Hector and Achilles are More Alike Than You Think (The Iliad, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Homer's Iliad, translator Emily Wilson returns to discuss the red and gold cover design of the Norton Library edition, recount her decision to recreate a new translation of the epic, and give a performance in the original ancient Greek. 

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern studies, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Iliad, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324102076.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Music]

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Homer's Iliad as we interview its translator, Emily Wilson. In Part One, we discussed what is known about Homer and the historical basis of the Iliad. We discussed Troy and how the Trojan War exists in popular imagination. In this second episode, we learn more about Emily Wilson's relationship with Homer, how she came to translate these epic works, her favorite line in the poem, her hot take, and we even get to hear Emily's beautiful performance of the poem—some of the poem—in its original Greek. Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the Odyssey and the Iliad, she has published translations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca. She has previously joined us on the Norton Library Podcast in two episodes devoted to her Norton Library Edition of Oedipus Tyrannus. It is so great to have her with us today. Emily Wilson, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Emily:] Hi again.

[Mark:] Good to see you, and I'm been looking forward to continuing our discussion of your Norton Library Edition of Homer's the Iliad. And maybe we can start with this beautiful edition itself. Can you tell us a little bit about the cover design and the colors? How did this come about, and why do you think it's so designed?

[Emily:] I love the simplicity of the design of the Norton Library...

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] ...covers, which all just have a single, really clear color. I love the sort of ochre-ish red of the Iliad design which echoes the colors of the hardback which features a – a fresco that uses that same palette. I think the – the combination of red and gold is really suitable for the Iliad because it's a poem, of course as we were saying a little bit last time, it's a poem about conflict which means it's a poem about blood. And the shedding of blood is conflict in the battlefield holds up a red cloth to signal that conflict is gonna bring about bloodshed.

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] And I like that the red is – the red is bigger, but then there's also the gold of glory, right. There's the gold of both glory and of the bronze armor that so many of the characters wear to try to delay the bloodshed that's inevitable in this poem. So, I think these colors sort of speak to the ways it's about both shining, glorious metals and also human blood.

[Mark:] This isn't quite wine red though, is it, the cover?

[Emily:] Uh no, I mean “wine dark sea,” it's – I mean it depends –  it depends how much water you put in with your wine. [Laughter]

[Mark:] Right, that’s a good point. Emily, when did you first read the Iliad?

[Emily:] I first read bits of it in high school. Um and I think in my – can't actually remember whether I read a whole translation. I think – I think I mostly, you know, read little tiny bits in in Greek class because I was lucky enough to go to a high school where I'd started Ancient Greek when I was 15, and I just remember being so excited just by the sound of the language. Um, and I remember reading just little tiny bits and being excited also just about part – part of what we were talking about last time of how there were these porous boundaries between the divine and human realms in – especially in the Iliad even more than the Odyssey, and just how exciting that is to imagine a world where human beings can be constantly interacting with deities. Love that.

[Mark:] So, when you first encountered the Iliad, it was in the original Greek.

[Emily:] I think so. I mean I know I was never told to read a particular translation by any teacher because, I as you can tell from my accent, I grew up in the UK where they have a ridiculously narrow educational system which I would not endorse. Um, but as a result of that, it was a very translation phobic, um, educational environment, and I – I read Classics as an undergraduate and we were never told to read a translation because the assumption was that we were reading all of these texts in the original.

[Mark:] If you started your introduction to the Iliad as a teenager, has the passion for this poem stayed consistent ever since?

[Emily:] I've always loved the Iliad, yes. I mean I think it's a – it's a poem which, I mean you were saying last time, that the – the title Iliad can be kind of impenetrable, but once you can get past that and realize this is a poem about huge emotions and about these really basic human questions: about how do we deal with death?; how do we deal with conflict?; how do we deal with being inside and outside communities?; how do we deal with our grappling for status and for our desire to be the best?; and how do we deal with loss and grief? Those questions are still so urgent and have only become more urgent, I feel like, in the course of, at least for me, the course of my life. And also, the way that it's a poem about parents and children, as well as about grief. So, the ways that I understood this poem when I was an angry teenager are different from the ways I understand it now that I'm a middle-aged person who has kids and has gone through different kinds of loss and grief and rage in the course of the last few decades.

