Emily Wilson with Sarah Ruhl: The Odyssey Onscreen

“Tell me about a complicated man.”

So begins Emily Wilson’s contemporary translation of Homer’s Odyssey — establishing her as the definitive Homeric translator of our time and radically transforming how we understand a cornerstone of western literature. As The Odyssey enters the pop cultural arena this summer via Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation — a film inspired by Wilson’s translation — she joins us for a conversation about why the The Odyssey has endured for nearly 3,000 years.

In the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman, written in a vivid contemporary idiom, Wilson captures the beauty and enchantment of Homer’s poem without poeticizing its carnage — a profound reflection on violence, marriage, and family. Nearly a decade after that translation gave Homer “a radically contemporary voice” (The New York Times Magazine), and nearly three millennia after it was originally composed, The Odyssey remains shockingly relevant.

In this conversation with the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Sarah Ruhl, whose work is profoundly influenced by Greek myth and famously modernized Eurydice for the stage, Wilson asks: what can a story about travelers and the aftermath of war tell us about our own world in an era of mass migration, riven by military and political conflict? What can this epic of a “complicated man” reveal to us about contemporary masculinity and violence? In a nation rooted in myths of rugged individualism and sacred homeland, how does The Odyssey hold up a mirror to American life?

Hear Wilson and Ruhl discuss The Odyssey’s circuitous path through the waters of Western culture — from ancient song to modern verse to Hollywood. Find out how this archaic text, in the hands of a master translator, can offer a startling vision of how we live today.

“Wilson’s language is fresh, unpretentious and lean… It is rare to find a translation that is at once so effortlessly easy to read and so rigorously considered.” ― Madeline Miller