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there beautiful people, I'm journalist and

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the official Rustin Podcast. We're

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diving into the man, the moment, and

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the movement at the center of the

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stakes were so severe, people were getting killed

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for registering people to vote. He

1:01

was a pioneer in the sense that he really

1:03

was a true radical. You

1:05

are absolutely gonna want to listen, I promise

1:07

you that. Subscribe now, wherever

1:10

you get slay-worthy podcasts. I'm

1:13

Constance Grady. I write for Vox about

1:15

books and culture. And today, I'm sitting

1:17

in for Sean Illing. It's

1:21

hard to remember what a

1:23

weird book The Iliad by

1:25

Homer is. It's so

1:28

old and it's so foundational to

1:31

Western culture that it

1:33

kind of just seems like a fact. Oh

1:36

yeah, one of our most revered works

1:38

of literature is a long

1:40

poem about a bunch of men violently murdering each other

1:42

over who gets to own what sex slave. That's

1:45

normal, right? The

1:48

Iliad is the first one of the Homeric poems.

1:50

The other is The Odyssey. Even

1:53

for Greek literature, The Iliad is

1:55

bizarre. Mostly, it's about Achilles

1:57

getting offended that one of the Greek generals

2:00

confiscated a slave girl of his and he

2:02

refused to pay because of it and

2:04

then there are long descriptions of the rest of the

2:06

Greek army going off and fighting battles without him. It's

2:11

a poem about petty angry men and

2:14

the violence they do to each other

2:16

and it's the basis for the 3,000

2:19

years of literature that has come after it. Every

2:22

battle scene, every tragic death,

2:25

every depiction of greed and

2:27

grief and humans being awful to

2:29

each other. The alien is

2:31

at the bottom of everything. My

2:46

guest today is Emily Wilson. Emily

2:48

is a Classics Professor at Penn.

2:51

In 2017 she published a

2:53

celebrated new translation of The Odyssey.

2:56

Earlier this year she brought it up with a

2:58

translation of, you guessed it,

3:00

The Illyid. Emily's

3:03

translations are straightforward and vivid

3:05

and alive. They let you

3:07

feel the strangeness of this

3:10

alien culture from 3,000 years

3:12

ago. I

3:14

wanted to talk with her about the parts

3:17

of the Illyid that feel very alive

3:19

and urgent and the parts

3:21

that feel very far away. I really

3:23

want to know why does

3:25

the Illyid last? Emily

3:33

Wilson, welcome to the show. Thank you

3:35

so much. So Emily, tell me

3:38

what draws you to translating these ancient

3:40

texts. So I love these ancient

3:42

texts and I want them to

3:44

be available to new readers and available

3:46

to readers who may have read them

3:48

before in different translations in a different

3:50

way. One of the big things that

3:52

I wanted to do was to create very regular metrical

3:54

translations to honor the musicality and rhythm

3:57

of the original and the way that

3:59

in antiquity the Homeric epics, as

4:01

well as ancient tragedy,

4:03

were performed out loud, experienced out

4:05

loud. So I want to create

4:08

read-aloudable translations. And your

4:10

translation of The Odyssey in 2017

4:12

got a lot more mainstream attention

4:14

than classical translations usually do. So

4:16

why do you think that is?

4:19

Yeah, it's, I mean, I feel very lucky that it got

4:21

so much attention. I mean, I think Robert

4:24

Fagel's translations also got pretty widely reviewed.

4:26

I mean, it's not that it's never

4:28

happened before, that her translation of Homer

4:30

has sort of seemed like this might

4:32

change things in terms of how does

4:34

the general public read Homer. I

4:36

mean, I think one thing was the

4:38

factoid, which isn't really all that much

4:40

to do with me, of I was

4:42

the first woman to publish an anglophone

4:44

translation of The Odyssey, which I think

4:46

is more something about the

4:48

state of translation of ancient

4:51

texts, and it's gendering, and

4:53

it's the particular mutations

4:55

of that than it is about me. I think it

4:57

was a well- I'm

5:23

thinking about terms for gender within

5:25

the Homeric poems or within ancient

5:27

tragedy when I'm translating tragedies. And

5:30

I think the Homeric poems are

5:32

pretty interesting in their representations of

5:34

gender. In the Iliad, for instance, there's

5:36

a whole cluster of terms that

5:38

suggest excessive masculinity, and

5:40

then also terms that suggest courage,

5:43

but bleeding into this could

5:45

be a rash, destructive

5:47

kind of courage. And there are words

5:49

like agenoria, which is cognate with the

5:51

word for man, aner. So it's

5:54

wrestling with how do I translate that? How

5:56

do I represent the ways that the poem

5:58

itself sees masculinity? as

6:00

sometimes a problem. But that isn't about

6:02

whatever gender identity I may be inhabiting.

