When Keats first looked into Chapman’s Homer, he felt like “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”. This translation will change the way the poem is read in English. (Wilson studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford – as, full disclosure, did I – and is now a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania.) She has also written a work of limpid, fast-moving verse, in English epic’s home metre of iambic pentameter. Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem. Now comes the first by a woman.Įmily Wilson’s crisp and musical version is a cultural landmark. The first into English was by George Chapman in 1614-15 there have been at least 60 others. The first into Latin was in the third century BC by a slave called Livius Andronicus. H omer’s Odyssey, probably composed around 700BC, is one of the oldest poems in the western tradition, with a concomitantly long history of translation.
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