Report on Emily Wilson

Alexa Drescher

In her lecture on translating the Iliad, Emily Wilson discusses her process of translation in both tangible and intangible ways. I found her discussion on misleading binaries in translation to be fascinating, and her comments on why modern day retranslations of a text as old as the Iliad are warranted provided me with illuminating ideas to incorporate into my final project on the purposes of retranslation. She also discusses the priorities she had in mind while translating the Iliad, which I have been able to apply to my own translation work. 

Emily Wilson discusses her history in order to allow listeners to more deeply understand her experiences translating ancient Greek texts. She grew up in the UK, where she read the Odyssey for the first time. She discusses in depth precisely how education on classic literature differs between the United States and the UK, and states that her experiences becoming educated in the UK had a major impact on her interests as a translator. In the UK, students are not instructed to read any particular translation of the Odyssey. Instead, Wilson’s first experiences working with the text were in the original Greek. She states that she imprinted on the Greek version of the text rather than a translation of the text, which assisted her greatly in developing her own interpretation of the text in translation. Upon completing her college studies, she obtained a degree in both comparative literature and English literature, which allows her to pay close attention to the customs and cultural practices of both the Ancient Greeks and modern day readers. I believe that this contributed significantly to her efforts in creating a modern and new translation of the Iliad which is easily received by major audiences. 

Wilson begins discussing the content of her lecture by asking the open-ended question, “What is Translation?”. This is a question that we have all asked ourselves throughout the semester, and it yields a variety of answers. In beginning to answer this question, Wilson states that translation can be equated with “interpretation”. She states that a translator must be deeply immersed in the idioms of both the source and target language, lest a mistake be made. Understanding the connotations and nuances associated with phrasing is crucial to a translator’s job, especially when translating a text as ancient as the Iliad. In the case of ancient texts, Wilson explains that many of the common phrases used throughout the text do not translate literally over into modern day language. For example, she references a line of the original Iliad in which a character states that he values a dear friend as “his own head”. In translating this phrase into English, a translator could render it as valuing the friend as “his own right hand”, which would make more intuitive sense to modern day readers. By translating the line in this way, the original intended meaning of the phrase “his own head” is preserved and transmuted into modern day English. Wilson confidently claims that altering the original literal meaning of the phrase does not impact the resulting translation in a negative way; instead, she argues that the role of the translator is to readapt out of date language into something easily understood by modern readers. 

The next topic Wilson discusses in her lecture relates to what she calls “misleading binaries” in translation. There are two sets of binaries she explores: archaization versus modernization, and poetic language versus literal. Wilson believes that these stereotypical binaries are reductive and misleading in considering the tangible problems faced by translators. In the case of archaization and modernization, Wilson makes the point that the idea of deliberate archaization did not exist prior to the last century. In this sense, archaization is a modern practice. This was a new idea for me; I had never considered that following strategies to archaize a text could be interpreted as a modern style of translation. Wilson asks what the “whole truth” is about a text; in her mind, discovering and presenting the “whole truth” is the translator’s primary purpose. This point drove me to consider whether archaizing a text contributes to the translator’s presentation of what the “whole truth” is. When the Iliad first came into existence, its speech patterns were received by its initial audience as a modern story. This begs the question, does deliberately archaizing the story in a modern translation work to distort a modern day reception of the text? I believe the answer is yes; while the practice of archaizing a translated text to create the effect that the story itself has been unearthed from beneath centuries of history is effective in achieving its goal, it does deliver the story to the audience in a different way than the story was originally intended to be received. The translator must have a clear goal in completing their translation prior to determining whether or archaize or modernize a text in order for the resulting translation to be effective. 

The second misleading binary Emily Wilson discusses in her lecture relates to the translation styles of poetic versus literal translation. Wilson points out that literal translation techniques are often misinterpreted as being more faithful to the original text than a poetic translation. Turning back to the concept of the “whole truth” of a text, she suggests that the most crucial aspects of a given text are not solely dependent on syntax or word order. Incorporating some poeticism into a translation of a text as old as the Iliad has immense value in translating not just the meaning of the story, but also the experience of reading the original. Translating with a poetic rather than literal style in mind does offer the translator more flexibility in how they transform metaphors and descriptive passages from one language to another, but Wilson argues that poetic translations are no less faithful to the original text than a literal translation. My understanding of the subject leads me to believe that poetic translations are more focused on translating a reading experience, while literal translations intend to allow the reader unimpeded access to the text, whether the translated references make immediate sense or not. 

