The Odyssey by Emily Wilson

Title: The Odyssey

Author: Homer/Emily Wilson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co Inc.

Publish date: 2018

ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9

This is by far and away the best rendition I have read. It matches the original line for line, and flattens bullshit archaisms like a cyclone. It’s fast, it’s immediate, it’s frankly stunning.

But you don’t just get the poem. Oh no. The Intro and the notes are all as thought-provoking and precise as the other work. I wish I could photocopy the entirety of that knowledge straight onto my brain, but as it was I had to settle for taking copious notes and resigning myself to the fact that I’ll have to keep going back, and back, and back.

Frankly, I don’t want to talk about it with my flat-footed prose. Just read it yourself. Cover to cover. At the risk of sounding like an idolatrous stalker, Wilson’s every word appears to be a gem: can she not open her mouth without complete and concise mastery? I flicked through an interview she gave on the book, and this passage pretty much gives you an idea:

‘There is a lot of agonizing among humanities faculty, maybe especially classicists, about “outreach.” That term in itself strikes me as patronizing and misguided, as if academics were always donating priceless gifts to the intellectually impoverished masses. I don’t see it that way. We (i.e., human beings who have the privileged position of spending our lives on teaching/scholarship/writing) should be engaged in multi-way conversations with other people who do other things, trying to listen as well as talk without talking down, and we should make the boundaries between different peoples as porous as possible. “The public” includes me; it’s not some separate sphere out there somewhere.’

About five thousand moose hoofs up out of five for this one. Scale just broke.