she explains my people are not welcoming to strangers and so yet that's
why adus has to walk into town separately from her so I think already even before we meet the the king and queen of this strange place we have these Mak signals about how welcoming or not welcoming are they why is it that
they don't they are so good at sailing and yet they seem to have gone nowhere in what ways is this very isolationist Society the ideal or not the ideal is there humor in Homer oh there's tons of humor yes I I guess we were just talking
about the F so I think one of the funniest parts is when adus has been Shipwrecked and he lands on the land on the land of scaria the land of the fans and of course has lost all his clothes in the ship wck and ends up having to
pop up from behind a bush wearing no clothes in front of a beautiful princess and in order to try and impress her he has to cover cover himself up with branches and give a very long speech to distract her from the fact that she's
being accosted by a dirty naked man it's a funny scene why did Thomas Hobbs translate The Odyssey was that part of his political Vision somehow I think so I mean I can't I can't give you the expert Vision on hob the expert account
of hobbs' but it's a lot of work as you know a lot of work yes yes I mean I think both both facities and Homer were projects for Hobs that had to do with trying to figure out what what kinds of models and also what kinds of counter models what kinds of wrong Society can be represented by the ancient political worlds and now that you've spent so much time with this book does part of you feel Socrates was actually right about
Homer that it's a bad example you mean about by right about aysus or right about you mean well Homer in general that he's banned from the idea banned from the the second best ideal in the Republic right he's not banned from it's not it's not like calipolis is that necessarily the ideal Republic It's a second best compromise ideal and um Socrates in that book says that of course um both Homer and the tradan are problematic for several different
reasons it's both that they water the emotions which would be better dried up and also that they make us and want us want to pretend to be in the mindset of or they of people that we shouldn't want to be in the Persona of and also they're
not representing reality isn't the underworld also too dreary for Heroes the also it's also too dreary and also of course the gods behave abysmally and Homer so for all these reasons it's both theologically and ethically and
psychologically and also metaphysically wrong and which is actually your wor you don't agree with any I think homo is psychologically truthful and ethically helpful and I mean I think the the whole question about is it literature's job or poetry's job to to train a politician I'm not sure that that's quite the right way to see it um I think I think by inhabiting World Views which aren't our own we can grow in some way which
doesn't necessarily have to be I agree with XYZ political gomon that's articulated in this line or that line of Homer I think it's a limiting way of reading a poem but say you're trying to steal man Socrates Andor Plato whoever you think is responsible they were pretty smart people right so they thought this for some reason what's the critique of Homer that makes the most sense to you even if you reject it I think the critique of Homer that makes
the most sense to me is to do with um there is some intense valorizing even though think there's also questioning of that valorizing of the warrior code whereby you get um maximize Honor by killing as many people as possible which
doesn't seem to me a particularly good model for how a community should function that we should be thinking that that that level of mil military press should be be put quite so high on the evaluative scale once so disas returns
home why does it take so long for the whole plot of Revenge to unfold this has bothered me you expect a fairly Swift ending but there's book after book after book and still the suitors Aren't Dead what role is that playing in the
exposition of the story what should we infer from that you're absolutely right so it is just gets back home geographically in book 13 and yet the poem isn't over we've still got a whole half of the poem to go we've still got
another almost 12 books I think it has to do both with the poet's self glorification look how amazing this is that I can spin out the story of a nostos of a journey home such that it isn't even about the journey anymore it's about all these um elaborately different recognitions between adicus and each important member of the household and it's also about the about Athena's plot right Athena's plot is to glorify herself and her and her her
special mortal and the the best way to glorify adicus is not just to have the maximum body count but also so to do it in a way that's as as massive and as both temporally and geographically as possible that she's spinning it out so
it's even more impressive look how your your hero got home in only a year my or two years my hero took 20 years to get home and then look how he managed to come back from this absolute loser position of being one man against over a
hundred looking like an old beggar and so on that that it may it means the the the whole narrative Arc is all the bigger the longer it takes what kinds of people if you had to generalize prefer The Iliad to the Odyssey what's that
preference correlated with empirically um I think it's correlated with um I think it's about it's about mood partly I mean that the Odyssey is much more varied just in terms of scenes and and in terms of um I think if you're easily
bored you may prefer the Odyssey because it has more different characters more different scenes more different types of things happen I mean in thead It's s Mena angry some people get killed C Mena angry some people get killed and it's that relentlessly over and over and over where and it's in this very very small space small stretch of time whereas the Odyssey has far more variety in terms of what kinds of people are speaking what