6:04

It's about the way the poem is

6:06

quite complicated in its representations of gender.

6:09

And similarly, I find the Homeric

6:11

poems fascinating in how they are

6:14

intelligently intersectional about gender, that they don't

6:16

sort of equate all

6:19

female characters are more disempowered than

6:21

all male characters. Instead, they were

6:23

very, very powerful divine goddess characters,

6:26

and they were also very much

6:28

lacking in power, male

6:30

mortal characters. So I like

6:33

that they're complicated about it. They're not unlike the

6:35

headline writers, they sort of acknowledge that being

6:37

female, being male, there's a lot to

6:39

say about that. And it's not a, it can't be summed up

6:41

in a headline. So the Odyssey

6:43

is this big hit in 2017. And

6:45

then you sit down to start translating

6:48

the Iliad. Did you feel a weight

6:50

of expectations on you as you sat

6:52

down with that? I did. I mean,

6:54

when I first, it was in my

6:56

contract for the Odyssey that if I ever did the

6:58

Iliad, that Norton would publish it or would consider doing

7:00

it if the Odyssey had been a success. And

7:03

I had thought for many years that I would

7:05

probably need 10 years off, and

7:07

I would write a different kind of book for

7:09

a while. I mean, I didn't start off my

7:11

career as a translator. And I thought maybe I

7:13

won't just do translations continuously. But

7:15

then I changed my mind because I thought

7:18

the best training for translating an epic

7:20

poem is translating an epic poem. I

7:22

just done that. So when will I ever be in a

7:24

better position to do this than I am now? But certainly,

7:27

I did feel the weight of expectations when I

7:29

turned to the Iliad, because of course, when I

7:32

published the Odyssey, no one had heard of me, whereas

7:34

that's not the case. Once I published

7:36

the Iliad, and I knew that there

7:38

would be a sort of different kind of media reception

7:40

and different kinds of expectations. And

7:42

I also felt that the Iliad is, I love

7:45

both the Homeric epics, but I think the Iliad

7:47

is even greater. And it's also extremely different.

7:49

It has a lot in common with the Odyssey

7:51

and a lot that's extremely different. So I felt

7:54

the weight also just of the

7:56

greatness of the poem. And can I really live up to

7:58

it and live up to the emotional and

8:00

sonic and aesthetic intensity of the Iliad.

