Odyssey Translator Emily Wilson’s ‘Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea’ Lays Her Rules

Is there a scholar better at promoting a book launch than Emily Wilson? Almost a decade ago she revolutionized the promotion of literary translation after the release of her first Odyssey translation. While literary media outlets were breathlessly heralding the arrival of the first-ever translation of the Odyssey into English by a woman, Wilson took to Twitter and showed everyone in granular detail how a translator works, with lengthy threads (still available here, even though Wilson has since deleted her Twitter account) detailing how the choices she’d made differed from earlier renditions.

The threads combined transparency, accessibility, and humor, and they were hugely popular. Whether you came to them as a trained classicist trying to figure out which translation you wanted to teach, or as a newcomer to Homer wondering why another translation was needed at all, Wilson had something to teach you.

The threads combined transparency, accessibility, and humor, and they were hugely popular. Whether you came to them as a trained classicist trying to figure out which translation you wanted to teach, or as a newcomer to Homer wondering why another translation was needed at all, Wilson had something to teach you.

Those threads form the basis of the final, largest essay in Wilson’s essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, released earlier this month. It’s a wide-ranging and compulsively readable book, comprising mostly revised and reworked review essays that she’s previously published but to which she added substantial new material.

And once again, Wilson’s promotion strategy has been impeccable, intentionally or not, with her scathing review of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation of the Odyssey, which begins by calling the movie “an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours” at which “[m]y teenagers had a good time.” That perhaps was the nicest thing she had to say. Wilson’s review briefly crashed the London Review of Books website and sparked a debate about whether she had been overly or inappropriately harsh with the film. Joyce Carol Oates may not have approved, but if you enjoy Wilson’s shade, you’re in for a treat, because that reviewer voice is the one that you hear in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea.

Readers might expect a book from one of our most prominent public intellectuals to sound like one of those large, endowed lectures universities host to show their commitment to educating the broader public—edifying, learned, entertaining, occasionally funny. Wilson’s book reads more like the kind of jokes scholars make to each other over mediocre wine at the reception after such events.

You’ll learn a great deal about ancient literature from this book, and even more about the complexity of translation. But you’ll also learn a whole lot about what academics sound like when the (polite, erudite) knives come out with surgical precision. Wilson’s harshest critiques are reserved for translators who embellish or expand on the original text without adding anything useful or interesting, and she’s especially tough on those whose translations add length without bothering to sound like actual English.

A 19th century work by Louis-Frederic Schutzenberger depicts the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, from Homer’s Odyssey.Universal Images Group/via Getty Images

The most illustrative example, perhaps, is Wilson’s assessment of the opening of Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2025 translation of the Odyssey. Her analysis of Richmond Lattimore’s opening—“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys”—is absolutely withering; by comparison, when she shifts gears to Mendelsohn, she is relatively brief and neutral. Mendelsohn’s Odyssey has many well-deserved fans, but two Odyssey translations coming so close together are bound to jostle for space like kids in the backseat of a car.

Wilson ends her book with a set of 20 rules that guide her translation practice, and her second is that a retranslation (that is, a translation of a book that’s already been translated) is “fundamentally pointless” if it doesn’t bring something new to the text. It seems to be in this spirit that she chides Mendelsohn: “Fourteen words in Greek have become twenty-four in English, through the addition of words and phrases that correspond to nothing specific in the Greek, though they often draw on the phrasing of earlier English translations: ‘the tale’ is an addition also found in the 1929 translation by Herbert Bates; ‘off course’ is a nautical phrase, not corresponding to anything in the Greek but also found in Robert Fagles’ version.”

She concludes with the most damning of praise, saying that Mendelsohn is “[f]ollowing Lattimore in his courageous defiance of contemporary English idiom.” Ouch, but you can’t say she doesn’t have the receipts. Whether or not you agree with her, Wilson is consistent and has a clear point of view, necessary ingredients for a critic (as I suspect Mendelsohn, a fine critic himself, would cede). Wilson’s rule no. 16 is, “Don’t try to please everyone. If nobody objects to any choice you make, your choices are too timid.” Nobody could claim that Wilson doesn’t live by that rule in any of her writing, including here.

In the first essay of the book, “Tongue Breaks,” about the translation and reception of Sappho, Wilson is perhaps especially harsh on women writers whose only connection with Sappho is a shared gender. In the margins of a paragraph where Wilson wrote, Mary “Robinson aspires to sublimity, but, sadly, her writing sounds like this,” I scribbled to myself, “Is EW best when bitchy?”

