Homer Emily Wilson Popular Books

Homer Emily Wilson Biography & Facts

Emily Rose Caroline Wilson (born 1971) is a British American classicist, author, translator, and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023. She is also the author of several books, including Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007), and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (2014). Early life and education Wilson was born in 1971 in Oxford, England. Her parents are Katherine Duncan-Jones, who was a scholar of Elizabethan literature, and A. N. Wilson, an English writer.Her maternal uncle was a scholar of Roman history at the University of Cambridge, and her maternal grandmother, Elsie Duncan-Jones, was a scholar at the University of Birmingham, as was her maternal grandfather. Her younger sister is Bee Wilson, who became a food writer.Wilson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1994 with a B.A. in literae humaniores, classical literature, and philosophy. She completed an MPhil in English Renaissance literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1996, and a Ph.D. in classical and comparative literature at Yale University in 2001.She received the 2003 Charles Bernheimer Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for her dissertation Why Do I Overlive?: Greek, Latin and English Tragic Survival. Career Wilson has taught in the Classical Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania since 2002. She developed her first book, Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004), from her Ph.D. dissertation, and dedicated it to her grandmother Elsie Duncan-Jones. According to Wyatt Mason, the book "looks at the way mortality was imagined, in the tragic tradition, by Milton, Shakespeare, Seneca, Sophocles and Euripides." In a Renaissance Quarterly review, Margaret J. Arnold writes, "The exposition challenges Aristotelian ideas of tragic structure, catharsis, and conventional heroism."In 2006, Wilson received a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her next book, The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007), was described by Carolyne Larrington as "a sprightly and illuminating account of the events surrounding Socrates' execution by means of a self-administered drink of hemlock; the probable historical reasons for his trial and judgment; and the ways in which later ages – from Socrates’ immediate successors among the Greeks, through the Romans, Christian apologists, Renaissance thinkers, Enlightenment sages and anxious moderns – have understood the death of Socrates."Wilson's next books focused on Rome's tragic playwright Seneca. In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. In 2014, she published The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, which is also published with the alternate title Seneca: A Life. In a review of Seneca: A Life for Literary Review, Tim Whitmarsh writes, "This clever and learned book is not just a study of a protean and conflicted individual. It is also intended as a lesson for our own time. Seneca, Wilson argues, was 'Rome's most perceptive analyst of consumerism and luxury'."Wilson became internationally known for her translation of The Odyssey in 2018, with media attention on her becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. A 2019 interview with Robert Wood published in the Los Angeles Review of Books includes discussion by Wilson about the media attention she received as the first woman known to translate the entire Odyssey into English. Wilson comments, "The stylistic and hermeneutic choices I make as a translator aren't predetermined by my gender identity. Other female translators of Homer – such as Caroline Alexander in English, Rosa Onesti in Italian, and Anne Dacier in French – have made extremely different choices from mine." Wilson's Odyssey was named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018 and was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award.In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences, and she was appointed the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.In January 2020, Wilson joined the Booker Prize judging panel, alongside Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay. In 2020, she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work translating Homer's Iliad.In September 2023, an English translation by Wilson of Homer's Iliad was published by W. W. Norton & Company. Wilson includes an introduction, as well as maps, family trees, a glossary, and text notes. She had developed the book over the previous six years. Odyssey translation A review of Wilson's translation of the Odyssey by Madeline Miller for The Washington Post notes that Wilson "prioritizes Homer's speed and narrative drive, seeking to capture what she calls the "nimble gallop" of his verse. She writes in iambic pentameter, impressively limiting herself to the same number of lines as Homer’s original". In a review for London Review of Books, Colin Burrow discusses "the challenging task of translating the poem into the same number of iambic pentameter lines as there are hexameters in the original," writing, "In order to achieve that level of compression she has to rely heavily on monosyllables, and to make sharp and sometimes simplifying decisions about which of Homer’s implications to make explicit."In a review for NPR, Annalisa Quinn writes, "Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup – the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms – to reveal something fresh and clean." In Wilson's translation, enslaved characters are often referred to as "slaves" instead of as "maids" or "servants", with translator notes explaining the word choices; while discussing older translations of the Odyssey with Anna North at Vox, Wilson commented, "It sort of stuns me ... how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible."Madeline Miller also writes about Wilson's word choices, including the use of the word slave, and states, "Perhaps more controversial will be her translation of the famous first line, which Wilson gives as 'Tell me about a complicated man.'" Referring to the opening lines of Wilson's translation, Wyatt Mason writes, "When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored," and as to the use of the word complicated in the first line, "the brilliance of Wilson's choice is, in part, its seemin.... Discover the Homer Emily Wilson popular books. 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  • The Odyssey synopsis, comments

    The Odyssey

    Homer & Samuel Butler

    Having spent ten years fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus embarks on his journey back to Ithica. To get there he must deceive a giant Cyclops, face Poseidon’s wrath, escape canni...