Emily Wilson: belief

Transcript context

…Any period that you care to. Homer’s time is fine, but we know more about Athens, of course. We know more about Athens. I would definitely say funnier, but I’d also say — even though the texts we have are primarily by elite men — I think even from those texts, which are already a tiny demographic, we can say they’re more diverse in terms of how do they look at the world than we might have thought. Generalizing about “This is the Athenian worldview” doesn’t actually make any sense if you look at the array of different opinions that are articulated in the text. When you translated the Odyssey — as a reader, I think of your approach as pretty clean and direct and very easy to read, but also with a lot of psychological depth, and I prefer that in the Odyssey. But when I read, say, the Hebrew Bible, I want something a little more, maybe stentorian in tone, or a little more baroque, actually. I think a lot of people feel the same way. Why that difference? Why do we want something different from a Bible translation often?…

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