Emily Wilson Wanted to Like Nolan’s Odyssey

Emily Wilson has become the most famous living translator of the Homeric epics.

Her 2017 The Odyssey , the first major translation of the poem into English by a woman, has sold more than 1 million copies. (Her Iliad translation came in 2023.) And this summer, she found herself right at the center of cultural discourse after she drew her sword and published a scathing review of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the ancient work.

She didn’t anticipate that she would become part of a pop-culture controversy, and she was reluctant to revisit the episode when we sat down for an interview at this year’s Atlantic Festival.

“I really wanted to like the film,” she said, but “it seems to me that criticism has a responsibility to tell the truth.” Her strong convictions animate a new book of essays, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea , which dissects translations of ancient work with unsparing rigor.

Wilson, who is now working on a second translation of The Odyssey , entertained the idea that there might be something “compulsive” in her art and her approach.

Her new essays reveal a translator’s difficult balancing act—between fidelity and originality, and between accessibility and strangeness.

In the course of our wide-ranging conversation about the pleasures and blind spots of translation—and, yes, the backlash to her now-notorious movie review—she spoke about the imperative she feels to get that balance exactly right.

The following conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: You take a pretty hard line in this book about when a text should be retranslated, but you’re translating The Odyssey again.

It’s interesting that you should want to go back in again.

Have you learned something new about the text or come to see it in a new way that makes it exciting for you to tear it all up and start it from scratch? Emily Wilson: It’s not tearing it up to do a new one, right? Partly it’s that I’m kind of addicted; I can’t stop doing this.

I have several other projects I’m supposed to be doing.

I did The Odyssey really prioritizing pacing, because my students would very often show up to class saying, Oh, it was so boring.

And I would be like, How can The Odyssey be boring? And then I would realize it’s because the translation was twice as long as the original.