But I could almost hear Wilson’s own voice in my ear, scolding me, because that isn’t the right word. Wilson herself points out the dangers of importing entirely unnecessary misogyny into our interpretations, as generations of translators did with editorializing editions calling the 12 slave girls executed by Telemachus for sleeping with the suitors “sluts” or “whores”—a judgmental gloss completely missing in the original.

So when I revisited my note, I considered crossing out my word choice and replacing it with something like “tart”—but no, that’s too archaic. Her critique is often too direct to be rightly called shade; saying her teenagers enjoyed a film is shade, but calling someone’s writing “turgid” is not. So what, exactly, should I call this voice? As I considered, I realized just how much reading this book had conditioned my eye to look for careful word choice—which, actually, feels like the bigger project of Wine-Dark Sea.

Wilson sometimes seems to long for a slightly higher caliber of critics and readers of her translations. The seemingly most-quoted and argued-about part of her review of Nolan’s Odyssey is her claim that she “would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” Harsh, yes, but consider what came right before it: “In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem, ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’”

Christopher Nolan signs autographs during The Odyssey premiere in Paris on July 8. Victor Boyko/Getty Images for Universal Pictures

My sense, reading this, was that Wilson was especially aggrieved by how an offhand comment by the director got twisted in the media to make it sound like Nolan had substantially based his script on Wilson’s translation. One can only imagine how infuriating it would feel for a translator as careful and considered as Wilson to have her name incorrectly attached to a film she thought was merely entertaining. If only the broader public had a better understanding of what goes into producing a translation and what makes different translations distinct!

The answer to this lack of education is to read this volume. Throughout the essays in Wine-Dark Sea, Wilson walks the reader through the infinite number of tiny choices translators must make to try to produce a text that transmits not only the original’s meaning but also its tone, its pace, and its poetic effects into something that will mean something to readers. In her final essay, “Translating the Odyssey,” she delves into minute grammar questions, like the effect of replacing a Greek purpose clause with a participle.

Elsewhere she goes further into broader questions of translating texts into very different cultures, especially in back-to-back essays about the challenges of translating ancient comedy, “Punishment by Radish” (a reference to the often-threatened ancient Greek punishment of sodomizing criminals with root vegetables) and “Ave, Jeeves.” In the first, she argues that the spirit of Aristophanes’ comedy is best expressed by the obscene lyrical fluidity of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP.”  But some tropes may be harder or even impossible to bring to contemporary readers, like the brilliant slaves of Roman comedy, of whom Wodehouse’s Jeeves was the last accessible avatar. Wilson is entirely unafraid of a modern comparison—in one of my favorite passages in the book, she writes approvingly of the resonance between her “complicated man” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.”

Other modern parallels didn’t work as well for me. Several of the essays veer, in their final paragraph, into the briefest possible parable for modern times. In an essay about Demosthenes’ rhetoric against Philip, she concludes with a gesture toward Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to show how voters can still be swayed by an “enticing lie,” and an essay about Aeschylus’ Oresteia ends with a claim that it has something to teach us “[a]s we turn our attention to the angry voices of those who feel themselves marginalised in modern life.” Sure, but to my eye the continued relevance of Wilson’s analysis in our world was obvious without making such explicit nods. I wondered if she didn’t entirely trust the reader to get the point, which felt at odds with the confidence she displays elsewhere.

But this minor quibble doesn’t detract overall from how much Wilson teaches readers about how to be educated readers of translations—lessons that, one hopes, some will absorb before Wilson’s newly announced retranslation of the Odyssey is released. It is difficult to overstate what an unprecedented literary event this is: Wilson has decided to retranslate from the ground up her bestselling 2017 translation, further iterating on her work along the guidelines she sets for herself in those final 20 rules.

Wine-Dark Sea holds some clues for what that new translation might broadly look like; she notes that the translations she uses in the final essay don’t quite match her 2017 text. But it seems she’s also motivated by a desire for more nuance than she originally felt was possible. Her spare 2017 text matches Homer line for line but cuts Homer’s dactylic hexameter into English iambic pentameter, which often meant turning a 17-syllable line into a 10-syllable one, a choice that keeps that translation lean and swift. The new one, she says, will be longer, which will give more room to explore the ancient world.

Wilson told the Associated Press that she feels she overused “slave” as a general term—including in the passage I mentioned earlier, the hanging of the slave girls—where she could have given more specificity that would shed light on the broad array of social roles held by slaves in the epic. Ironic, considering that nearly a decade ago her original translation was much-lauded for its willingness to call a slave a slave, where even other recent translations used euphemisms like servant. As always, Wilson is pushing us to be better readers of Homer—and of her.