what kinds of events are happening is it fair to say that throughout most of the history of Western criticism earlier critics preferred The Iliad to the Odyssey even though the Odyssey I would say is clearly superior but why why this earlier super is superior um I think it's um I'm I'm not sure that everybody did I mean dren said Dryden criticizes theier for being too warmongering I mean for being too much um and and Homer for the
same reasons it's not like it's been a universal preference of the of the eliad of the Odyssey until the 20th century when it all changed around though I think maybe that is part part of the trend so Linus Pudo longinus on the
sublime says that the Iliad is like home is at the height of his power and then the Odyssey is like the setting sun it's the it's the old man's poem it has all these cute incidents and it's like a poem that where you learn about
character rather than learning about this very very intense dramatic Arc so I think it's partly about thinking um a poem of warfare with fewer female characters is more impressive more important than a poem which is more domestic and has more to do with survival than with killing beyond that I'm not sure I mean I think they were both very highly B highly valued in most periods of antiquity it's not like people skip the Odyssey I'm noticing a
trend lately meline Miller has a best seller with cersi Pat Barker has the Silence of the girls which is a takeoff of The Iliad Margaret Atwood a few years earlier had her retelling of Penelope stale why is this a trend now well the P
can't remember what date it is but it's about 20 years old but I think you're right that there's a lot of there a lot of um retellings of myth right now and I think part of it has to do with um a sort of turning back to possible
alternative archetypes I mean that we don't know quite know what to do with um the great religious books so let's look for something else which has cultural Authority but and is going to be meaningful and and recognizable to many
many different people from different religious traditions and we can somehow have a a space of cultural sharedness over that are you going to do one the ilad yes I'm doing the ilad no not a translation but a fictional derivation
I've thought about it I'm not ready to do it right now I don't have a good good big concept but maybe one day and what's your view on who Homer was how much oral tradition how much a single Mastermind a group of editors one final finisher what do you think I think I think they're written poems so obviously the puzzle is how how did these written poems come into being I feel that that the that writing must have been involved in the
composition not just in the recording of something which was already present entire in one genius's mind because I think having something present intire without any use of writing that's as Monumental as these poems are seems to me
implausible beyond that I don't really have a clear view about was it a pair of people was it a single person did the same person do the ilad and the Odyssey I don't see how we can possibly know that I think they're very different
poems um but I also think the chances are that um they seem to be composed The Odyssey seems to be composed with some kind of awareness of the of the Iliad but to what extent can fully be proved I'm not sure can't software tell us if
it's the same author no no I mean it can tell us that there are linguistic differences which we already knew but then there were linguistic differences partly because they're different poems so couldn't somebody I mean also author
might not be the right term right it might if it's if we're imagining that it could be an oral poet who's collaborating with a scribe is that is that an author I don't know do we know anything about why mean civilization declined uh there are different theories about that I mean there seems to have been various cataclysmic events there may have been um there may have been weather events there were clearly conflicts I mean there were clearly
sieges and sackings of cities but so war in environment is that your best war in environment seems to be the best guess but that's I'm just echoing what I've learned from archaeologists it's not like I've actually excavated at any of
these cities you think that's not very good evidence then it's a guess oh no I think it's good I mean I I'm just I'm just saying that I'm not I can't speak from personal digging but but I think it's I think that seems to be what
happened right it seems to be that combination of War environment and who knows what I chance as well presumbly moving forward a number of centuries in time how well did ancient Athenian democracy work in terms of accountability were rulers accountable to those who could vote or did they just do what they wanted how should we understand or model that system how should we model that I mean how how should we imagine it or how should we
how should is it like a democracy but simply fewer people vote and the rulers are responsive to public opinion or does the agenda Setter have all the power or what's your vision of how ancient Athenian democracy at its peak worked
well it was in a way much more I mean for those who were citizens it was in a way much more democratic than our system which is represent representational democracy so because of course PE everybody who had uh who was a citizen
had a voice in the assembly was able to speak directly to those who were in power um the were several offices were Ed by lot such that anybody regardless of background aristocratic or not aristocratic background or regardless of
wealth could could in theory become one of the one of the generals or one of the leaders of the Assembly of course also it was you know a tiny fraction of the population of Athens that was a citizen of course most of the population were
enslaved and were not citizens um women weren't weren't being appointed to be generals or leaders in the assembly I mean the critique that many many of us s are s sources from Athens are in in in a number of different ways hostile to democracy and the critique that you find in in Plato for example has a lot to do with the with the the idea that because it depends so much on the will of the people and the people aren't necessarily
