Emily Wilson (classicist)

Emily Rose Caroline Wilson (born 1971) is a British classicist and the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.[1] She is the author of five books and in 2017 became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer's Odyssey into English.[2]

Emily Wilson
Wilson in 2015
Born
Emily Rose Caroline Wilson

1971 (age 49–50)
Oxford, United Kingdom
EducationBalliol College, Oxford
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Yale University
OccupationScholar, professor, writer, translator, poet
EmployerUniversity of Pennsylvania
Children3
Websitewww.classics.upenn.edu/people/emily-wilson

Early life and education

Wilson "comes from a long line of academics",[2] including both her parents, A. N. Wilson[3] and Katherine Duncan-Jones,[4] her uncle, and her maternal grandparents, including Elsie Duncan-Jones.[2] Her sister is the food writer Bee Wilson.[5] Wilson's parents divorced shortly before she went to college.[2]

Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school.[2] A graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1994 (B.A. in literae humaniores, classical literature, and philosophy), she undertook her master's degree in English literature 1500–1660 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1996), and her Ph.D. (2001) in classical and comparative literature at Yale University.[1]

Career

Wilson's first book, Mocked With Death (2005), grew out of her dissertation and examines mortality in the tragic tradition: "our constant awareness of all that we will lose, are losing, have lost."[2] The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003.[1] In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship (Rome Prize).[6] Her next book, The Death of Socrates (2007), examines Socrates' execution. Wilson later reflected that she was interested in the ways and methods that Socrates would educate people, but also Socrates' death as an image: "What does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment, even when you've just poisoned yourself?"[7]

Wilson's next works primarily focused on Rome's tragic playwright Seneca. In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. In 2014 she published The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca. She later noted that Seneca is an interesting subject because "he's so precise in articulating what it means to have a very, very clear vision of the good life and to be completely unable to follow through on living the good life." Wilson chose to translate Seneca's tragedies rather than his prose because translating Seneca's rhetorical style in the prose risks sounding "too silly to be impressive. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there."[7]

Wilson is perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed translation of The Odyssey (2017), becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English. Following a lengthy introduction, she provides a translation of Homer's work in iambic pentameter. Wilson's Odyssey was named by The New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of 2018[8] and it was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award.[9] In 2019, Wilson was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences.[10]

Wilson is a book reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement,[11] the London Review of Books,[12] and The New Republic.[13] She is also the classics editor for The Norton Anthology of World Literature and The Norton Anthology of Western Literature.[14][15]

In January 2020, Wilson joined the Booker Prize judging panel, alongside Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay.[16]

Bibliography

Books and translations
  • Mocked With Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004.
  • The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, Harvard University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-674-02683-4.
  • Six Tragedies, Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0192807069.
  • The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0199926640.
  • The Greek Plays, Modern Library/Random House, 2016. [Wilson translated Helen, Bacchae, Trojan Women and Electra in this volume]
  • The Odyssey (Homer), W. W. Norton & Company, 2017. ISBN 978-0-393-08905-9.

Articles

Critical studies and reviews of Wilson's work

Critical studies and reviews of the Odyssey (2017)

Notes
  1. Emily R. Wilson, University of Pennsylvania.
  2. Mason, Wyatt (2 November 2017). "The First Woman to Translate the 'Odyssey' Into English". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  3. Yang, Wesley (20 December 2004), "'Highbrow Fight Club'", New York Observer.
  4. Reisz, Matthew Reisz (26 July 2012), "The family business", Times Higher Education.
  5. "Beatrice D. Wilson (I18438)", Stanford.edu.
  6. "American Academy of Rome; Fellows – Affiliated Fellows – Residents 1990–2010". Retrieved 15 December 2015.
  7. Cowen, Tyler (27 March 2019). "Emily Wilson on Translations and Language (Ep. 63)". Medium. Conversations with Tyler. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
  8. Aarts, Esther (19 November 2018). "100 Notable Books of 2018". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
  9. "Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation is short listed for the national translation award". Comparative Literature & Literary Theory. 16 July 2018. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
  10. Dwyer, Colin (25 September 2019). "MacArthur 'Genius' Grant Winners Attest to 'Power of Individual Creativity'". NPR.
  11. "Search TLS Online Archive". Timesonline.co.uk. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
  12. "Search · LRB". lrb.co.uk. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
  13. Emily Wilson page at The New Republic.
  14. "The Norton Anthology of Western Literature". wwnorton.com. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
  15. "The Norton Anthology of World Literature". wwnorton.com. Retrieved 27 July 2015.
  16. Chandler, Mark (7 January 2020). "Child, Busby and Sissay join 2020 Booker Prize judging panel". The Bookseller. Retrieved 31 July 2020.
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