Emily Wilson's Lecture

 For me meeting Emily Wilson was kind of like meeting a celebrity, since ever since my undergrad I have read about her being the first woman translator of the Odyssey. It was then quite interesting and surprising (in a good way) when she shared the slides with the headlines that describe her work (Emily Wilson is a Woman! and Emily Wilson is a Modern!) and mentioned that she really doesn't see these as an accurate framework for her translations. In this way, she distanced herself from these simplistic statements. Once she pointed this out, it was much easier for me to focus and acknowledge all of the other things that she brought to her translations (besides a gender perspective), such as the importance of orality, complex descriptions of the characters, and a wide range of emotions. Honestly, I had never before considered the importance of performativity in The Illiad and The Odyssey until I heard her reading them aloud. The passionate way she read completely changed the way I had conceptualized these texts as serious, classic, and kind of unapproachable and, instead, r made the text come alive in all its "cataclysmic wrath." 

I also really appreciated the first slides of the talk where she addressed questions such as "What is translation?" Instead of giving a simplistic definition based on words such as "equivalence" and "fidelity", she instead addressed the impossibility of defining translation and highlighted that it is a very difficult task whether you are translating from a classic text or not. She also stated very clearly that "translation is writing" stemming from the fact that when you translate you are literally writing again the whole text in a new language. I also found very interesting the slide where she presented the "misleading binaries" which included "domestication vs foreignization", "archaic vs modern", and "poetic vs literal". As someone who is constantly stuck between the notions of domestication and foreignization, it was liberating to see them as misleading. This made me think that a text can have both domesticating and foreignizing elements that may serve to resist ethnocentric violence. The idea that archaizing is in fact a modern gesture was also very interesting since I believed that it also allowed Wilson to fight back against those who critiqued her for being "too modern." Overall, I thought It was an excellent lecture where she fully justified her translation decisions. I believe that some of her pervious "haters" may have been won over in the course of the lecture. 

-Lia


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