educated people they they're easily swayed by demagogy and of course in an age of the internet we can see how people are still easily swayed by all kinds of different voices should we consider electing politicians by lot today is it such a crazy idea I think it's a great idea great idea Classics enrollment as you know at many schools it's been declining for maybe 20 years or more do you think Classics as a distinct field of study
will still exist in 30 years and what will it look like I don't know I think it's going to have to look different because you're right um enrollments are declining and I think there's also a lot of sort of questioning from within by
classicists about the elitist Legacy of Classics I mean about the ways that it's been sort of tied up with the people who who end up being classicists especially in Britain but this is true in the states too and those who've gone to the
fancy private schools and who've learned Latin since they were five years old and then it's sort of tied up with with with being of a particular class means that you can speak Latin or you can read Latin and and that is inevitably if if if we can't give a better reason to learn Latin and Greek or to read the ancient text then this is going to be entry to a particular um social class within our own Society then which it no
longer is then of course that's not going to be a good reason for people in the future so say we elect You by lot to be in charge of all classics education what would you do what would you change I would just try and find ways to
make it both more attractive and more inclusive to different for to people from different backgrounds I would talk to more different people about what it might be that would in that might entice them to learn about cultures and
languages that are totally different from any that are nowadays extent and I think one of I think we should stop selling Classics as um these are the societies that formed modern America or that formed the Western Cannon um which
I which is a really bogus kind of argument and instead starts saying we should learn about ancient societies because they're different from Modern societies and that means that we can learn things by learning about alterity
we can learn learn about what would it be to be just as H just as human as we are and yet be living in a very very different Society now you have another well-known book it's called senica a life and on reading it I I guess this is
my reaction why are the stoics so hypocritical so senica Spends His Life sucking up to power he's very well off extremely political and possibly involved in murder plots right yes that's right what is there about stoicism
Marcus Aurelius is somewhat bloodthirsty it seems yes so are the stoics all just Hypocrites and they wrote this to cover over their their wrongdoings or how should we think think about the actual history of stoicism you know I do I see senica and Marcus aelius as very very different characters I I think Marcus aelius was militaristic and bloodthirsty and expander of the Roman Empire but that and you know he was happy to
slaughter many barbarians but that's not this he was fairly consistent about thinking that was a good idea and and also fairly consistent in associating his dream of of cultural and Military imperialism with um stoic models of
virtue whereas senica was very was very much constantly um sort of unable to fully act out the the ideals that he had and I think one of the reasons he's so interesting as a writer is that he's so precise in articulating what it means to
to have a very very clear vision of the good life and to be completely unable to follow through on living the good life but why would you accumulate so much wealth if you're a true stoic I personally don't think you would but but
senica has a lot of um very wonderfully rhetorically onate explanations for why in fact that's perfectly reasonable because STX had had this distinction between there are things that are good in themselves the main thing that's good
in itself is virtue being a good person the thing that's bad in itself is being a bad person um but then there are also things in the middle which are neither good nor bad but might be preferable so it might be preferable not to be a slave
or it might be preferable not to be homeless and impoverished but it and it might be preferable to have you know millions and billions of dollars and so it's it's not that it's actually bad as long as you can hang on to Virtue
despite being in the midst of corrupting power then you're even better are you surprised that so much of Silicon Valley has turned to the stoics their vision of the sto fits very well yes what's the hardest thing about
translating senica so I I translated sen um most of senica's tragedies rather than his Pros but I think the same issues would apply for for both I had a hard time figuring out how much I could get away with pulling out all the stops
rhetorically because he writes in this wonderfully ornate purple purple style um it's showing off showing off showing off bombast and I think the risk is always that it's going to come across as too silly to be impressive and it it has
to go very close to sounding silly but without quite getting there and do you think senica had a role in the murder of the emperor's wife I think he was Pro he probably knew about it I don't know if he actually got his hands bloody or wet
but I think he Pro he probably knew about it Socrates you've written on Socrates are Socratic ideals in Decline today um here we are having a conversation look at us being Socratic um it's it's so hard to say what are Socratic ideals because of course Socrates Socrates didn't write anything everything about as we referred to earlier we were talking about the Republic that's Plato's Socrates it's not necessarily socrates's Socrates or
history so soes in so far as the Athenians voted to have Socrates drink the drink the hemlock you could say well maybe that was the low point of Socratic ideals back then in 399 maybe it's all been up since then um and what does the