[Mark:] How did you make the leap from a reader of the Iliad and even maybe a scholar of it to saying, "I'm going to translate my own"?

[Emily:] Yeah, I mean it's a very different thing to read, study, even write about a text versus try to recreate the whole experience of it—which is what creating a – a published translation is about. And I as – as I've already sort of suggested, I'd been reading the Iliad and then teaching it both in the original and in various different translations for several decades before the kind Norton people, um, invited me to do a translation of it. I'd already done the Odyssey translation. Um, and when I was first invited to do that, I kind of hesitated because I thought, you know, “Maybe there's kind of a lot of translations already out there,” and, “Am I going to do anything different?” Um, and I – and I spent a lot of time especially with once I was, when I was first asked to do the Odyssey, just wrestling with “should I do this?” because I – I thought it would be a complete waste of time if what I do is just more or less the same thing as what Richmond Latimore or Robert Fagels have already done. And so, I – I spent some time just meditating on my own experience in the classroom, especially with using these different translations. And that made me think yes, I could do something really different and worthwhile, um, that would address some of the issues that I'd had with my students with the various translations that I'd used. Um, and I felt that this, even though there were dozens of translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey into English—starting with George Chapman's in the early 17th century which I think are great—um there – there's actually less diversity in the contemporary 20th/21st century ones than you might think because they – they tend to fall into certain categories: there are the prose ones that the pe – the British people tend to read; there's the free verse ones with the long lines like Richmond, Latimore, and then several others a bit like it; and then there's the free verse ones with the shorter, more punchy often, more cliché-ish lines like the Robert Fagel's ones. I wanted to do something different from any of those because to me, the experience of reading the original is very largely a musical or sonic experience.

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] That these poems are composed in dactylic hexameter. Hex – so, those – those words, like Iliad itself, may be completely impenetrable if you don't know what they are. [Laughter] So, a dactyl is a – is – it comes from the word for finger. So, it's “laa-la-la.” A finger if you have, most people have fingers where there's a long joint and then two shorter joints, so, it's “laa-la-la. Meen-ne-na. Aee-da-da. Aa-pe-le-ya-dos-sake-le-os.” So it does that six times, hence hexameter. And it's like that way with every line. It's not a loose, free beat where sometimes there's seven stressed syllables, sometimes there's six, sometimes there's five, it can go any way you like, it's kind of like prose but it's laid out like verse; that's a totally literary poetic form that we – we're used to because free verse is something that has dominated poetics, um, you know, since the time of Baudelaire. But it’s – it is from the archaic and classical Greek perspective; a poetics that's designed for oral performance has a particular, regular rhythmical sound. And to get rid of that element seemed to me just: I don't want to do that, I don't want to have my students be baffled by the idea of these poems as poems. I want to create translations that if you read them out loud, even if you're not thinking about meter, you hear meter. So, I wanted to use the obvious traditional poetic form in Anglophone poetics which is that, which is iambic pentameter, just to signal to the ears of any – of any reader of the translation: this is traditional poetics. Even if, um, even if all – not all – not every word choice is a word that Shakespeare would have known, it's still going to have that rhythm that will echo this much longer pre-existing dramatic and narrative verse form.

[Mark:] What's interesting to me is in the way that you're describing it: when you take on a translation, it's almost like you need a thesis or a mission statement every bit as much as when you're writing a scholarly article or an essay. You wouldn't just take on a translation if you didn't have a particular motivation.

[Emily:] Absolutely, I mean I think if it's – if it were a text that, okay we've just dug this up from the sands of Egypt...