8:03

And it's interesting that you went for

8:05

the Odyssey first and the

8:07

Iliad as your second project since in

8:10

the world of the story

8:12

chronologically the Iliad comes first. So why did

8:14

you decide to start with the Odyssey? I mean, none of

8:17

that was really my choice. I got asked by the

8:19

publishers to do the Odyssey first and you can see

8:21

why they would want the Odyssey more than

8:23

the Iliad because nobody really

8:25

I mean hardly anyone reads the Iliad in

8:28

ninth grade, whereas a lot of kids especially

8:30

in the US read the Odyssey in consolation

8:32

in ninth grade or first year of

8:34

college. The World Literature Survey very often

8:36

starts with the Odyssey is often

8:38

usually some instructors like to play around

8:40

and start with the Iliad instead, but the

8:43

Odyssey in a way makes more sense as

8:45

a beginning of a world lit class because

8:47

it is just travels the world. Whereas nobody

8:49

in the Iliad goes anywhere beyond to

8:51

death. Right now

8:53

the sort of cultural consensus is that

8:55

the Odyssey is like the more human

8:57

poem and the Iliad

9:00

seems to be out of favor. But

9:02

I understand from your introduction that

9:05

in antiquity people thought of the Iliad as

9:07

the great one. So how do you think we came

9:09

to that sort of switcheroo? I mean, I

9:11

think in antiquity people thought they were both

9:13

pretty great. I mean, there are some ancient

9:16

critics who seem to imply the Iliad is

9:18

greater. I mean, like in the pseudo-lungiogenesis on

9:20

the sublime, which presents the

9:22

Iliad as the ultimate sublime or

9:24

pohupsos, the height of poetry is

9:27

in the Iliad because it has

9:29

so much more heroic confrontation with

9:31

death and so much more

9:33

divine human interaction in a more complex

9:35

way. And also so much more very

9:38

intense nature imagery. It's so much more

9:40

of a, in modern terms, it's a

9:42

much more ecological poem. I

9:44

mean, I think different later cultures, post-traumatic cultures

9:47

have wrestled in different ways with the Odyssey

9:49

versus the Iliad. A lot of

9:51

the Iliad and the Odyssey both were not

9:53

really read at all in the

9:55

quote unquote Western world for many centuries than

9:58

they hadn't read Homer. were

10:00

reading Virgil for a long time. And

10:02

I think once Homer started to be

10:04

read again in the early modern period,

10:06

there was a lot of anxiety about how

10:08

violent is the Iliad and how much is

10:11

it endorsing, whipping you

10:13

up to want to slaughter lots of people, which on

10:15

some level that is what the Iliad does. It

10:17

makes you feel the glory as

10:20

well as the terrible pathos and

10:22

tragedy of war. There has been, in

10:25

different ways, in different cultural moments, a

10:28

lot of anxiety about glorification

10:30

of violence in the Iliad. In

10:32

antiquity, there was a lot of anxiety

10:34

about both Homeric poems insofar as Plato

10:37

bans them from the semi-ideal republic

10:39

and they stir up all the

10:41

wrong emotions. They make you sympathize with all the

10:43

wrong people. The idea that Homeric

10:45

characters are heroes in a superman sort

10:48

of way is a very modern

10:50

American projection back onto these

10:52

ancient poems. Whenever I

10:54

see classes talking about your work, they

10:56

get really excited about two things. One

10:58

is that you're writing in metrical

11:00

blank first. And then the

11:02

second thing that people get really excited

11:04

about is that your language is very

11:07

clear and limpid and sort of transparent.

11:09

And I can see both of those things

11:11

in the work, but it's sort of fascinating

11:14

to me that they also seem like they

11:16

should be contradictory in a way. Like you

11:18

shouldn't be writing either poetically or very straightforwardly

11:20

and plainly rather than both at the same

11:23

time. So how did you

11:25

think about maintaining both of those ideas in

11:27

your head as you translated and what was

11:29

important to you about keeping them both present?

11:32

They were both essential to me because they're

11:34

both essential, I think, in the original. I

11:36

mean, both, as I said, the metricality, the

11:38

original is composed in dactylic hexameter. I

11:41

use amic pentameter, though I experimented

11:44

for a very long time with trying to

11:46

use a longer metrical line, but I couldn't

11:48

make it work so it felt alive in

11:50

English. And I think pneu pentameter sort of

11:52

triggers a sense of this is a very

11:54

traditional poetic form, which is a sort of

11:56

analogous experience to the experience of dactylic

11:59

hexameter. into a poem in

12:01

archaic Greece. To me, it's

12:03

a, I mean, we talked a minute ago

12:05

about preconceptions about Homer. I think there are

12:07

also so many interesting preconceptions about poetry, and

12:10

the idea that poetry has to be either

12:12

obscure or flowery or ornate

12:14

in certain ways. I mean, that

12:16

doesn't hold up if you read Robert Frost

12:18

even. I mean, there are plenty of

12:20

lines of Shakespeare that don't use fancy words,

12:23

to be or not to be. That is the question.

12:25

None of that's vocabulary words, and yet it's a

12:27

metrical and extremely powerful line. So

12:29

I think it's sort of interesting that people think of

12:31

that as a paradox, which I think is to do

12:34

with a peculiarly sort of contemporary

12:36

idea of poetry as this very

12:38

satiric thing, which of course is

12:40

not, was not the case for most

12:42

centuries of people composing and loving

12:44

poetry. Certainly wasn't the case in antiquity.

12:46

It wasn't a satiric. It was something

12:49

that everyone can hear, listen, respond to.

12:51

And Homeric

12:53

poetry in particular, in so far

12:55

as, I mean, I guess I've done

12:57

translations of other ancient poetic

13:00

texts, such as Sophocles, Seneca,

13:02

Euripides, all of whom I

13:04

think are in certain ways more difficult

13:06

than Homer. Homeric syntax is very clear,

13:09

and yet it's also totally poetic. There's

13:11

no arguing with the poetic qualities of

13:13

Homer who was called Ho-Poetus, the poet

13:15

in antiquity. We'll

13:23

be back with more of my conversation with

13:26

Emily Wilson after a quick break. Support

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That's vox.com/give.