dying Socrates mean to you personally someone you admire someone you think he's a fool someone who is a martyr a precursor of a Christ figure or I deeply admire him with some some serious reservations I mean the reason I I I'm
constantly sort of turn back to thinking about him partly because I you know as an as an academic and also as a writer I'm sort of constantly thinking about what does it actually mean to to try to educate people I'm I'm interested in in the Socrates who who claims that he isn't teaching anybody anything and yet he's living this life of engaged in being engaged in conversations which are clearly designed to either draw things
out of people or else put things into them insidiously so I'm interested in that in that in whether all educators are somehow in that double of am I am I actually helping you find something out or am I imposing my own Vision on you
I'm interested also in the in the figure of the dying Socrates as an image in a way this is related to the Sena questions as an image of Integrity of what does it mean to live with so much Integrity that you can be absolutely
yourself at every moment even when you're you just poisoned yourself let's say I'm a greater fan of Plato he's a more systematic thinker the other versions of Socrates say from xenophon they're not to me very impressive they're okay they silly yes and maybe maybe it's a bit like Boswell and Johnson where Boswell makes Johnson much better and Boswell in some ways is smarter than Johnson I would say or sharper yeah Socrates was just pretty
smart but Plato's the true philosopher can you talk me out of that I think that's that's a perfectly reasonable point of view yes um I'm sure that Socrates didn't have the whole edifice of um of metaphysics and also obviously
he wasn't the enormously impressive literary stylist that Plato is um I think Plato was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary thinker it does seem as if the there's good there's good evidence partly because Aristotle seems to
confirm this that Plato did that Socrates himself did come up with some pretty interesting ideas such as the idea that nobody willingly does wrong that in so far as anybody does anything wrong it's because of of a mistake we don't realize it's wrong which I think is actually still something which you know is worth some ethical philosophical grappling it's an idea it's worth some grappling now as you know your doctoral
dissertation it's on the concept of overliving as you call it what is overliving and why is that interesting it's a term that I took from Paradise Lost by Milton and it's ad Adam says after he's eaten the apple and um he's
fallen he realizes that the the only thing to look forward to is death and and yet he's not dead so it's it's it's a moment when um Milton's character is grappling with what you could see as a continuity eror in the Book of Genesis
that Adam and Eve don't die immediately after eating the Apple um which was supposed to result from eating the apple and he says why do I over live why am I mocked with death and so that comes at a moment in Paradise Lost where after the
narrator has said I now must change my notes to tragic so I was interested in trying to figure out why does Milton imagine um not death but fail a failure to die as being part of a tragic genre that that this this sequence of the poem
is both tragic and about the failure of Adam and Eve to die right after the fall so I I I think it's an interesting idea just to realize that we have this idea from Shakespeare that of course tragedy is all about when you have the heaps of corpses up on the stage at the end of Hamlet but of course that's not actually all that tragedy is about especially if you go all the way back to Athenian tragedy there's a number of tragedies in
which there aren't any corpses on on stage at the end and and so I'm interested in it both as a as thinking through how does narrative represent death how does narrative represent the experience of not being dead and also in
um in terms of just imagining what is the tragic genre all about what does it say about both life and death is there an example of overliving say from contemporary popular culture someone who either whose sin or whose tragic fate is
that he or she lived too long I'm not going to come up with good examples so that's why I should have prepped for that Michael Jackson I guess that's yes well but there also postmortem Reckoning very often too right that that that the whole salonic line of call person happy till they're dead very often the whole meaning of the life can change as of as of course it is right now with Michael Jackson that the the Legacy can be become totally tainted
and even after you're gone history itself can revise the ear meaning change the meaning yes would you accept immortality if offered it at your current age and state of health you would be intact as you are today forever uh do the people I love get to forever to just you you have a chance to overlive do you want it can I also create world peace and solve climate change no but you do get to live forever and people might uh buy even more copies
of your books can I change my mind in a couple hundred years no oh then I won't take it then you won't take it no let's say you were age 80 and you could be restored to your your current physical state would you then accept living
forever I think most 8 year-olds would take it then yes I'm sure I will what's the year at which you're indifferent where you're not sure whether or not you take it no I'm I'm kidding I'm I'm not going to take it I would take it I think
mhm if you took it do you think you'd end up being bored or are we able to always keep on amusing ourselves as humans I I think we'd probably I probably keep on amusing myself but it it would probably get hard I mean once there are no more humans left it's it's going to get tough and once all the books have rotted and once the you know I'm not going to be able to run the electrical power plants all by myself now we have a segment in the middle of
