Nearly a decade after her acclaimed translation brought Homer’s The Odyssey to a new generation of English-language readers, Emily Wilson is returning to the ancient epic. Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, is now retranslating the poem entirely from scratch. The new version, she told the New York Times, will follow an approach closer to her translation of The Iliad, using somewhat more lines than the original to allow greater variation in word length and pacing. “It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told the Associated Press. She is currently about halfway through the project.
The announcement follows a summer of controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey, which drew on Wilson’s 2017 translation, including its opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man.” Wilson sharply criticised the film in the London Review of Books, while novelist Joyce Carol Oates subsequently accused her of “haughty superiority.” But Wilson’s decision to revisit Homer predates the dispute. In a spring interview, she spoke of wanting to return to the poem and approach it differently. She remains proud of her first translation, while acknowledging choices she would now reconsider—including its repeated use of the word “slave,” which she believes could be replaced by more precise terminology reflecting the poem’s different forms of enslavement.
The second Odyssey will also contain substantially more of Wilson’s scholarly commentary, with four times as many endnotes as the original. For Wilson, returning to Homer is not simply an exercise in correction but another encounter with a poem that has already been transformed through language once before. Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds noted that translators have often revisited their own earlier work, describing literary translation as a continuing process of “interpretive reimagining and re-making.” Wilson will probably retain her now-famous opening line, but beyond that, the new Odyssey promises another version of an ancient story, one shaped by a translator who knows the poem intimately and is willing to meet it again.
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