17:00

So I want to turn into the text a

17:02

little bit now. And just for those

17:04

of our listeners who maybe haven't read The

17:06

Iliad in a while or haven't had a chance to

17:08

read it at all, can you set

17:11

us up and tell us how the poem

17:13

opens? The poem opens, Mene

17:15

na eida sa'a peleia do'a ke

17:18

leo su lo mene, and so

17:20

on. I can't do it longer, it's going

17:22

to sound like a party trick, so I don't want to do. The

17:25

first word is mene, from meneis,

17:27

which means wrath. I translated it

17:29

as wrath rather than anger or

17:32

rage because the Iliad has a

17:34

whole spectrum of vocabulary for different

17:36

kinds of fury that people and

17:38

gods can feel. The wrath

17:40

of Achilles is different from mortal human anger.

17:42

If a man gets mad at another man,

17:44

what usually happens in the Iliad is that

17:46

he slaughters a few other men. When

17:49

Achilles is possessed by this

17:51

overwhelming wrath against his fellow

17:53

Greek Agamemnon, he manages

17:55

to cause a huge massacre both

17:58

on the enemy side and very

18:00

unusually on his own side. He's

18:03

acting like a god insofar as

18:05

he can kill without doing anything. Swift-footed

18:07

Achilles barely moves for three-quarters of

18:09

a poem. It's interesting to me,

18:11

when I first read The Iliad

18:14

as a teenager, I just hated Achilles

18:16

so much. I think I

18:18

really resented that he acted as though

18:20

he was the only one

18:22

in the war whose losses really mattered,

18:24

right? It starts with him refusing to

18:27

fight because Agamemnon has taken away his

18:29

slave girl, and even after Agamemnon offers

18:31

him this enormous apology with a million

18:33

backup gifts, he's still refusing

18:35

to fight. And

18:37

then one of the things that your translation

18:39

and introduction did, which I really loved, was

18:41

it sort of made me reframe this

18:45

attribute of Achilles into being something

18:47

very human, this idea that when

18:49

we're consented by loss, we

18:51

just want to say, no, I don't accept any

18:53

recompense. My loss can never be made whole, which

18:56

is probably how we all feel when we're

18:58

faced, especially with the loss of human life.

