Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

Emily Wilson, a classical scholar and translator of Homer's Odyssey, examines how modern cultures shape responses to ancient Greek and Roman literature, and how translators and scholars either replicate familiar ways of imagining the ancient world or find ways to make it genuinely new.

Wilson opens by framing translation as the most intense test of whether ancient words can live again in a new language. Drawing on the poet Louis MacNeice's poem Autumn Journal, she argues that translators of ancient metrical verse should recreate formal qualities such as metre and sound, not merely semantic meaning. She cautions against treating "antiquity" as a monolith and notes that most surviving ancient poetry was composed by elite men whose representations of women and enslaved people reveal how these groups were imagined rather than how they lived.

The first essay examines the translation and reception of Sappho, the archaic Greek lyric poet whose nine books were lost around the ninth century CE, leaving only one complete poem and scattered fragments. Wilson analyzes the translations of Anne Carson, a poet and classicist, which use blank space and brackets to treat textual absences as aesthetic objects, noting that Carson obscures the Greek's indication that both the beloved and the speaker are female. She traces the evolving meanings of "Sapphic" and "lesbian," noting that the modern sense dates only to 1870, and argues that Sappho's most distinctive feature is her emphasis on individual isolation, even though scholars have suggested her work may have been performed chorally.

Wilson surveys the history and theory of literary translation, tracing it from Cicero's argument for translating sense rather than individual words through the "foreignising" theories of the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher and the German critic Walter Benjamin, who argued for syntactically literal, unidiomatic translations designed to enrich the target language. Against this tradition, she sides with practitioners who insist that a translator must above all be a skilled writer.

The essay on Rome argues that the Roman decision to translate and imitate Greek literature was historically extraordinary. Wilson identifies 240 BCE as a turning point: Livius Andronicus, a Greek immigrant and possible former slave, created the first Latin play translated from Athenian drama for the Roman Games, the public religious festival at which dramas were staged. Drawing on Denis Feeney's Beyond Greek (2016), she argues that the Romans used translated Greek literature to assert cultural credibility on a global stage, and that the early authors who created Latin literature were themselves cosmopolitan immigrants.

Wilson uses the career of the Athenian orator Demosthenes to explore how political rhetoric constructs fantasies of freedom with real consequences. She notes that fifth-century Athenian democracy excluded women, enslaved people, and resident aliens from its citizen body. She traces Demosthenes' opposition to Philip of Macedon and the defeat at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BCE), analyzing his most famous speech, On the Crown, in which he argues that the struggle for freedom is a kind of victory regardless of outcome. Wilson draws parallels to modern politics, including Brexit and leaders who promise to restore lost national greatness.

The essay on Helen of Troy traces ancient and modern representations to explore how misogynistic tropes project male desire onto women. Wilson surveys shifting portrayals across Greek literature: the sympathetic Helen of the Iliad; the "ship-destroyer, man-destroyer, city-destroyer" of the Greek tragedian Aeschylus's Oresteia; and the contrasting treatments by the Greek tragedian Euripides. She traces Helen's diminished role in Roman and medieval literature and suggests Helen has become culturally urgent again in an age preoccupied with virtual images, questions about gender roles, and obsessive desire.

Wilson examines ancient Athenian Old Comedy, the fifth-century genre of political, obscene, and choral plays known primarily through the work of Aristophanes. She argues that the element most often lost in translation is the lyrical flow, and discusses the political substance of these comedies, which address the cost of war, corruption in education, and radical social change while often reinforcing the status quo through comic satire.

The essay on Roman comedy examines the plays of the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence alongside the comic novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius as windows into Roman attitudes toward slavery and social hierarchy. Wilson examines the figure of the clever slave (servus callidus) as a symptom of slave-owners' anxieties and traces Terence's biography as an enslaved person from Carthage who was freed and became a comic poet. She notes that the fall of Roman comedy from modern syllabuses coincides with the disappearance of domestic servants from wealthy households.

Wilson examines the poetry of the Roman poet Catullus (84–54 BCE), positioning him as a key influence on the Western love lyric tradition through the Italian poet Petrarch. She compares multiple translations, arguing that "literal" versions can be more misleading than looser ones because Latinate English words often sound formal whereas the Latin originals were part of ordinary spoken language.

The essay on Stoicism examines the modern popularity of this ancient philosophy, particularly through the teachings of Epictetus, who was born into slavery in the first century CE, and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Wilson argues that Stoicism is designed to help privileged individuals align themselves with the existing order rather than to change the world, which helps explain its popularity among wealthy people in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. She concedes its practical value for daily annoyances but concludes that ancient Stoicism serves as a cautionary tale against treating antiquity as a repository of unambiguous wisdom.

Wilson analyzes Christopher Logue's War Music, a poetic reimagining of Homer's Iliad by a poet who knew no Greek, working from existing translations beginning in 1959. She praises his cinematic technique and anachronistic similes but criticizes his treatment of the Iliadic goddesses as stereotypes and his lack of interest in individual human experience. She concludes that the work treats war as spectacle rather than a source of human grief but remains a powerful achievement that invites fresh engagement with the source text.

The essay on Aeschylus's Oresteia (458 BCE) examines the trilogy's meditation on the relationship between female grief and male glory. Wilson summarizes the arc from Clytemnestra's murder of her husband Agamemnon through their son Orestes' matricide to Orestes' trial at Athens, where the goddess Athena breaks a tied jury vote in his favor. She argues that the trilogy justifies the subordination of female claims to justice under male-dominated political institutions, and compares six English translations, judging classicist and translator Oliver Taplin's as the best contemporary rendition.

Wilson examines the career of Edith Hamilton (1867–1963), the retired educator whose bestselling books The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and Mythology shaped popular American perceptions of ancient literature. She argues that Hamilton's popularity rests on her vivid prose, her remaking of ancient Greece in the image of an idealized United States, and her aura of authority, while critiquing Hamilton's work as inaccurate and casually racist in its dismissal of non-Western civilizations.

The book's longest essay provides a comparative analysis of English translations of specific Odyssey passages. Wilson argues that the modern image of the Sirens as seductive mermaids has led translators to add sexualized language absent from the Greek, and that many translators insert terms of sexual abuse where the original uses a neutral pronoun when describing the killing of enslaved people in Book 22. She devotes the final section to her decision to translate the opening word polytropon, meaning "of many turns," as "complicated," defending it as a word that captures the imagery of folding and layers and promises narrative complexity.

The book closes with 20 principles guiding Wilson's translation practice. She argues that translations of metrical verse should use traditional metre, that retranslations must offer genuinely new interpretations, and that translations should recreate the emotional effects of the original. She acknowledges that translation is inherently impossible but insists that bringing ancient texts to life for new generations is always worth the effort.