Before addressing her priorities as a translator, Emily Wilson discussed the major media headlines which showcased her work. Like her, I was somewhat puzzled by the fact that the majority of media headlines chose to focus on the fact that she is a female translator rather than highlighting how she worked with the text in a new and unique manner. Other headlines claim that she has created a new “modern” rendition of the Iliad, which Wilson strongly disagrees with. In her translation, Wilson uses a traditional regular meter, which she notes is the opposite of what one would expect in a more modern translation. I agree with Wilson’s point of view, and find myself confused as to why media headlines have overlooked the specifics of how she imparts her own style on her translation of the Iliad. Wilson addressed one possible explanation for this oversight, stating that many people tend to mislabel exciting texts as modern because ancient texts are often misunderstood to be boring and tedious to read through. I find this to be a great shame, as it is of course blatantly false. Readers tend to anticipate dry and monotonous reading when imagining the experience of parsing through ancient texts, and I believe that only through modern and exciting retranslations can this faulty interpretation begin to be remedied. 

My favorite section of Wilson’s lecture centers around her discussion of why retranslations of texts are necessary in the first place. For my final project this semester, I researched and analyzed the purposes of retranslation, so having the opportunity to take Wilson’s thoughts into account assisted me a great deal. The first point Wilson makes is that scholarship on Homer’s ancient texts continues to develop, and is never completed. One of the most significant aspects of reading ancient texts is relating to them through the lens of the goings on in the modern day. Wilson states that cultures evolve over time, which results in readers asking new questions of the text in line with their understanding of the world they are living in. With these new questions and new focuses in mind, up and coming translators are presented with the opportunity to reinterpret the original text, resulting in a translation which intends to comment on modern day affairs through the lens of Homer. No individual translation can address every modern day topic through retranslation of Homer’s ancient texts. This justifies not just one, but several many retranslations of works like the Iliad. Wilson provides a list of themes of importance which are applicable to the real world, which I found to be helpful in understanding her analysis on a more tangible level. These themes are,

* Partisanship

* A human society in its last days

* Intimate connection between people and technology 

* Celebrity culture and its discontents

* Men fight to control women’s bodies 

* A plague and its repercussions

* Inequalities, hierarchies

* Violence being glorified, pain as entertainment 

* Rage, grief, and mortality 

These themes are particularly relevant to modern day readers, as each of them can be found in current world events. By beginning a new translation of the Iliad with any of the above themes in mind, a translator’s resulting work will differ dramatically from translations which intend to address different themes and modern day perspectives. 

Wilson also comments on the natural aging of translations, which I myself studied in completing my final project for class this semester. As I mentioned above, works like the Iliad were not interpreted as archaic by its initial audiences. However, the original Iliad was not subjected to the passage of time when it was first presented to audiences as an oral telling. Any given translation of the Iliad is (or will be) subjected to the naturally fluid nature of the evolution of language, and it will begin to sound archaic when they were not intended to originally. Only through consistent and increasingly modern forms of retranslation can this effect be mitigated. 

Emily Wilson’s lecture pushed me to think about how many ways one can approach translation. Rendering idioms from foreign languages into English can be done in countless ways; it is up to the translator to decide how to most accurately present both the literal and metaphorical meanings of idioms to readers. I also learned about commonly accepted yet misleading binaries in the field of translation, and I have begun considering how to best translate what Wilson coins as the “whole truth” of a text. Finally, Wilson’s discussion of how translators can adapt their translations to address various themes present both in the text and in the modern world inspired me to look more deeply into my own selected texts to search for implied themes to highlight in my resultant translation. Her lecture offered content which made intangible generalizations about translation feel more accessible, which will allow me to apply her thoughts to my own future translations.