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Emily:] ... and no one's ever read this before, then okay, maybe you don't need a particular critical angle on this, maybe it's worthwhile just to get out some kind of hideous, clunky translation so that people can sort of have a sense of the semantics. That's not the point, and if – if there are already 70 plus translation – complete translations of the Iliad already, there's no point spending, you know, over a decade of my life doing new work. [Laughter] What was I doing with my time? Unless I've got something really clear that I'm adding that's different to what's available, is responding to something real in the originals. So, I've already mentioned meter: that was my primary thing. And then I also felt really strongly that a lot of the translations I'd used, even though I admired certain things about many of them, sort of flattened out the narrative perspectives in the Homeric poems. And one of the big takeaways in Homeric scholarship over the past generation has been a new awareness about how fluid and flexible the narrative POV is within the Iliad and the Odyssey, that we're not always looking from a certain character's perspective it – it we're constantly shifting around, whereby we're – we're seeing first what – what Achilles sees, and then we see what Andromache sees and we can see Hector being dragged behind the chariot of a – of Achilles as if from her – her point of view, and then we're drawing back again. So, there's a – there's a quasi-cinematic quality to how the perspective shifts around. And there are also ways that I felt a lot of existing, especially modern, translations sort of flattened out the – the possibilities of deep empathy with multiple different characters within a scene, such that we're, there was sort of shaping so that we're – you can sympathize with Hector but you can't sympathize with Andromache, or you can see where – where Achilles is here in terms of his emotions but you can't see where Thetis is. I felt – in the original, I think you can always have a sense of more than one narrative perspective. There's a repeated line about “the killing and the killed” on the battlefield, that Homer is always aware that in every scene there's both victory and defeat. If there's someone gaining an upper hand, there's also someone losing.

[Mark:] As you teach this poem to undergraduates, I know you've done this for many years, what are the common challenges that tend to arise?

[Emily:] There are so many interesting challenges. I mean, every – every challenge is an opportunity, right. It's – it's an opportunity to have – have a conversation I mean to – to really and then – and then to dig into the text and to think about, um, what expectations do we bring to this text that might be informed by our own presuppositions about humanity or about violence or about gender or about what's necessary or unnecessary in terms of choices or agency or power; all of those things come up when you're teaching the Iliad. What are – what are our presuppositions about, um, whether – whether committing or suffering violence inherently dehumanizes people? I think the Iliad presents a world in which it doesn't dehumanize, that you're just as much yourself when you're committing what we might call atrocities as when you're grieving for atrocities. Um, one of the sort of permanent challenges or interesting things that undergraduates very often want to bring – bring to the Iliad, and also to Greek tragedy, is an assumption that the Ancient Greeks were always all about fate and were therefore, um, everything was complete – completely predetermined back in the day, which of course it is from our perspective historically. And of course, also 18-year-olds who've left home for the first time are always wrestling with: “Do I have anything, what's up – what's up to me, what's not up to me? Do I have any agency in my life?” And so those kind of questions, I think, are useful, um, to wrestle with and to think about: how the Iliad's presentation of fate and destiny is not – is actually quite surprising from a modern perspective, that destiny and fate are not associated with the whole of your life, is about something that's been pre – predetermined in the way that it might be in Calvinism, but instead it's about the – the portions or amount of life that you have. So, it's associated very specifically with the end of life. It's not about what do I do right now while I'm talking to you and it must have been predetermined that I would be sitting here and having this conversation now, instead it's about when am I going to die and how – how – what portion of life do I have, and how does that relate to the portion of honor or social status that I have?

[Mark:] One other question about the challenges that undergraduates face when they have to read the Iliad is in terms of storytelling narrative scope, is this a difficult book? Do – do students struggle in we – we know the – we know the Iliad is very long, is this – is this a difficult poem to wrestle with? And even when we – if you might compare it with the Odyssey, how is that in terms of the challenge?

