Five books that inspired Emily Wilson’s translation of the "Odyssey"

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has published four books on ancient literature, philosophy and translation, an edited volume on tragedy, and many essays and articles, as well as verse translations of Seneca, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.

For Vogue Wilson tagged five books that aided her translation of the Odyssey. One title on her list:

War Music by Christopher Logue

Logue was a jack-of-all-trades who knew no Greek, and yet managed to create a pretty amazing set of poetic riffs on the Iliad, designed in the first instance for oral performance on the radio. I read this (like [A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K.] Le Guin) at a formative age, and Logue helped inform my sense of what I might be able to do to evoke the energy of Homeric similes and a sense of the specifically Homeric sublime, without the padding and verbosity that have plagued many twentieth and twenty-first century translations.

Read about another book on Wilson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue