Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: journeys through ancient literature. Profile Books/LRB, 2026, pb, 280 pp.

How to ‘give old words new voices’.

This was a birthday gift from some friends with whom I’d had discussions about the Nolan film ‘Odysseus’, and who knew about my subsequent reading of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad (posted about recently here).

It’s a collection of 13 essays, some of them revised versions of ones that were published in various literary and specialist academic journals, on the theory, nature and practice of translation. How far is it possible to convey the sense, meaning, cultural and other values, and a whole range of related matters, in translations of texts from so long ago that we find it almost impossible to imagine what life might have been like then.

Can the translator somehow render those ancient words into readable versions, preferably almost as well-written as the originals, that make accessible to the modern reader those texts that were the products of an oral literary culture, probably performed by professionals and choruses who either memorised the written texts, or extemporised around well-established tropes and images.

Should the translator of an original that was written in verse try to bend her own very different language, with its different sounds, rhythms and nuances, into verse as well? Does translating them into prose in some way traduce the intentions and effects of the verse original? What about dealing with tricky linguistic matters like idioms, or words that have no modern equivalent?

These and a host of other fascinating questions are raised and discussed in these brilliant, perceptive and erudite essays. Wilson frequently compares different translators’ versions of a key passage from the ancient Greek, analysing the choices and assessing their various degrees of success. I didn’t always agree with her conclusions, but they were always carefully presented and argued.

Because of my recent film and reading experiences I turned first to the final essay, ‘Translating The Odyssey’. It’s highly accessible, witty, insightful and thought-provoking. Wilson considers, for example, the problems for the translator in contextualising and rendering into English for modern sensibilities passages like the one in which Odysseus’ son Telemachus hangs the slave women who were sexual possessions of Penelope’s suitors. Should this shocking scene be made to arouse sympathy for the slaughtered women, or indicate the social and cultural assumptions in Homer that they had dishonoured Odysseus and his son: both the suitors and the women had to die in order for honour to be restored.

It’s difficult for the reader today to avoid feeling the injustice in this scene – something which it seems would not have troubled Homer or his contemporary audience. Or at least, in his presentation of the world of honour of those characters at that time.

The other essays deal with similar crucial moments in a range of old Greek texts, most of which I know little about, from Aeschylus to Sophocles. Classical Roman authors and texts are also considered in their responses to these Greek works. There’s a particularly inspiring essay on ‘slut-shaming of Helen of Troy’ – a title which sums up Wilson’s jaunty habit of slipping into slang and the vernacular to convey some of the spirit of the original texts, and our responses to them. It’s a very scholarly and deeply researched approach, but is never stuffy or over-academic in tone. So there are references to the likes of Cardi B and Wodehouse’s Jeeves to help us place the literary equivalence of some of these ‘old words’, characters and themes.

One contemporary reference I found particularly congenial. In discussing the notion of ‘classical studies’ in the last century or so, she points out how it has tended to form a kind of ‘gatekeeping’, an indication that their reader has been to a ‘good school’ (UK code for what we call a public, ie private school, definitely all-male) which maintains traditional standards of a ‘classical education’:

The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek – or at least, knowing enough to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles over the brandy – has often provided a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs…[it’s become associated with] systems of exclusion based on income, education, race and gender. In the United Kingdom, its cultural capital remains high enough that Boris Johnson – an incompetent drunkard whose social privilege enabled him to attend Eton and…Balliol College, Oxford – managed to hold the highest political office in the land for an astonishingly long period of time, and even maintain the illusion of being an intellectual partly on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek. No other party trick could have served him as well. Thanks to centuries of culturally ingrained snobbery, even a passing acquaintance with these languages is still often considered a sign of extraordinary intelligence… (p.182)

I make no apology for quoting most of that passage, because I think it demonstrates Wilson’s refreshingly unsnobbish, even iconoclastic approach: her love of and enthusiasm for the classics doesn’t prevent her from acknowledging this uncomfortable tendency towards snobbery and arrogance in the modern British world of classical studies.

It all made me think of my own studies at university of Old English and Middle English literature. How can we reimagine the force and intention of texts produced in such alien and distant times and contexts, with such different, often abhorrent, attitudes and beliefs embedded in them – for example to class, women’s place in those worlds, war, culture, the enslavement or colonisation of people.

Even if, like me, you know very little about the classics, I’m sure you’d find this collection of essays very stimulating.