Emily Wilson Is Starting Over With Homer

By Andy — 2026-09-03 — Literary News

I ran into a customer last week holding both copies of Emily Wilson's Odyssey. Different covers. Same poem. He looked confused. I didn't blame him.

Wilson, who chairs the classics department at Penn, is nine years into a complete retranslation of Homer's epic. Not tweaking. Not revising. A wholesale, from-the-ground-up remake of the 2017 version that sold over a million copies and became, more or less, the Odyssey that English readers learned first.

It's odd work. Translators revise and correct. That happens. But you don't throw out a bestseller and start fresh, especially not within a decade. According to the American Translators Association, this is practically unheard of.

So what changed?

Wilson's approach to The Iliad, which she finished in 2023, showed her a different way in. She'd used more lines than the original, allowing room for varying sentence lengths and rhythm. The 2017 Odyssey, by contrast, was tighter. It had constraints. The compression worked—that's why it sold—but it wasn't everything she could do with the text.

She's also thought more carefully about how to handle concepts that don't translate cleanly. Take "slave." In ancient Greek, bondage worked differently than the word conjures in English. The new version will carry more endnotes (she promises to quadruple them, which, as far as I can tell, she's genuinely excited about). Context matters. Precision matters.

Her publisher apparently disagreed at first. Can't blame them either. But sell a million copies and you earn some room to disappoint people. She's already halfway through the new draft. Whatever questions the book trade had about her decision, Wilson herself seems settled on it.

She loves this poem. She spends her days reading Homer and wrestling with it. That's not nostalgia or market-chasing—that's just where her mind goes.

Which means we'll have two Wilsons on the shelf, side by side, and teachers will curse her name when deciding which one to assign. That's actually fine. The poem survives it.

Source: "Emily Wilson, a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, has announced that she is retranslating the epic poem from scratch." — Smithsonian Magazine