Since the “Odyssey” first appeared in English, around 1615, in George Chapman’s translation, the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseus’s ill-fated 10-year attempt to return home from the war in Troy to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, has prompted some 60 English translations, at an accelerating pace, half of them in the last 100 years and a dozen in the last two decades. The poem lying open before us was Homer’s “Odyssey,” the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the “Iliad,” in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them.
#Now we just translate windows#
On the wall hung pictures of Wilson’s three young daughters the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. “ Polytropos,” Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word - πολuτροπον - of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. Late in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek.
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