The Odyssey
By Homer, translated by Emily Wilson,
WW Norton, 593pp, £30/$40
The Odyssey – and The Iliad – are everything they’re cracked up to be: the great, early epics on whose shoulders Western European literature stands. But what are you supposed to do about them if you don’t read Greek? Emily Wilson provides the answer in her terrific new translation.
In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay, “On Not Knowing Greek”. Of course, the old Bloomsbury clever-clogs did know Greek – but her convincing point was that we can never really know Greek. As the greatest of the earliest surviving literary languages, Greek is so pure and underivative that it survives just this side of understanding in our corrupted, unoriginal, plagiarising, modern minds.