[Emily:] I would say that my – my experience with undergraduates is that students very often say, "Wow, this is so much easier than I thought it was going to be." You know, cause there's that perception of, "Oh it's ancient, so it's going to be kind of boring, kind of difficult, I'm going to have to force myself through it because the teacher says it's canonical, but blah blah blah." [Laughter] You know, students very often say, "Oh wow, I actually thought this was really moving and interesting. And wow, I had no idea that we – anything that I could care about from somebody who's you know been dead [Laughter] for a while.” One of the big challenges that I haven't mentioned so far is the names, right. And I think the fact that the Norton Library um I – I have a glossary with pronunciations, um, you can also look at my website to click on me saying – saying all of the names in the Odyssey in case you're worried about pronunciation. I think sort of letting go of an idea that: “I can't understand – understand this poem unless I know all of these names.” You don't actually need to know all of the names to start with. You need to understand something about the world building, and you need to ga – pick up as you go along who some of the main characters are. If you've got Achilles and Agamemnon to start with, you don't need everyone else right away. You can pick it – pick it up. Um, you don't need to know all of the names of everyone who's gonna die because there's going to be a lot of people. [Laughter] And part of the world building is about just the hugeness of how many people die in a war. Nobody, even if they have a tongue of bronze, can say all of those names.

[Mark:] Your genealogies at the end of the Norton Edition are tremendously helpful, so readers can refer to those. Emily, I have an extremely unfair question, but I'm hoping you'll give it a try. What is your favorite line in the Iliad?

[Emily:] I have lots of favorite lines so I'm not really going to answer the question properly. Um, I'm going to give you one beautiful line that will, I hope, illustrate that the sounds of this poem are really important. Um, so I'm just going to read you the beautiful line and then I'll read you my translation of it. [Reads in Greek] So, that's when – that's at – in the start, in Book One, when the priest, um, Chryses, is dismissed by Agamemnon rudely and goes off alone beside the sea. So, this is my translation of that line, which I had to expand a little bit: “He walked in silence on the shore beside the loud resounding rumble of the sea.”

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] So, we tend to think of the Odyssey as the sea poem but of course, actually, it's the Iliad that's mostly set on a beach. And the sound of the sea is crucial in this poem, as well as the sounds of warfare. And the – the metricality and musicality of – as well as the allit – alliteration in a line like that are really important in terms of its effect.

[Mark:] Yeah, and so what is the poem capturing in that particular moment? It seems like such a poignant passage. 

[Emily:] We've had a human kind of loudness with Agamemnon yelling, right. So there – there's a kind of loud that Agamemnon's voice can have, that he's defined repeatedly as the lord of men, “anax andron.” He has – his voice has a reach that can extend through throughout the council of the Greeks, and it can work to honor or dishonor a fellow Greek. But there's a – there's a kind of loud that is not contained by Agamemnon's voice, and we're being reminded of that and reminded of the world of – the world of nature and the world of the gods. The Apollo phlos boria thelasis contains many deities, as does the sky including Apollo who's gonna come and help Chryses to spread plague throughout the camp to – to show that Agamemnon's voice is not the only voice, the sound of humans is not the only sound. 

[Mark:] Emily, you mentioned that when you read the book and translated it you were entering into a tradition that has been centuries old. Do you have a take on the Iliad that is counterintuitive or a hot take, something controversial?

[Emily:] Oh, the hot take—

[Mark:] That only you believe? 

[Emily:] I don't – I don't, I mean the idea of only I believe something with the Iliad [Laughter] about which so many wonderful books and articles have been written I think that would be, you know, ridiculous arrogance to suggest that that was the case. Um, I mean I would say a hot take that sometimes surprises people is Hector and Achilles are far more alike than you might think.

[Mark:] Mmm, ok.

[Emily:] And – and far more alike than I would suggest. 

[Mark:] In what sense? 

[Emily:] That they're both driven by the desire for "kleos” and the desire to avoid shame. And that Hector is sometimes presented—um, I mean including by famous intellectuals like Simone Weil, um, but also by, you know, scholars who are much more classicist-y scholars—as the resistance fighter who's all about defending the besieged city. And I think the poem very clearly presents him in very different terms from that. In that famous interaction between Andromache and Hector in Book Six, where Andromache, the enslaved nursemaid, and this – and the son of Andromache and Hector come to beg Hector to fight defensively on the wall rather than push out to the forefront of the troops to attack the Greek ships and risk his life in the most dangerous way possible, that argument is not about is Hector going to fight or not fight. It's about is Hector gonna fight in a way that will ensure he'll be dead soon or is he going to fight in a way that might keep him alive a little bit longer and stave off the day when Andromache is going to be enslaved and raped and their baby's going to be held from the wall. Um, and I think that scene is very often sort of mischaracterized in – in that it's very often presented as: good guy Hector doing brave things. And sure, he's doing brave things but he's doing brave things very explicitly for the sake of avoiding shame for himself, which is not the same as trying to save his city.

[Mark:] Is the poem careful to enter into this whole good guy/bad guy theme? Do we see moral ambiguity throughout the poem or are there heroes and villains?

[Emily:] I don't think there's any heroes or villains. Entering into the good guy/bad guy theme, along with fate, that's one of the bits of baggage that people bring to the Iliad, right. There's – there's the idea that it's a superhero story in which we've got to have: some people are the saviors...

[Mark:] Right.

[Emily:] ...of the universe, and some people are the bad guys...

[Mark:] Right.

[Emily:] ...who are going to be just trying to destroy those who are saving the universe. It's not like that whatsoever. It's a much more nuanced and there – obviously it's not a realistic poem, people in real life battle at no point in history sort of paused to give each other long speeches before hurling spears at each other. Um, so on many levels it's not realistic, as well as the fact that there are constantly goddesses swooping down from the sky. [Laughter] Probably didn't happen, um, spoiler. But at – on the level of, um, what is conflict actually like and what are people actually like, including what are divine beings like, is constantly nuanced and we're constantly shown this is how and why this character is acting this way, without that layering over of didacticism or moral judgment of “and that's why Hector was bad.” It's not like that at all. It's, we understand exactly why he's doing what he's doing, and we also understand exactly why Andromache is saying what she's saying and feeling what she's feeling, and we understand why the baby's crying. We understand, even though the – the nurse doesn't say anything, we understand how she feels too. We understand all of these characters and understanding is, I think, much more morally profound than moralizing.

[Mark:] I have to imagine that since the Iliad has been in existence there have been many attempts to repurpose it and present it in different ways other than just a poem. Are there other media attempts at capturing this?

[Emily:] You know I think this maybe goes back to your questions about, like, the Odyssey. Okay, that's like...

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Emily:] ...a story about one guy coming home. We can kind of get that. The Iliad is in some ways about these more difficult set of themes to do with grief and wrath and rage. Um, it's – I mean you know there are pop culture things that might have something adjacent to the Iliad, like the movie, Troy, but it's – that's not really the Iliad. Um, I think there are far fewer pop culture retellings of the Iliad than there are of the Odyssey. I mean I guess one – one early and important example of a sort of response to the Iliad is Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. He'd read the seven books of the Iliad by George Chapman, the first English translator who first published us these – this excerpt of seven books from the Iliad. And Shakespeare had read that, and that was the primary, um, source for his Troilus and Cressida, along with Chaucer. And it's this very cynical and dark, um, dark play that responds to certain things in Chapman's Homer and sort of wrestles with things that Shakespeare is also interested in, in terms of is status worth anything; what – what is toxic masculinity; or you know, the Elizabeth and Jacobian versions of those questions about court culture and conflict.

[Mark:] That Hollywood movie, Troy, is there even a 1% overlap between the Iliad and that movie? Is there anything to be gleaned from it?