19:01

So I'm wondering if you can speak to

19:03

how you see Achilles' obstinacy

19:05

sort of functioning within this poem and what

19:07

work it does. Yes. So

19:10

Achilles is unlike his fellow Greeks in

19:12

that he's the son of a

19:14

goddess as well as of a mortal

19:16

man. And he's also the swiftest-footed and

19:18

therefore the best at the form of

19:20

fighting, which involves throwing a spear, running

19:22

in really fast to collect it, throwing

19:25

another spear to kill another person and

19:27

so on. He can kill more people

19:29

in quick succession through his athleticism on

19:31

the battlefield than any other

19:33

member of the Greek army can. So he's

19:35

special, both because he's semi-divine and because

19:37

he's really good at his job. And

19:40

yet he also is wrestling with

19:42

the fact that he's even a person

19:44

as special as that, is both

19:46

mortal and vulnerable to all kinds

19:48

of losses. What happens in that

19:50

quarrel scene at the start, where,

19:52

as you say, it hinges on

19:54

really quite an unattractive quality of

19:56

two very privileged men getting very furious because they're just

19:58

so much more than just a person. one of them

20:01

doesn't get to enslave the woman that he'd

20:03

hoped to be enslaving, which doesn't seem like

20:05

it's really rather sympathised with either any of

20:07

them in that kind of context. I mean,

20:10

I think if you can get yourself into

20:12

the mindset of this poem's emotional and social

20:14

world, you can sympathise because Achilles, he's also

20:16

unlike his fellow Greeks and Churgens, in that

20:18

he knows for sure if he stays at

20:21

Troy he will die. So he knows that

20:23

he's trading his life for honour. So

20:25

any ammunition of his honour means that

20:27

he's given his life for nothing. And

20:30

I think you can sort of see from that perspective that it's

20:33

not surprising that he's upset. He's

20:35

dying for absolutely nothing. And this is, in

20:37

a way, even though he's very unlike us

20:40

in so many ways, most of

20:42

us aren't sons of goddesses, most of us

20:44

aren't quick spear warriors, we also

20:46

will all die. And we also all have that

20:48

sense of sometimes you lose things that you'll never

20:50

get back. If you lose your life, you

20:53

never get it back. As Achilles himself is the one who

20:55

says most powerfully in Book Nine, when he's

20:57

insisting that there are some types of things, maybe

20:59

you can get it back. You might be

21:01

able to get some horses or some cattle or

21:03

steal some tripods from somebody, all of which he's

21:05

great at doing, but you can't get life back

21:07

once it goes past your teeth. And one of the

21:10

things that sort of comes out in that argument

21:12

also seems sort of central to one

21:15

of the things the poem is grappling with is this

21:18

question of whether humans can be blamed for

21:20

the things that the gods make them do

21:22

and conversely, if they deserve the credit for

21:24

their accomplishments, if they're helped by the gods. And

21:28

when I read this poem, I always find it

21:30

really difficult to wrap my head around that

21:32

question. I always sort of have

21:34

this instinct to make the gods action

21:37

instantly metaphorical. And then the poem is

21:39

really hiding me on that. So

21:42

for instance, my instinct is always to read

21:44

Helen of Troy as someone who was metaphorically

21:47

overcome with lust when she

21:49

met Paris and was abducted

21:51

by him. But the text of the poem

21:53

is like very clear that she was literally

21:56

the victim of Aphrodite and

21:58

her influence on her. So how

22:01

would you recommend modern readers approach

22:03

the problem of the gods when

22:05

it comes to understanding the psychology

22:07

of these characters and how they

22:10

interact with this world where

22:12

immortal creatures can change fundamental

22:15

ideas about their natures? Yeah,

22:18

that's a great question. I mean, people

22:20

in antiquity also wrestled with that. I

22:22

mean, people in later antiquity, especially once

22:24

there were attempts to fuse

22:26

the Homeric poems which remained canonical

22:28

with versions of Neoplatonism and nascent

22:31

Christianity. The only way to make

22:33

it work is you have to

22:35

make the gods metaphorical. And

22:37

it sort of works up to a point.

22:39

I mean, I think that Helen's seen in book

22:41

three where Helen doesn't want to go to

22:43

bed with Paris because she despises him and he's

22:45

just been humiliated on the battlefield and she

22:47

doesn't think that's a sexy look and she doesn't

22:50

want to go to bed with him and

22:52

she doesn't respect. And yet, I mean, I think

22:54

most of us have been overcome with lust

22:56

for people we don't respect. So it's possible to

22:58

read it metaphorically. And yet the goddess herself

23:00

seems so uncannily real. And as

23:02

a translator, I thought it's absolutely essential that

23:04

the reader must believe in the gods and

23:06

the goddesses and must feel the sense that

23:09

when the sea looks misty, but then all of

23:11

a sudden, the F50 sea goddess is emerging from

23:14

those waters. You have to believe it. And

23:16

you have to believe that this really is

23:18

Poseidon's striding over the mountaintop in three strides.

23:21

This really is here in her magical

23:23

chariot and putting on her sexy earrings

23:25

and her sexy bra that

23:27

will make you be distracted from the battlefield.

23:30

You have to believe in the gods. So

23:32

I mean, I personally don't have any problem believing

23:34

in the gods because I think they make sense

23:36

of the world we live in in certain ways

23:38

so much better than Marthias and does because

23:41

it's a complicated world out there. And

23:43

so many things happen that no

23:46

particular single human seems to be in charge of.

23:48

And if you're sort of trying to make sense

23:50

of how exactly did that person make that decision,

23:52

which might have been a bit surprising, that maybe

23:54

there were several things going on in their mind

23:56

at once, could it have been that a goddess

23:58

tucked in by his hair? Who knows? Why

24:01

did the armies suddenly flee or

24:03

suddenly get invigorated to fight? I

24:05

mean, again, I don't think

24:07

even the greatest military strategist can always

24:09

explain why did they lose

24:11

morale at that particular moment or why did

24:13

that person happen to die when it

24:16

seemed like he was winning and yet then the

24:18

other person won. We have

24:20

sports betting because you can't always predict things. And

24:22

I think the guards are a way of saying

24:25

that we can't always predict things. And also they're a way

24:27

of saying nature is bigger than us, the

24:29

world is bigger than us. The

24:31

forces out there, we can't understand. It's like

24:34

Tolstoy's spirit of history

24:36

is the chaotic Olympian guards coming

24:38

down. Absolutely. And yet

24:40

they also have so much personality. I

24:43

love that they're both this sort of

24:45

abstract sense of the world is so

24:47

much bigger than humans. And yet they're

24:50

also so detailed in their psychological anxieties

24:52

and desires and fears and rages and

24:54

griefs and that they're in so

24:56

many ways just like humans, except that

24:58

they're far more powerful and won't die.