these conversations called overrated or underrated and I'll toss out a few items and you give us your opinion if they're overrated or underrated the fork overrated or underrated underrated why in fact my sister wrote a book called consider the for I love maybe a chance to plug her book so it's it's it's about kitchen Technologies and just the ways that people eat given that we have both knives and forks which most most people
you know before fairly recently people at without forks and it encourages a very different approach to cutting up food into small pieces and therefore being able to not have an overbite in your jaw and the the whole the whole
model of of eating and even even the structure of the face is different thanks to the fork Caligula overrated or underrated underrated I mean he's pretty pretty much a low it's not like I think he was great yes but what's the case for
Caligula so to speak relative to reputation that he was a pragmatist he had no choice he had to maintain orderly rule he had to maintain orderly rule and of course everybody would have said he was um absolutely insane and come up
with with with the worst possible excessive stories even if he actually wasn't quite as insane as as made for a good story couldn't he have just been another tiberious or was that then impossible politically he probably could
have been but then psychologically in terms of his personality you know not everybody is tiberious not everybody wants to just go off and sit on Capri for the rest of their life Philip Sydney the poet in essayist overrated or
underrated underrated he's great he's great what do you like about Philip Sydney are we doing plugs for every member of my family okay that's great okay so my mother Katherine Duncan Jones wrote a very good biography of s Philip
Sydney um partly explaining why why he's so underrated um he's underrated I mean I think it's extraordinary that so many people have read Shakespeare but haven't read Sydney who was both a formative influence on on Shakespeare and also an
extraordinary both poet and Pros writer in his own right he wrote both um he wrote two versions of what in many ways are the the of most important early proton novels in English the old Arcadia and the new Arcadia he also wrote an
amazing sequence of sonnets called astal and Stella um he was a great poet great writer Monty Python's Flying Circus overrated or underrated correctly rated very high okay Philadelphia underrated love it how long have you lived here uh
16 or 17 years Queen Victoria overrated or underrated my father and Wilson wrot biography Victoria um I don't know about Victoria I I don't think I have an opinion maybe maybe can stay stay at in the middle yes in the
middle in the middle bad on imperialism but good for European peace that kind of thing exactly yes here's a question from a reader about translation and I quote Greek morphology is a nightmare but syntax is relatively easy Latin is opposite so Latin is more of an in intellectual language agree or disagree I don't think it follows that um difficulty of syntax implies intellectuality of ideas or concepts or anything else I mean I think they they
require different kinds of thinking as artificial intelligence advances and there are more online resources what will translation even mean in that future world will we keep on learning other languages I hope so I think I mean it's a great shame that so many languages are are are dying right now I think it in every language you think differently you you see the world differently so the fewer languages that are you know known by anybody on Earth
the the fewer visions that we have of what life's about there few ways of thinking other than ancient Greek and Latin what languages interest you uh lots of languages I don't know but it's I'm not going to have time thanks to my refusal of your lovely offer of immortality that's in fact something I would do if I if I had you could learn them all I would learn them all for sure um I mean I don't know any Asian languages I feel guilty about that I
know a like I know one semester's worth of Russian I mean I I read French German Italian little bit of Spanish my my daughters go to a Spanish immersion school so I know Elementary School Spanish but I'd love to know some
languages which are more different from those I do know I mean I'd love to know Chinese Japanese Arabic would be great here's another reader question about translation quote could you please ask her about home her translation pulls
this word to the foreground more than I remember other translations doing and that decision made me read the text differently it also made me realize that home is not a concept that I interrogate nearly as much as I should so I'm asking you about home I love that question the Greek text has a lot of uses of the the noun nostos from which we get Nostalgia like the the Journey of homecoming the event of homecoming um and then of Co of
cognate words and I wanted to to use the word home as as a way of signaling the the central ity of the concept of home and of defining the concept of Home in the poem that it it has it's it's already a very loaded word in English I
think it's a it's a word which has which means so much more than just house or place where you live um I think the Odyssey is is fascinating in the ways that it defines home as something which involves both a living space and a
particular kind of community and a space where at least one member of the household has the choice about who to keep in who to keep out and you're working now on a translation of The Iliad is that correct it's correct yes
and is that easier or harder than translating The Odyssey well I started doing it right away or almost right away after I finished the Odyssey because I thought I'm on a rule now I it's not that different in terms of language than
the Odyssey and then I got really stuck for the last for the first few months that I was working on it I was feeling completely stuck and questioning everything because it it's the mood of the poem is so different um it's not all that different lingu linguistically but it's different enough that I felt I had to sort of step back and think think differently about everything I'd already done I mean so for the Odyssey I used damic pentameter
