Odyssey Translator Emily Wilson for Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

"Emily Wilson's brilliant reconsiderations of the ancient world-through the figure of Helen of Troy, the remaking of the Iliad by Christopher Logue, the use of comedy to grapple with dark matters, even slavery, and much besides-makes this an enthralling and profoundly relevant book." -- Salman RushdieEmily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow.

In addition to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.She joins us this November to discuss _Crossing The Wine-Dark Sea.__In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson-whose renditions of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation's imagination-explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past.

Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work.

Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over "foreignizing" and "domesticizing" styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world.__Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew._