Emily Wilson (classicist)

Emily Rose Caroline Wilson (born 1971) is a British classicist and the Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.Emily R. Wilson
University of Pennsylvania. In 2017 she became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer's ''Odyssey'' into English.

Early life and education

Wilson "comes from a long line of academics", including both her parents, A. N. Wilson and Katherine Duncan-Jones, her uncle, and her maternal grandparents, including Elsie Duncan-Jones. Her sister is the food writer Bee Wilson. Wilson's parents divorced shortly before she went to college.

Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school. A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1994 (B.A. in literae humaniores, classical literature, and philosophy), she undertook her master's degree in English literature 1500–1660 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1996), and her Ph.D. (2001) in classical and comparative literature at Yale University. Her thesis was entitled ''Why Do I Overlive?: Greek, Latin and English Tragic Survival''.

Career

Wilson has authored five books. The first, ''Mocked With Death'' (2005), grew out of her dissertation and examines mortality in the tragic tradition: "our constant awareness of all that we will lose, are losing, have lost." The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003. In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship (Rome Prize). Her next book, ''The Death of Socrates'' (2007), examines Socrates' execution. Wilson later reflected that she was interested in the ways and methods that Socrates would educate people, but also Socrates' death as an image: "What does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment, even when you've just poisoned yourself?"

Wilson's next works primarily 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''. She later noted that Seneca is an interesting subject because "he's so precise in articulating what it means to have a very, very clear vision of the good life and to be completely unable to follow through on living the good life." Wilson commented on the challenges of translating Seneca's ornate rhetorical style, saying that Senecan bombast in contemporary English risks sounding "too silly to be impressive. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there."

Wilson is a book reviewer for ''The Times Literary Supplement'', the ''London Review of Books'', and ''The New Republic''. She is also the classics editor for ''The Norton Anthology of World Literature'' and ''The Norton Anthology of Western Literature''.

In January 2020, Wilson joined the Booker Prize judging panel, alongside Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay.

''Odyssey'' translation

Wilson is perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed translation of ''The Odyssey'' (2017), becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. Following a lengthy introduction, she provides a translation of Homer's work in iambic pentameter. Wilson's ''Odyssey'' was named by ''The New York Times'' as one of its 100 notable books of 2018 and it 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.

Beginning, "Tell me about a complicated man", Wilson writes with some creative and unusual phrases (such as "journeyways of fish"), although much of her verse translation uses "plain, contemporary language"., attending to both Homer's "fleetness" and "rhythm and musicality". Following many other Homeric scholars, she has argued that the hierarchical societies depicted in the Homeric poems are not viewed uncritically by the narrator, and that the poems include many voices and many distinct points of view. In one noteworthy choice, enslaved characters, described as "dmoiai" or "dmoioi" in the Greek, are often referred to as "slaves" in Wilson's versions, instead of "maids" or "servants"; Wilson has expressed surprise that so many modern North American translations obscure the social structures, noting "how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible."

Wilson has noted that being a woman did not predetermine her critical work as a scholar, reader or translator, and has expressed discomfort with the media reception of her work in terms of gender, since it tends to obscure her primary goals (such as the use of regular meter and attention to sound), and risks erasing the work of other female Homerists and female translators. Wilson has emphasized that other female translators of Homer, such as Anne Dacier and Rosa Onesti, made very different interpretative choices from hers.

Bibliography

Books and translations

*
''The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint''
Harvard University Press, 2007. .
''Seneca: Six Tragedies''
Oxford University Press, 2010. .
''The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca''
Oxford University Press, 2014. .

Modern Library/Random House, 2016. ''Helen'',_''Helen'',_''Bacchae'',_''The_Trojan_Women.html"__"title="The_Bacchae.html"_;"title="Helen_(play).html"_;"title="ilson_translated_Helen_(play)">''Helen'',_The_Bacchae">''Bacchae'',_''The_Trojan_Women">Trojan_Women_

''The_Trojan_Women''_(_grc,_Τρῳάδες,_translit=Trōiades),_also_translated_as_''The_Women_of_Troy'',_and_also_known_by_its_transliterated_Greek_title_''Troades'',_is_a_tragedy_by_the_Greek_playwright_Euripides._Produced_in_415_BC_during__...
''_and_''Electra_(Euripides_play).html" "title="The_Bacchae">''Bacchae'',_''The_Trojan_Women.html" "title="The_Bacchae.html" ;"title="Helen_(play).html" ;"title="ilson translated Helen (play)">''Helen'', The Bacchae">''Bacchae'', ''The Trojan Women">Trojan Women'' and ''Electra (Euripides play)">Electra