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Emily Wilson      

Classicist; Professor at University of Pennsylvania; First Woman to Translate the Odyssey into English

Emily Wilson is professor of Classical Studies and graduate chair of the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. and Corpus Christi College M.Phil.) and Yale University (Ph.D.). In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship.

In 2017, she became the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Her translation has been praised for its contemporary sound and her radical changes to the presentation of the story.

In November 2017, Wyatt Mason profiled Professor Wilson in The New York Times Magazine. "When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker."

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The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English
The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer’s epic a radically contemporary voice.

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