Emily Wilson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Here’s another reader question about translation: “Could you please ask her about home? Her translation pulls this word to the foreground more than I remember other translations doing, and that decision made me read the text differently. It also made me realize that home is not a concept that I interrogate nearly as much as I should.” So, I’m asking you about home. I love that question. The Greek text has a lot of uses of the noun nostos, from which we get nostalgia, the journey of homecoming, the event of homecoming, and then of cognate words. I wanted to use the word home as a way of signaling the centrality of the concept of home, and of defining the concept of home in the poem. It’s already a very loaded word in English, I think. It’s a word which means so much more than just house or place where you live. The Odyssey is fascinating in the ways that it defines home as something which involves both a living space, a particular kind of community, and a space where at least one member of the household has the choice about who to keep in, who to keep out. You’re working now on a translation of the Iliad. Is that correct?…

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