all the way through and I also made it line for line and I started thinking should I do something completely different should I use hexameters should I use um dactyls rather than I AMS um and I think I'm back to I Amic pentameter but it's been through a lot of different struggles and a lot of drafts in of different um different ways of of doing it stylistically poetically and what the process you go through to improve your translation is that you
show it to people you simply let it sit you compare it to other texts you evaluate it as poetry what do you do to have it become better so I usually do a lot of reading and rereading the original and then I usually write a
draft of a little bit out in a notebook I do a lot of looking up different words in different dictionaries and trying to figure out connotations I read my drafts out loud to myself before I read them out loud to anyone else and then I fix
things and change things and try and change things that didn't sound right and then I change them again and then after I've tinkered with it for a long time myself I once I've got a whole Complete Book I both I send the Complete Book to my lovely editor at Norton Pete Simon and he doesn't know Greek but he looks at it next to other translations and thinks about does this sentence work as an English sentence and then he he
sends it back and then I reread it again and I fixed lots of things including things he hadn't commented on and then I and then eventually I share with other people as well I go through multiple stages of revisions now I have the
impression that you're using Twitter in some ways to revolutionize how people discuss and present translation is that a fair assessment of what you're up to yes I think there are some misunderstandings about translation that
are really common so I'm I'm trying to articulate just sort of translation 101 to the AUD to how do you do that in 280 characters is it all tweet storm or embedded photos or what what's your method of using Twitter my method is um
well I do I I do have some cat photos as well but my My Method about translation is to take a tiny bit of mostly The Odyssey but occasionally some other text and analyze what different translators usually if it's the Odyssey including me
have done with it and just show how complet how very very different the meaning of a sentence can be depending on how how exactly a translator chooses to chooses one word versus another word and how there can be very very different interpretations all of which are valid readings of the Greek and what do you think translation teaches us or you in particular so say I were to talk with an ancient historian about periclean Athens
or I could speak with you and you've done translating of ancient Greek or of Homer's time uh what perspectives are you likely to have on those periods that say an ancient historian would not what kind of knowledge do you end up
specializing in other than the translation itself I would say I have um I I have a pretty deep knowledge of of word choice and Poetics and style and literary form of each of the texts I've studied I but what will that cash out
into like if I ask you what might you understand about ancient Athens that an ancient historian would not as well like what would you say concretely I would say I I mean if you're asking about paricles I I would say that if I'd spent
longer studying Pericles speech in facility I I might have a deeper understanding of the rhetorical tropes that that are being used and of the um the ways that rhetoric inter interacts with ideology with within the representation
in that in that passage within the representations in multiple literary texts of that period um I think I might have a deeper understanding of how cultural representations operate in classical Athens but you end up thinking
well they're funnier than we thought they're more sardonic than we thought they're more bitter than we thought mhm what's the final takeaway in terms of your understanding of that time um are we ask are we are you doing classical
Athens or doing any period you care to Homer's time is fine but we know more about Athens of course we know more about Athens I I would definitely say funnyer but I also say um even though the texts we have are primarily by Elite men I think even from those texts which are already tiny demographic we can say they they're more diverse in terms of how do they look at the world than we might have thought that they don't that
you could the generalizing about this is the Athenian worldview doesn't actually make any sense if you look at the array of different opinions that are articulated in the text and when you translated The Odyssey as a reader I
think of your approach as pretty clean and direct and very easy to read but also with a lot of psychological depth and I prefer that in the Odyssey but when I read say the Hebrew Bible I want something a little more maybe stentorian
in tone or a little more Baroque actually I I think a lot of people feel the same way why that difference why do we want something different from a Bible translation often H have you read the the Robert alter yes translations do you
like them very much so so they're they're also fairly clear right it's not that they're I don't find them very clear maybe they're as clear as they can be yeah but you're easier to read than he is that may be the difference is
pretty easy to read I mean homo syntax is really very easy and I wanted that's part of what I wanted to bring out I mean I hope that in a way I would like it if my Sena translations are less easy to read than my Homer translations
because I think correct easy to read I hope so because stylistically those authors are very different I me so I think it's partly just about the source text and it's also about the cultural perception of the source text right I
mean we don't most people in contemporary Society don't believe in Athena so we have a different idea about how should Divinity be represented in this text versus in a text where there are people who still worship the god of
