The Iliad

“Wilson’s Iliad is clear and brisk, its iambic pentameter a zone of enchantment.” ―Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books

The greatest literary landmark of antiquity masterfully rendered by the most celebrated translator of our time.

When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017―revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)―critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time.

The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world―the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even “complicated,” characters―both human and divine.

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

5 maps

Emily Wilson grew up in Oxford, UK, and studied Classics at Balliol College, and English Literature at Corpus Christi College. Her PhD. is from Yale in Classics and Comparative Literature. She is currently a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in literature, story-telling and how ideas and culture play out through narrative and in words, and in the music of language. She cares about poetry, drama and philosophy of all eras, especially ancient Greek, Roman and early modern. She has written books on tragedy and "overliving", the long afterlife of the death of Socrates, and a life of Seneca. She has also done several verse translations of classical verse drama and epic, including Seneca's tragedies, four plays of Euripides, and Homer's Odyssey.

Her approach to translation is discussed here: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_wilson_odyssey.php

Profiled here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html

"Wilson’s style is like the proverbial mountain stream―clean and clear, and bubbling along at pace.… Wilson’s strong authorial voice and open and accessible style…make this volume the definitive Iliad for our times. Readable, relevant and from the heart, this is the Iliad we have all been waiting for, whether we knew it or not."
― Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Washington Post

"Wilson’s admirers hoped that her second Homeric translation would be as great an achievement as the first. What they might not have expected is that it would be better.… Emily Wilson has not only produced fresh and limpid new translations of two foundational ancient poems. She has also given a new generation of readers the tools to approach Homer, with comfort and confidence, for the very first time. For those who knew the poems already, she lets Homer speak to them in a new voice."
― Johanna Hanink, Slate

"Wilson’s deep love for and understanding of the Iliad―by her own admission, the greater of her Homeric loves―shine through every page of this superb translation. The completion of her verse Homer amounts to nothing less than the renewal of an English poetic tradition."
― Daniel Walden, Bulwark

"The experience of reading Homer must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of a new translation. In her version of The Iliad, [Emily] Wilson enlivens the epic with rich sanguinary nutrients.… The result is an Iliad of clarity and approachability, its violence rendered with brutal intimacy: Wilson’s translation is zippy, and it zips the reader to a place and time of alien savagery.… [T]he vigor of language and vision is undeniable."
― Atlantic

"There’s nothing stiff or cool about Emily Wilson’s stirring translation of The Iliad, which whips and crackles beneath the familiar meter of loose iambic pentameter. Wilson tells it all in plain English, to elegant effect.… [S]he deftly coaxes the original’s Dactylic hexameters into our own accentual tongue. We feel her joy, birthed by hard labor.… Wilson has pulled off a thrilling achievement, framing ancient questions in a fresh light."
― Hamilton Cain, Boston Globe

"Superb. Emily Wilson’s beautiful, fluent, memorable translation tells us once again that the Olympian gods and the would-be superhumans who want to emulate them are not yet dead in our world."
― Rowan Williams, New Statesman

"Wilson is at her best when writing of the battlefield.… [S]he has a knack for the consonantal sounds of warfare. Her opening description of Achilles’ anger, which will lead inexorably to more men’s weapons clanging against metal, terms it ‘cataclysmic wrath.’ Her priority is those iambic Shakespearean rhythms: the beat makes this the perfect translation to read aloud."
― Kate Maltby, Financial Times

"Wilson has again presented a Homer that sings, in sprightly iambic pentameter and pellucid language that avoids ponderosities like, well, ponderosities and pellucid.… The shortness of Wilson’s lines…abetted by her unfussy diction and lyricism, are easy on the reader’s eye and seem to help the mind grasp the breadth of Homer’s canvas at any given moment while still marveling at details.… A masterful, highly readable rendering of the Greek classic."
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Seduce[s] with its crystalline clarity, elegance, sensuality, sometimes breathless pace and above all emotional clout."
― Edith Hall, Guardian