I’m still awaiting my copy of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, but on the basis of passages circulating on social media and this New York Times Magazine interview it’s going to be well worth it. Certainly it’s already setting off some fascinating discussions of issues in translation: the particular choices that have to be made in trying to express concepts that don’t have an exact equivalent in the target language, and in particular words that have multiple senses and associations in the original. This is a problem in the very first line of the poem, with the word used to describe its main character, polytropos: (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Emily Wilson’
It’s Complicated
Posted in Musings, tagged Emily Wilson, Homer, Odyssey, translation on November 4, 2017| 7 Comments »