Emily Wilson on Translations and Language (Ep. 63) | Conversations with Tyler
conversationswithtyler.com · 10,604 words · saved by 1 readers
The literary translator’s toolkit must include pen, paper, various dictionaries, a big desk, and a huge orange cat.
In a recent Twitter thread, Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: “There aren’t enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises” (#2 on the list), “It’s very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don’t connote modern psychology” (#5), and “There is no common English word of four syllables or fewer connoting ‘person particularly favored by Zeus due to high social status, and by the way this is a very normal ordinary word which is not drawing any special attention to itself whatsoever, beyond generic…
saved by
related reading
- What Emily Wilson’s 'Iliad' Misses - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
- Emily Wilson’s Sack of Homer | Compactcompactmag.com
- Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Manlrb.co.uk
- A Translator’s Reckoning With the Women of the Odysseynewyorker.com
- Time and Time Again - The Driftthedriftmag.com
- Try a Little Harder - CAT Centercatranslation.org
- Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing for Literary Greats and What Gets Lost in Translationharpersbazaar.com
- "Smile" vs. "Poop!"rivalvoices.substack.com
- The Iliad | The Folio Society Fictionfoliosociety.com
- In Defense of Mimicry | The Poetry Foundationpoetryfoundation.org
- Meet American Daisy Rockwell, who translates some of India’s finest Hindi writers into Englishscroll.in
- 'Proust's Way?': An Exchange | André Aciman, Lydia Davis, Marcel Muller | The New York Review of Booksnybooks.com