The Iliad of Homer
Translated by Emily Wilson
WW Norton 2023

Emily Wilson follows up her critically-acclaimed 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey with this translation of the Iliad in a heavy, very stylish new hardcover from WW Norton. Wilson joins the very small group of women who’ve translated the poem, which would guarantee the book a large amount of publicity in our hyper-partisan political moment even if her Odyssey had not been so well received, and the twofold result has been as predictable as it’s been enjoyable: dozens of critics are writing about Homer, and the intricacies of translation are again being discussed in all the critical journals.

The central intricacy has always been the translator’s intentions. Do they plan to render the original into its new language with as much word-and-phrase fidelity as possible, or are they aiming instead to capture some elusive essence of the original, now draped in the rules and customs of states unborn and accents yet unknown? In her Translator’s Note (oddly so called to differentiate it from the Introduction, even though she wrote them both), Wilson makes it clear she’d like her own approach to be the former, with fidelity to the original taking precedence. “Ideally, literary translators would not grind the beef, pork, and lamb of their originals into an unidentifiable hot dog,” she writes. “Instead, the distinctive stylistic features of each original should remain distinct in translation.” 

This will of course be borderline impossible, since the iambic pentameter of English doesn’t exactly play well with the dactylic hexameter of Homer’s Greek. That core incompatibility has breach-birthed hundreds of translations into English, with often very intriguingly varying results. In her Odyssey, Wilson was clearly striving for an approachable immediacy, and that seems to be her guiding principle here too. “In order to enable a modern reader to feel as engaged and immersed in this poem as an ancient listener might have done,” she writes, “I felt my English should never be more difficult or more obscure than the Greek original.” 

There’s an obvious quick rejoinder to this – what about the translator ethics of less difficult or less obscure? – but the solicitude for the modern reader is always welcome, although it can of course be taken too far. There’s a temptation before all 21st-century translators, a social-media temptation to dumb things down and dial up the quick-hit drama. The rationale behind such a temptation might very well derive from social media as well: surely something like the Iliad is an ultimate manifestation of “too long, didn’t read”? 

The Iliad is full of voices, full of characters talking to each other, and if this temptation is going to manifest itself, that’s where it’ll pop up first, not in long, intricate descriptions of the shield of Achilles. Take, for instance, the non-stop action of Book XI, where one Greek captain after another is suddenly taken out of action, forced to limp back to the beach and lick their wounds. For one brief moment, the useless Prince Paris gets to shine, firing off his arrows and occasionally hitting the mark. He wounds Diomedes in the foot, and since he seems to be out of arrows, Diomedes has a chance to brag his way through the pain (instead of Paris putting a second arrow right in his open mouth). Back in 1950, E.V. Rieu rendered a prose version for Penguin Classics:

Bowman and braggart, with your pretty lovelocks and your glad eye for the girls; if you faced me man to man with real weapons, you would find your bow and quiverful a poor defense. As it is, you flatter yourself. All you have done is to scratch the soul of my foot. And for that I care no more than if a woman or a naughty boy had hit me. A shot from a coward and milksop does no harm. But my weapons have a better edge. One touch from them, and a man is dead, his wife has lacerated cheeks, and his children have no father; the earth turns red with his blood, and there he rots, with fewer girls than vultures at his side.

Forty years later, Robert Fagles made a new translation for Penguin:

So brave with your bow and arrows – big bravado –

Glistening lovelocks, roving eye for girls!

Come, try me in combat, weapons hand-to-hand –

Bow and spattering shafts will never help you then.

You scratch my foot and you’re vaunting all the same – 

But who cares? A woman or idiot boy could wound me so.

The shaft of a good-for-nothing coward’s got no point

But mine’s got heft and edge. Let it graze a man –

My weapon works in a flash and drops him dead.

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief,

His sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil 

Red with his own blood, he rots away himself –

More birds than women flocking around his body!

The small changes jump out right away: “milksop” is gone from the Fagles, and Rieu’s “quiverful” becomes “spattering shafts.” And the brittle bravado of Diomedes, who’s obviously hurt worse than he wants to admit (all that business about women and small boys being a dead giveaway), comes across more clearly in the Fagles just a bit. And the opening insults are virtually unchanged: “your pretty lovelocks and your glad eye for the girls” to “glistening lovelocks, roving eye for girls.” It’s an immediate, human moment, and here’s how Wilson gives it:

You good-for-nothing archer! Sleazy flirt!

So rude! So cocky in your silly hairstyle!

If you tried fighting with me face to face,

Your bow and your swift arrows would be useless.

You brag like this because you grazed my foot.

I barely noticed it – as if a woman 

Or foolish child had slapped me. Blows that come

From nobodies and cowards do not hurt. 

Even a scratch from me cuts sharp and deep,

And instantly, my enemy is dead.

His grieving widow’s fingers tear her cheeks,

His children have no father now. His blood

Reddens the earth. He rots and round his body

More birds than women gather.

This announces itself immediately, of course: it’s very intentionally meant to sound jazzy and contemporary. Here Prince Paris is “rude.” Here he’s a “nobody.” And then there’s that headliner change: “sleazy flirt” in place of Rieu’s “glad eye for the girls” and Fagles’s “roving eye for girls.” The Greek word, parthenopips, is rendered literally in Wilson’s notes as “girl-ogler,” and she mentions that “sleazy flirt” could also be rendered as “girl-eyed.” All of which sufficiently muddies the question of whether Paris looks at girls, is looked at by girls, or looks like a girl, but it doesn’t even touch on much less explain that “sleazy,” which has a host of contemporary connotations that are certainly not present in Homer. Likewise that “rude,” which is Wilson’s substitution for Rieu’s “braggart” and Fagles’s “big bravado” – Wilson glosses the Greek lobeter as indicating that Paris “is better at hurling insults than weapons,” which preserves the irony of the one moment when Paris is actually good at hurling weapons but, unlike the two predecessors, kills the parallel of the insult coming from Diomedes, who’s right at the moment engaged in desperate bravado (and who’s very good at hurling both throughout the poem). 

It’s just a single moment, but it paints the Wilson Iliad in general: when Wilson comes to a passage that might be flashier if she temporarily skirted or ignored the “distinctive stylistic features,” she tends to do that, usually in the cause of emphasizing the drama of any given passage. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as seen in the number of Homer translators who’ve made the same choice for their own books. Vivid color and lunging action are clearly priorities for Wilson. “The horror of the war is stained, like ivory, with beauty,” she writes. “We feel the joy of the spear at tasting human flesh, and the purely sensory details: the gleam of metal, the softness or wetness of the muscle and blood, the noisy clash of armor and bones as they hit the ground.” It’s a fair assessment to say that Wilson has succeeded in crafting this sensory Iliad for a sensory era. It’ll certainly make readers for her Homer.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.