the god of the Hebrew Bible right right sure which poets have influenced your translations other than the Poets of the time obviously Homer but later poet yes so my my translation of the Odyssey is all in iambic pentameter and I and i' as
I said earlier um my first book which is my dissertation was came out of a set of questions about Milton's Paradise Lost I was very much aware that um English already has has epic poems and and I also was very much aware that I didn't want to make Homer sound like sub miltonic I didn't want to make it sound like Paradise Lost I didn't want to make it sound like the fairy queen I didn't even want to make it sound like Tennyson
even though I love Tennyson's idles as well as his ulyses and he has one of the most ambiguous characterizations of Ulisses he he does to me makes perfect sense yes it's a wonderful poem so I I wanted to try and um to obscure my love
for Shakespeare and Milton in the style I was writing but also for it to be there on the down low and I wanted to try and write a a kind of narrative verse that was informed by pre-20th Century narrative verse but that was not
archaizing so in some ways it it I wanted to try and make it more like Elizabeth Bishop or ordin than like Shakespeare even though I also have have spent a huge amount of time reading Shakespeare Samuel Johnson once so pin
that no one ever wished Paradise Lost to be longer than it is do you agree or did you wish that I wish it were longer but also wish the last two books were better what's wrong with them it's just a lot of summary of how the world's going to
be terrible terrible terrible and then yes it's going to be terrible some more which isn't Nar Nar in terms of narrative and characterization it's much less interesting than the first 10 books I much prefer Samson agonises to
Paradise Lost am I crazy very interesting I love Samson nesties but I don't much prefer it now that you've achieved a high degree of Fame glory and you know income also and you think about how the ancient Greeks understood f Fame
and Glory how is it to be from a position of Fame and Glory yourself evaluating their views um I guess it depends which ancient Greeks we ask right I mean if you ask aysus he'd say great you should get as much um stuff as possible you you're going to you you should you know try to come home not just broken in in a borrowed boat but with as much treasure as possible if you asked Socrates who went around with no sandals and one
cloak summer and winter maybe not so not so interested in the accumulation of K dos some more questions about you how important do you think it is having more female mentors in Academia and how do we get there I think it's very important and I I don't think I have an easy answer to how we get there I I think part of it has to do with um familyfriendly hiring policies familyfriendly retention policies because there are also glass ceilings
right I mean in terms of how many women get tenure as opposed to how many get hired as opposed to how many finish their phds women drop off at every stage should we just abolish tenure and have fiveyear contracts pay some people more pay pay
everybody I mean pay all the adjuncts I mean we need that's that's the area that I think really needs to get fixed in general that of course there's the trend towards these people who not only don't have tenure but also don't have any kind
of contract beyond the single course which is a terrible deal but other than just having more money everyone would want how should we change the rules of the system I don't know I mean I think there should be more Equity I mean I I
don't feel like there should be such a disparity between the people who are people like me who are lucky enough to have you know a good salary and guaranteed medical benefits for the rest of my career unless I go crazy and you
know quit um and then the a juns who get none of those things we feel like there should be some something closer to a to a leveling and I don't know what I can do to fix that but when you were 17 what in the world of ideas were you obsessed with whether the unexamined life is worth living I mean I I must what did you conclude I thought I needed another few years examining it to figure it out worth living as long as it's not too
long right that's right when you were 14 what was your favorite book when I was younger than 14 I loved all books that had magic in them so I loved the N year books Diana wi Jones um I didn't want to read anything that didn't involve going through a portal to another world and then I think that started to change when I was 14 and I started to read Jane air maybe around that age and I loved it um Jane Austin I read Dickens I went through a
very religious phase and I read the Bible might might have been my favorite book at 14 that kind of thing yes yes and how did you decide to become a classicist you could have taken a number of paths right if you're going to be an
academic I could have taken many parts and in fact I think I wouldn't have been an acade I think I I considered not being an academic at all that's another possible path I I consider what would you have done if not Academia that's
that's partly why I stuck out I I didn't quite know I me I I considered going to med school but I realized that I'm actually not very good with blood I considered going to law school but then I actually thought I'm I want to spend
more time in the library than I think I'm going to get if I if I do that um I considered also being a literature scholar but not a classicist I mean I knew I wanted to to read poetry and keep on studying poetry but I didn't
necessarily think it had to be ancient poetry I thought I thought it could be later poetry as well would be fine you have many writers in your family background how did that shape you it made me know that it wasn't weird to
want to read all the time MH um so that in itself was a formative realize it was a formative thing I didn't have to learn that it's that it's okay to to be reading all the time now there's some books you're working on I'll ask you
