What's New is Old Again

On Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's Iliad

The funny thing about the story of the Trojan war is just how much of it doesn’t happen in The Iliad: The judgement of Paris? Paris stealing Helen from Menelaus? Agamemnon and Menelaus gathering the Greek army and the famed 10,000 ships? Paris shooting Achilles in the heel? Trojan horse? The sack of Troy? All that is either either described as an aside in The Iliad or told in more detail in the long flashbacks of The Odyssey; the rest has all been added on by non-Homeric storytellers in the Greek and Roman worlds. (Here’s lookin’ at you, Virgil). What we have instead in The Iliad is just the wrath of Achilles, and the many, many deaths that wrath causes. And what we have now is a new translation of The Iliad by the classicist du jour, Emily Wilson, who made ripples among the academic set (and the wider general public) with her ‘modern’ translation of The Odyssey in 2017. Back then, a lot of the discussion was about how hers was the first published translation of The Odyssey by a woman, and much was made of her translation choices, particularly the gauntlet-throwing opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” This time around, Wilson’s bonafides as a classicist have been well established, her translation style more worn in and less ‘shocking,’ the only people I’ve seen quibbling with it are random twitter trolls rather than academics in the LRB, and Caroline Alexander already beat her to the punch on translating The Iliad as a woman. The start is not so controversial or ‘complicated’ this time around, it more neatly fits into the long tradition of English Iliads: “Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath / of Great Achilles…”