A little girl. Eight years old. Her school puts on a play. She’s given a featured role, the bright-eyed Athena, a Greek goddess. The production fires her imagination. The play is a tale of a far-away world, one full of magic and adventure involving a strange cast of compelling characters: marvelous men, magnificent women, incredible beasts, and an assortment of grand deities and curious demi-gods. It’s all so foreign and yet at the same time so remarkably familiar—the story of a man, equal parts good and bad; he’s struggling to survive against all odds to return to those he loves. He’s just trying to get home.
Inspired by the show, the little girl next finds as many ancient Greek myths as she can get her hands on. She devours all of them as well as the full version of The Odyssey, the epic poem on which her little elementary school play was based. She learns Latin, then Greek. She attends Oxford, then Yale, earning a PhD in Literature. Yet even as time passes, it’s that first play that never lets her go.
Though The Odyssey has been translated into English more than 60 times since the 17th century, Emily Wilson, the little girl in the play, became not only the first woman to do so, but she’s the first scholar to take on the additional challenge of translating Homer into iambic pentameter, matching him stanza by stanza and ending up with the exact number of lines the poet himself used. Readable, fluent, fleet-footed, Wilson’s miraculous version of The Odyssey aims, she says, to run “stride for stride with Homer’s nimble gallup.” Writing with a “plain simplicity and directness of thought,” she invites her readers toward a “more thoughtful consideration of what the narrative (actually) means.” Published to great fanfare in 2018, reviewers were duly impressed, calling Wilson’s writing crisp, vivid, cobweb-clearing, a landmark, a revelation.
Claire Danes, the actor who reads the audiobook of Wilson’s version of the poem, spoke for many a reader and listener when she said The Odyssey addresses no less than “what it is to be alive; what it is to find your way through life and exercise the best judgment you can with your own wits to try to survive. We can all identify with that,” she added, and she’s right.
Central to our literature for over 2500 years, The Odyssey holds forth on the most universal of universal themes: hospitality and the bonds of “guest-friendship”—xenia as it’s called in the original Greek—and the value of perseverance, which Wilson translates as “long-suffering.” Wilson elaborates brilliantly on this idea, this human value, in her introduction to the poem, calling it a “willingness to wait for the right moment to act without ever giving up.” The poem also takes up the concept of human grief, our vulnerability, our fear of the unknown, and our own mortality. Never shy about grappling with the big questions like how human beings might best interact with the transcendent, The Odyssey also explores themes of sacrifice and human beings’ devotion to what they consider to be divine. The timeless ideas of chance and destiny are plumbed, as well. Most distressingly, the poem suggests that our good behavior doesn't necessarily guarantee a happy life as it examines ideas of honor, of fidelity, and of the Greek idea of metis—the skills required to contend with the most difficult trials the world places before us. “Tell me about a complicated man,” Wilson writes in the first superbly-crafted line of her translation, and she’s off and running, tackling the Homeric epic straight on.
One may ask, why should we study such ancient stories? Well, first of all, it's undeniable that this epic, along with texts like The Iliad and our own Scripture, the Old Testament and New, have survived for thousands of years. If evolution teaches us it’s the fittest that survive, the fact that these texts have managed to persist at the center of our canon for thousands of years must mean they’ve contributed meaningfully to how our species has continued to survive, even thrive. Their durability suggests, in a word, that they are true. For this reason alone, they should be considered with utmost seriousness, and we should be encouraged, as Emily Wilson does with such deftness, to continue delving deeply into them. Simply put, they’re fundamental to what it means to be ourselves. Though messy and sometimes murky, they offer authentic, honest answers to our species' most consequential questions, firing our imaginations, and helping us to think about what our lives can be. May they never let us go.
God—Thank you for wiring us for story. May our stories continue to help us contend with the world. Amen.
