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Emily Wilson: The Odyssey Retold

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Bizarre, brutal and beautiful, Homer’s The Odyssey is a story of adventure and revenge. It’s one of our oldest stories and an enduring source of obsession for readers, scholars and storytellers.

In Australia, if you studied The Odyssey at school or at university, you probably read it in English and in prose. How much of the rhythm, pace and spirit of Homer’s epic Greek poem has been lost through dozens of English translations over hundreds of years? And what can a new, radical intervention from a different kind of translator bring to our understanding of the story?

Classicist Emily Wilson is the author of an immersive translation that breathes new life into The Odyssey. Written in startling, spirited verse, Wilson’s Odyssey soars and sings. At the centre of all the action is, of course, the sacker of cities and slayer of suitors, Odysseus himself. In Wilson’s telling, our hero is introduced as ‘a complicated man’; a figure of many moods and layers.

In May, this remarkable scholar – and the first woman to translate The Odyssey in English – will discuss translation, truth and complex heroes with Alison Croggon.

Embiggen Books will be our bookseller for this event.

Featuring

Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson is professor of Classical Studies and graduate chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. In November 2017, W.W. Norton & Company published her translation of the Odyssey, the first known complete translation by a woman in English. Wilson attended Oxford Un... Read more

Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon is an award-winning novelist, poet, theatre writer, critic and editor who lives in Melbourne, Australia. She works in many genres and her books and poems have been published to acclaim nationally and internationally. She is arts editor for The Saturday Paper and co-founder of the per... Read more

Location

The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.