25:08

More of my conversation with Emily Wilson

25:11

after one more quick break. It's

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25:34

before they're even built. Co-workers from

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25:41

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25:55

Learn more at forwork.meta.com. Hey

26:03

there beautiful people, I'm journalist and

26:05

author Treville Anderson and I'm hosting

26:07

the official Rustin podcast. We're diving

26:10

into the man, the moment and

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for registering people to vote. He

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was a pioneer in the sense that he

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really was a true radical. You

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are absolutely gonna want to listen. I promise you

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that. Subscribe now wherever

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27:55

was so struck by the idea you talk

27:58

about in your intro that Most

28:00

of the Olympian gods look down

28:02

on Aries and Aphrodite, who are

28:05

the gods of war and love or sex,

28:07

because they're the gods of the base, their

28:09

human instinct. Especially since arguably

28:11

the whole poem is set in motion in

28:13

the first place by lust and by the

28:16

desire for war. So how did

28:18

you think about that dynamic between the

28:20

gods in this sense that Aries and

28:22

Aphrodite are sort of on a different

28:24

social and emotional plane as you were approaching

28:26

the poem? I mean I thought about it

28:28

in particular with Aries, so I think

28:31

it's the thinnest characterisation of all the

28:33

Olympian deities. I mean Aphrodite gets more

28:35

sort of layers to her characterisation because

28:37

she gets to interact with more different

28:40

other deities. Whereas with Aries, in a

28:42

way he's quite similar to his various

28:44

horrible hench people like conflict and terror

28:46

and flight who are constantly rushing with

28:49

him across the battlefield wanting to slaughter

28:51

everybody. I see it as part of

28:53

the way the poem is, I

28:56

said a few minutes ago that people in the early modern

28:58

period were quite often anxious about the Iliad

29:00

as a poem that celebrates warfare. But I

29:02

think the depiction of Aries, the ruin of

29:04

humanity as he's often described, the bratoluygos

29:07

Aries. It

29:09

showcases the way the poem represents

29:12

the horror of war and represents

29:14

the ways that a

29:16

massacre is only a good thing if you're

29:18

Aries. And Aries loves bloodshed and is

29:21

always happy if a lot of people get

29:23

slaughtered. The other gods very often enjoy the

29:25

battlefield if the right people are dying, but

29:27

they don't enjoy it if some of their

29:30

favourites are dying. Which, I mean

29:32

they have a more nuanced vision of war,

29:34

whereas Aries is just all for it in

29:36

any context whatsoever. Yeah, I kept having this image

29:38

of him just sort of crouched on the edge of

29:41

the battlefield just like grinning, this giant

29:43

smile. Yes, the giant bloody smile,

29:45

yes. And of course also he's

29:47

immortal and that's also part of how the poem

29:49

is sort of acknowledging that we'll

29:52

always have war. There's never been a human

29:54

society where there hasn't been war and probably

29:56

there never will be. Yeah, so I

29:58

wanna on that note turn to... this

30:00

quote from the end of your introduction,

30:02

you wrote, you already know the

30:04

story, you will die, everyone you love will die,

30:06

you will lose them forever, you will be sad

30:08

and angry, you will weep, you will bargain, you

30:11

will make demands, you will beg, you will pray,

30:13

it will make no difference, nothing

30:15

you can do will bring them back, you

30:17

know this, your knowing changes nothing, this poem

30:19

will make you understand this unfathomable truth again

30:22

and again as if for the very first

30:24

time. How does it do that? It

30:26

does that in so many different

30:28

ways, I mean I think it does that

30:31

on a macroscopic level by showing you the

30:33

story arc of Achilles' rage which

30:35

gets mutated, his rage against his

30:37

wrath against Agamemnon which results in

30:40

him sitting out of the battlefield refusing

30:42

to acknowledge that he could accept

30:44

a diminution of his honor in

30:46

exchange for when he's going

30:49

to die of his honor, he refuses to accept

30:51

that loss and I think that's

30:53

connected to a refusal to accept the death

30:55

that he knows is soon about to

30:57

come. Then his friend Patocclus

30:59

goes out as his second self and

31:02

the second self of Achilles is killed

31:04

and of course Achilles is devastated by

31:06

grief and on some level

31:08

he's accepting that Patocclus is dead and then

31:10

another he's not because he's saying he's sort

31:12

of insisting I can recoup this

31:15

loss, if only I can kill the person

31:17

who killed Patocclus, if only I can obliterate

31:19

the Trojans, I can keep on killing and

31:21

even when Hector is dead I will keep

31:23

on humiliating him in front of his parents

31:25

and his people and I'll keep on raging

31:27

and grieving forever and I will never eat and

31:30

I will never stop and I will never sleep

31:32

and the loss will never be recouped but

31:34

he won't stop looking for a regeneration for

31:36

that loss, looking for something to

31:38

make up for it and the poem's

31:40

story arc, the story of Achilles' wrath

31:43