[Emily:] The whole gathering of the ships, which I think they do with computer-generated imagery, I mean that – that's a way of visualizing the catalog of ships in – in Book Two of the – of the Iliad, which in some ways for many people is the hardest part of the Iliad to get behind. It's hard partly because it primarily operates as a sonic experience, where the – the names are washing over you. But the – the Troy movie gives you that in a visual sense. Maybe we can do a shout out to a couple of poetic responses to the Iliad. This Christopher Logue's War Music, which I think is – is an amazing collection of sort of reimaginings of the translations of the Iliad that Logue, who didn't read Greek but he, you know, had a – had a really good, um, both linguistic and cinematic kind of eye, and I think it's an really interesting worthwhile thing to read. There's also Alice Oswald's Memorial, which is a sort of, um, poetic summary just of the deaths of the Iliad.

[Mark:] What about music? Does the Iliad inspire any music? A Iliad playlist?

[Emily:] The Iliad playlist. [Laughter] I think I, uh, I don’t –  I wasn't sure when – when you were first asking me to think about this, I was thinking there were so many songs about grief – grief and rage, right.

[Mark:] Yeah. Right? Right, right.

[Emily:] I mean I think one could come up with a angry music playlist [Laughter] or a sad music playlist and so many of those [Laughter] would actually resonate with the Iliad.

[Mark:] That's good.

[Emily:] There's a Brahms piece which is based on a Schiller poem which, um, called Nänie, which has a sort of stanza; um, there's five minutes of it that's sort of based on the grief of Thetis and the other nereids. And it's – it's a beautiful piece of music, beautiful poem about mortality and grief, which I think speaks to a really important theme in the Iliad.

[Mark:] Emily, I also wanted to ask you, if I could, about one of your endnotes. You – the readers should know that at the end of this Norton Library Edition, there's – there a generous endnotes where you describe and annotate various aspects of the text. And one that caught my attention is Book Three, line 196, where, I'm going to read a little bit: “The Trojans and the Greeks in their fine armor should not be blamed for suffering so long for such a woman, being as she is. It is uncanny how she seems to look like the immortal goddesses. But still, though she is like this, let her sail away or she may bring about catastrophe for us and for our children in the future.” And in your endnotes, you pay particular attention to the phrase “like this.” And if I – if this isn't foisting this on you, I wonder if you can explain a little bit of what you were getting at.

[Emily:] As it very frequently is in Homer, there are these ways that sometimes on the surface things are very much spelled out, like the here's Achilles being swift footed again, here he is being, um, the son of Peleus again. But then there are also really important things that are not spelled out, such as what's up with Helen, what does she even look like? Um, so in –  in the – in that line, um, she's described just as “toyer.” So: being such, being like that. So, what is it to be like that? [Laughter] Which we might think, if we're coming to this poem with this whole bunch of later reception of the Helen and Paris story, we might – might think okay that's got to mean that she's – she's blonde and she's norm – normatively, um, got pretty privilege in various different ways. That's – we know what that is. But the poem doesn't suggest that we know what that is. There's something much more uncanny about Helen, partly because what's special about her is that she's a daughter of Zeus. She's, um, she's not just a mortal woman, she has this power over events, which –there's real questions about to what extent does she own that power, or is that power that runs through her because she's a daughter of Zeus and she's been chosen by the gods to be – to play this instrumental role in the narrative. So, in my translation, I didn't want to do what I think some translators do of sort of adding in things that aren't there in the Greek, like adding in an idea that it's because she's beautiful or it's because she's extraordinary in some way. I wanted it to – to remain sort of open and weird as it is in the original. That she's – she's like that, whatever that “like that” might be.

[Mark:] You're right that the popular conception is she had the face that launched a thousand ships, but you're saying it goes way beyond that.

[Emily:] Within the Homeric poems, we're never told there's something weird about her face beyond that she says that she's dog faced. But what does that mean? [Laughter] Right, I mean it's on some level that it could be some kind of insult. It could suggest there's something not quite human. Maybe she's beyond human or maybe she's subhuman, but dog face doesn't suggest extra beautiful, it suggests there's something...

