Emily Wilson on The Iliad

Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey—the first translation of Homer’s epic into English by a woman— was received with huge attention and international acclaim.

Published in 2017, scholars and critics alike celebrated it as “a masterpiece” (Rowan Williams), “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times), and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English.

Wilson’s commitment to a regular, iambic pentameter line—the most familiar metrical structure to English readers—and to “fresh, unpretentious, and lean” language (Madeline Miller, Washington Post) won the hearts of readers by the hundreds of thousands.

Now, six years later and a decade in the making, Wilson joins us in Bath to give a talk on her new and equally revelatory translation of the first great Homeric epic: the much longer, much more violent and reverently respected Iliad.

In Wilson’s hands, this exciting and often horrifying work now gallops at a pace befitting its best battle scenes, roaring with the clamour of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors and the anguished cries of dying men. Wilson’s unadorned but resonant language plumbs the poem’s profound pathos and reveals its characters as palpably real, even “complicated,” human beings.

There is a reason Wilson’s Odyssey is now the go-to edition on English-speaking university reading lists, and this ground-breaking new translation will no doubt follow suit.

Capping a decade of intense engagement with Homer’s poetry, Wilson’s Iliad finally gives us a complete Homer for our generation and countless more to come.