ends when Achilles is able

31:45

to form a very temporary,

31:48

very contingent, very in a way quite

31:50

implausible kind of kinship with his greatest

31:52

enemy the king of Troy and they

31:54

weep together for their losses and they

31:56

eat together and so there's a sort

31:58

of way that that story of

32:00

how Achilles refuses to accept

32:02

his death or anyone that he loves death and

32:05

yet in the end all he can do

32:07

is accept it and eat. And similarly Hector

32:09

is sort of in denial about his own death or

32:11

about the possibility that he will die. He thinks he

32:13

can make it, he thinks he can keep on pushing

32:15

on out onto the plane, leave his

32:17

family and see if he's

32:20

city. Uncle Dawson. I

32:22

want to zoom out a little bit

32:24

now looking at some of the reception

32:26

of these poems. I know there's been

32:29

some anger on the far right, not

32:31

really as far as I've been able

32:33

to see in the academy about your

32:35

translations. I've seen some people call your

32:37

work Woke Homer and claim that

32:40

you're bringing in a political agenda.

32:42

It seems like it's part of this larger

32:44

trend in these kind of crypto-fascist

32:46

or sometimes outright fascist

32:49

spaces to want to

32:51

try to preserve this understanding

32:53

of Homer as specifically

32:56

the wellspring of

32:58

a white masculine European

33:01

idea of heroism and one

33:03

that they can see themselves as fighting

33:05

specifically to preserve. So I'm

33:07

wondering if you can speak to how your

33:10

understanding of Homer is, I would

33:13

imagine, quite different from that and what political lens,

33:15

if any, you feel that you are bringing to

33:17

the work. Yeah, I mean I find it, I

33:19

find all that response in which as you say

33:21

is there's a whole pocket of the internet that

33:23

seems to belong to people who

33:25

love the idea of ancient Greece as

33:27

a fantasy time when

33:30

everyone recognized that only white men

33:32

matter and women didn't matter and didn't

33:34

get to say anything and that's why we

33:36

idolize the ancient Greeks because they were justice

33:39

and such anistic and fascistic as we want

33:42

our society to be. I possibly

33:45

don't see my work as sort

33:47

of inherently political acceptance so far

33:49

as the Homeric poems are about

33:51

people and communities and I

33:53

think they're very empathetic about people,

33:55

communities, and people seems like the

33:58

wrong word because I'm including deities in the world. in

34:01

that world. And also trying to include

34:03

the natural world and animals as well. I mean, they're empathetic

34:05

about, what's it like to be a horse on the battlefield?

34:07

What is it like to be a dog who's hungry for

34:10

meat? What's it like to be a spear?

34:12

I mean, I think these are

34:14

very deeply empathetic works of imagining

34:16

about what is it like to

34:18

be a member of a community or to

34:20

be isolated from a community? And how

34:23

can communities stick together? How

34:25

can communities get blown up by

34:27

various different kinds of speech and

34:30

rage and action and violence? And

34:32

so in that sense, I think they are absolutely

34:35

political. And I think empathy

34:37

is a political concept, which is a

34:39

very important one and useful for today's politics. I wish

34:41

there was more of it and

34:43

more sense of everyone matters, which

34:45

I think the Homeric poems teach you.

34:49

But are they political in that they're going to tell

34:51

you exactly who to vote for? I don't

34:54

think it's quite like that. I don't think an ancient poem can

34:56

have that kind of and I think it takes some teasing

34:59

out and dwelling with the poem too, because

35:01

it's not just about the

35:04

point of reading a poem, which will take

35:06

you many hours to listen to or read, isn't

35:08

to get a moral that you can write down

35:10

on a post-it note. It's to go through the

35:12

whole experience. And that is also, I think, a

35:14

political thing. I mean, I think it's potentially political to say,

35:17

I wish people would read more and would read

35:19

complex, difficult texts, which aren't sort of

35:22

easily summarisable, which is not, I

35:24

think, the lesson that the anti-woke

35:27

people on the internet are taking. Because

35:29

many of the people who get most

35:31

enraged about my existence clearly haven't read

35:34

more than a line or two of my work or none

35:36

at all. They just know that I'm

35:39

female and that's more or less all they

35:41

need to be infuriated. In

35:43

the introduction, you draw a parallel between

35:45

Troy and its last days and the

35:48

world that we live in now destabilised

35:50

by climate change. So

35:52

if reading the poem is about the whole

35:54

experience of going through it, do you think

35:57

there's anything in that experience that can help

35:59

us? to see more clearly

36:01

the world that we are potentially losing

36:03

right now. I mean, I think it really

36:06

certainly teaches you to value

36:08

the short lived, the word Minantarios,

36:11

short lived, which is applied both

36:13

to Hector and Achilles, but in a way

36:15

applies to the whole world, applies to the

36:17

city of Troy, which will be flooded

36:20

by Poseidon and Apollo after

36:23

the warriors think that they've built

36:25

monuments through their actions and their

36:27

glorious deaths that will last forever. The

36:29

walls that Poseidon and Apollo themselves constructed

36:31

will be washed away. The Greater Cian Wall

36:34

around the encampment will also be washed away.