about on your homepage you list one called Classics reborn a book on the reception of classical literature in the early modern period Oxford University press what will you cover it's going to be a a sort of survey of how did people
in what people used to unselfconsciously call the re renissance or I always hesitate over that word because Americans say Renaissance I say Renaissance anyway so in that period um The Rebirth of classical Antiquity what
exactly was it to imagine that um classical Antiquity was being reborn so it's going to be about what what was that weird idea about and is there a cal figure country time no it's it's going to be a broad um but broad but selective
account of how that played out in um I mean it's going to be primarily Britain and Europe and it's it's more probably more Britain than anywhere else but um I can't skip Italy um and going through primarily literary texts and and
discussing the ways that literary authors of that period both build on and talk back to ancient authors and there's another book listed titled faithful described as a book about translation what will that be or what is it that's a
much shorter book and and not covering the whole of the whole of the Renaissance um it's a sort of stump piece in a way trying to do the same kind of thing that I'm doing on Twitter in terms of trying to explain to the the
general reader what exactly translation what do translators do all day what the literally translators do all day and also trying to figure out why is it which to me was puzzling when I realized it was true why is it that um for
instance that I'm the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English or to publish a translation of the Odyssey into English I was surprised when I realized that and then I realized this is part of a Much More Much broader
gender disparity that it's not that there aren't any female homor of course there are of course there are plenty of female classicists and yet um the field of literary translation within Classics is really skewed towards um towards men
and I was wanted to figure out why is that what kinds of issues are there within the field of literary translation in general and classical literary translation in particular why is that a stronger skew in the English language
world I I'm I'm not sure I mean it's it's very striking that that you know there's been a translation of the Odyssey by a woman in into French since um the 18th century there are several bomen into into Italian there's one bi woman into Turkish I think the whole culture of translation is different in um in European countries to to what it is do you think women translators have a higher relative standing when translation is less professionalized
less bureaucratized it's something you just do whereas when we conduct it through Academia maybe that puts women translators at a disadvantage or I think it's a combination of um that Academia in the states much more than perhaps in
France or Italy devalues translation so the you don't get tenure for translation which then also means if you're a category of person who might already be less likely to get tenure then maybe you're even less likely to do this this
this kind of work which is valued as useless why do we devalue translation in Academia what's wrong with our incentive scheme the whole incentive scheme is is messed up because the the kind of writing that's that's valued almost
exclusively is the peer-reviewed monograph which is I think it's partly that the humanities are supposed to come up with the kind of orig with or quote unquote original research which is imagined to work in exactly the same
structure as um PE reviewed research in stem fields which then means that it has to it has to qualify in the same way and then if you do a different kind of work which is not the peer reviewed monograph it doesn't look as much analogous to the research in the stem Fields so we don't count it and the different books you're writing the ilad translation faithful Classics reborn do you work on them all at once or what's your method you come
back yes I I still struggle with that all the time I I right now I'm not teaching so I I I'm able to you know spend the morning doing one and in the afternoon doing another I like it if I can do at least some translating in the
course of a day and then some writing in the course of a day I like to sort of balance out because they feel like they use different parts of my my brain and just physically what does your translation look like is it simply you
sitting at a computer typing and staring is it a room full of papers and books is it you've had to buy a separate house what's the production function for translation describe the factory I have a very big desk from Ika and I have a
huge orange cat who's mostly on it and I also have a couple of Greek dictionaries um usually a couple of commentaries a the te the Greek text a notebook a laptop so I usually do um some writing of a draft by hand in the
notebook first and then I type it up on the laptop and and then I revise it and I can consult the various the various texts that are spread around me on my big desk at various points very last question let's say a very smart uh
female undergraduate comes to you say she's 19 and she says I want to be the next great Homer translator say 30 40 years from now and we need another translation just because our language has changed and she asks you for advice
or some kind of insight that you have having done what you've done what is it you would tell her that other people wouldn't I would tell her read lots of English poetry I think it's very common for um for classicists to be a little bit too overp specialized and have just read ancient literature and have not not read enough literature that isn't um and she should start where she should read things that interest her that that she
loves I I don't think it has to be that I prescribe her Cannon but she but she should be reading in in her own language as as well as in ancient Greek Emily Wilson thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to
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