Emily Wilson is translating Homer’s The Odyssey again, and this time she says the work is a complete translate, not a revision of the 2017 version. She is about halfway through the new book, a fresh pass at the 2,800-year-old poem after her earlier edition became a bestseller.
Wilson and The Odyssey
“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson said last week. “I’m about halfway through.” She said the new version will allow more lines, longer words and the repetition of phrases, changes that move it away from the strict poetic meter and steady rhythm of her 2017 text.
That older translation stayed true to the ancient Greek form and used the exact same number of lines as Homer’s poem. It also became the first major English translation published by a woman, and it was widely considered faithful and accessible when it reached bookshop shelves nearly 10 years ago.
From 2017 to 2023
Wilson said she wanted to retranslate the work in a way that freed her from the constraints she placed on herself the first time. She used the same broad approach in her 2023 translation of The Iliad, suggesting the new The Odyssey will follow a similar method rather than simply polishing the old one.
She is also planning a heavier scholarly frame. “I’m also going to quadruple the number of endnotes because endnotes are really fun to write,” she said. For readers, that means the new edition is likely to read less like a tightened verse exercise and more like a text with more room for explanation and movement.
Sales and attention
The earlier translation already had a commercial life beyond classrooms. Audible said purchases of Wilson’s Odyssey translation were up by more than 600% year over year across its U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces, and daily global title sales rose nearly sixfold during the week the movie premiered.
Wilson also called Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation a sexless dud that dulled the women and missed the point when interrogating the cost of war, and she said it mirrored Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Game of Thrones. That public argument helped keep her version in view while sales surged again.
Peter Simon, her editor at Liveright Publishing, is once again part of the project as Wilson works toward a new ending that does not yet have a public date. For readers and buyers, the practical change is simple: the next Odyssey from Wilson will not be a touch-up of the old one, but a full reworking with more space, more notes and a different rhythm.