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Emily:] ...strange about her position among humans.

[Mark:] Your note to that moment says, “Helen's godlike power is associated with her capacity to look at men and represent them within a large temporal and geographical context rather than being herself the object of the male gaze.” So, “represent them within a large temporal and geographical context,” what kind of perspective are you alluding to?

[Emily:] I think we talked about this already in the previous episode a little bit, right, I mean, the way that Helen is – has been on both sides in the Trojan War: she's been in Greece, she's been in Troy, she's been married to both a Trojan and a Greek. Um, she has a sense also that, I mean, she famously says that she and Paris will be the subjects of – of song in the future, that they're going to be...

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Emily:] ...inscribed and memorialized through the Iliad itself. She has an awareness of her place within this ever-shifting story, right: she can be on the walls, she can be in her weaving, she can be in song. She's in these various different representational environments, and she is also herself a representer in that she's – she's doing the weaving, she's doing the telling Priam who everyone is. She's a narrator and a poet figure as well as a subject of poetry.

[Mark:] Emily, what is the Iliad's contemporary relevance? How do we read this poem in the 21st century?

[Emily:] So, one of my answers to that is that it's relevant by not being relevant. I mean, I think we can be so much immersed in the intensity of this, right now, is an exceptional time, and there's so much happening in every single micro news cycle, and we're so much alert to all these vast cultural and political changes that are happening in the world right now, and it feels like the world is both so much bigger and changing so much faster than it ever has. I think there are ways that turning back to an equally human but totally different culture and cultural representation, which is what the Iliad and the Odyssey are, gives you this kind of historical and imaginative perspective, where you can understand that we're not the only humans that have ever lived on planet earth; and we're not the only humans that have had intense feelings and a sense that everything is falling apart and about to end, and we're all going to die; and that that sense that we all have of huge cultural change and technology is both our salvation and not going to save us, that's what the technology of weaponry in the Iliad is also; that you can come to the Iliad with a sense both that this is surprising and totally different. And it's – that's also a reason to read it. That we're in this world of just read that little tweet and that little headline and then be immersed for 24 hours in a totally different world. And if you do that and lay yourself open to the alienness of this book, which is not like anything else you'll read from the 21st century, you'll also then realize: “I thought it was all totally different [Laughter] and yet it's all the same, and both those things can be true at the same time.” That sense of death is, uh, omnipresent, this is chaotic, this is the end times. Everyone's obsessed with celebrity, um, spin and media stuff, what it's all about. Everyone's in this cycle of rage and grief and partisanship, and people are destroying those on their own side. That's both the contemporary world and the Iliad.

[Mark:] Conveniently, Emily, I think we have just enough time to hear a little bit more of the original if you would grace us with a little bit of the Iliad.

[Emily:] Sure. So, I'm gonna read you just a very few lines which are a – one of many emotional climaxes in the poem, where Achilles, uh, speaking to his sea goddess mother, Thetis, acknow – acknowledges that she's done everything he asked for in terms of having the Greeks be massacred in his absence, but none of it was any good because Patroclus is one of the Greeks and now he's dead. So, this is Achilles responding to Thetis, saying: “[Reads in Greek].” So, I choose that passage partly because I think it's so important emotionally for the narrative arc of the poem, but also because it raises so many difficult—as any random three lines do—difficult translation questions, including the fact that there's this metaphor of Patroclus as Achilles’ head. So, this is my translation: “Yes mother, Zeus has granted me that prayer, but now what good to me is any of it? My friend Patroclus, whom I loved, is dead. I loved him more than any other comrade. I loved him like my head, my life, myself. I lost him, killed him.” So, I think both the emotional directness and the emotional ambiguities of that passage are really important in the original, and those are things I wanted to get across is the way that Patroclus is a body part and Achilles both lost and killed his dearest person.

[Mark:] Emily Wilson, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Homer's the Iliad. Thank you, Emily.

[Emily: Thank you, that was great.

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Homer's The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson, is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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