Stop! Homer Time: The Iliad - Chatting with Emily Wilson

**Andrew** (0:02)
This is a HeadGum Podcast.

**Craig** (0:05)
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**Craig** (1:12)
That sounds great. And if it sounds great to you at home, get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. Go to mintmobile.com/overdue. That's mintmobile.com/overdue. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/overdue. That's it. There's no catch. Up front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required $15 per month. Equivalent taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. With the recent release of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and buzz around Emily Wilson's translation of Homer, we thought we would unlock this special Stop! Homer Time episode originally released to Patreon supporters in early 2024 It's part of our Iliad series where we got to speak with Emily Wilson. Enjoy.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Stop! Homer Time, sort of. Soon. It'll start soon.
Andrew, this is a special episode of Stop! Oh, Craig, is it?

**Andrew** (2:39)
I'm just making sure we set our names. Each one of us has had our names said now.

**Craig** (2:43)
Well, you know.
They'll hear it after the... I'm a mysterious man introducing a podcast made by Craig and Andrew. Figure out which one I am.

**Andrew** (2:54)
Give the answer. It might surprise you. Hmm.

**Craig** (2:58)
I'm Craig.

**Andrew** (3:00)
I'm Andrew. This is Stop! Homer Time, our podcast about Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad. And this time we have... I don't know. It's not like a week or a month. This unit of time that we're existing in right now. We've got something special for you all. Yeah. And it's Emily Wilson came back to talk to us again. She did it once. And then she, knowing that, decided to come back and do it again, which is really, which is really gracious of her.

**Craig** (3:24)
Yeah. And we talked to her pretty early in our read of her translation of the Iliad. So what you're going to hear is a conversation where we talked mostly about just kind of her approach to the book, as well as some riffing on books one through four. And, you know, a little bit, you know, we're each somewhat familiar with the poem, so we can kind of reference later stuff. But we really dove into the character relationships that get set up at the beginning of the book.
And what she had to say about translating it versus other stuff.

**Andrew** (3:58)
Yes, so as we did this also with The Odyssey when we read it.

**Craig** (4:03)
Yeah.

**Andrew** (4:04)
She was super insightful and funny. This time she read a passage from the poem for us.

**Craig** (4:09)
That was cool.

**Andrew** (4:10)
That we enjoyed. I mean, we enjoyed both reading the passage and talking about it and then hearing her read it with all the pronunciation and the meter all intact and non-mangles.

**Craig** (4:20)
Pretty good, yeah.
So, I hope you dig it. Yeah.
So, Emily Wilson is joining us today. She is the Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania holding the College for Women Class of 1963, Professor in the Humanities. Wilson holds degrees in Classics and Renaissance English Lit from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature from Yale. She's been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, in Renaissance and Early Modern Scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow. And in 2017, she released her renowned translation of Homer's Odyssey, which we covered on our show, and we're honored to welcome her back to talk about Homer's other poem, The Iliad. Dr. Wilson, welcome.