36:36

It's a sort of picture of loss and

36:38

a picture also of how can we appreciate

36:40

the things that we are losing and how

36:43

can we learn not to delude ourselves with

36:45

also with the acknowledgement that we probably will

36:48

keep on deluding ourselves. I mean, that desire

36:51

to think it's not true, that maybe we're

36:53

going to make it, is also there in

36:55

the poem and there for many of us,

36:57

we keep on building

36:59

on coastlines and voting

37:02

for people who won't necessarily do

37:04

anything to mitigate climate change. Just

37:07

to bring it home, I'm going to go to

37:09

the question you've probably answered quite a few times

37:12

over the course of this tour, but I'm hoping

37:14

you can answer it one more time. Homeward poems

37:16

have survived 3000 years. Why have they lasted

37:18

so long and what is the most important

37:20

thing for us to get out of them

37:23

now? They've lasted so

37:25

long because they have these enormously

37:27

energetic and deep pictures

37:29

of these characters who are fascinating,

37:31

who aren't either evil

37:33

or amazingly good, but who are

37:37

engaged in these deeply

37:39

human sort of quests, like the

37:41

quest to grapple with mortality

37:43

or to win some kind of glory

37:45

or lasting name or celebrity. I mean,

37:47

who doesn't care about those things? Who doesn't

37:49

care about grief? I mean, we haven't

37:52

really talked about the way that the,

37:54

it goes on this trajectory from male

37:57

rage, but ends with female grief.

38:00

and Lamentation. I think they're

38:02

very truthful emotionally and that's a

38:04

lot of the reason why they've survived and they also have great

38:06

stories. We also haven't mentioned that despite

38:09

the intensity of the Iliad and the

38:11

Odyssey as well to some extent, they also have

38:13

really funny scenes and there are

38:16

comic moments that both the sort of

38:18

black comedy of the trash talking in

38:20

the quarrel but also the more

38:23

straight up comedy of the Seduction of Zeus

38:25

or the moments when Mariones

38:27

and Edeos are measuring their

38:29

spears against each other. They're

38:32

just really good stories. I think there's a lot of it. I didn't

38:35

do the lesson of Homer. I heard

38:37

of that could just be that there isn't

38:39

really a lesson of Homer. There isn't really

38:41

a lesson. Yes, I mean people in antiquity

38:44

also thought Homer is the greatest teacher and

38:46

Homer was used in the education of children

38:48

but the question of what exactly

38:51

Homer teaches, who knows? I mean

38:53

I think Homer teaches you the

38:56

world is bigger than you think and you

38:58

will die. Maybe that's enough. Who

39:00

could argue with this? Well,

39:06

thank you very much for coming by and

39:08

bringing us the truth that we will all

39:10

die in the end. Thank you. That

39:13

is Emily Wilson. She has translated

39:15

Homer's The Iliad out in stores

39:17

now. Patrick

39:37

Boyd engineered this episode. Alex Overington

39:39

wrote our theme music and A.M.

39:41

Hall is the boss.

39:44

Special thanks to Caitlin

39:46

Bugucci. As always let us know what

39:48

you think of the episode. Drop us a

39:50

line at the grey area at vox.com and

39:53

please share it with your friends on all the socials. Sean

39:57

will be back next week. New episodes of

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mintmobile.com/gray area. It's

41:01

not just sci-fi anymore. Virtual reality for

41:03

work is here. Mixed reality for work is

41:05

here. And

41:07

companies everywhere are using them both to transform how they

41:09

operate. Architects

41:11

are able to walk through buildings in mixed reality

41:14

before they're even built. Co-workers

41:16

from opposite ends of the earth are working

41:18

shoulder to shoulder in VR spaces. And all

41:20

sorts of workers, from pilots to underwater welders,

41:23

are getting trained in a virtual environment that's

41:25

safer and more cost effective. That's

41:29

Meta for Work. Giving you VR

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41:33

safer, together. Learn

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more at forwork.meta.com.