British-American classicist and translator Emily Wilson is translating Homer’s Odyssey again, nearly a decade after her acclaimed English version turned the University of Pennsylvania classicist into one of the best-known contemporary translators of ancient Greek literature.
This time, however, Wilson is not revising her 2017 translation. She is starting over.
“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told The Associated Press in an interview published August 28. She said she is already about halfway through the new work.
The decision may seem surprising because Wilson’s first Odyssey was a major success. Published in 2017, it became the first complete English translation of Homer’s epic by a woman and eventually sold more than one million copies, according to the AP. The translation also received wide critical attention for bringing Homer into contemporary English while retaining a poetic rhythm.
Wilson, however, does not describe the new project as an attempt to repair a failed translation.
Instead, she has said that her thinking about Homer and translation has changed.
Wilson is not rejecting her 2017 translation
Wilson remains proud of the first Odyssey. But several years of additional experience have changed the way she approaches the ancient Greek text.
One important stage in that development came with her translation of Homer’s Iliad, published in 2023.
The Iliad followed the success of her Odyssey and gave Wilson another opportunity to confront the particular difficulties of translating Homer into modern English. Critics praised the result for its clarity, energy and readable verse.
The experience also changed some of the choices she now wants to make with the Odyssey.
In an episode of the Instant Classics podcast, recorded earlier in 2026 and released publicly on August 18, Wilson revealed that she had decided to produce a second translation of the Odyssey. The podcast described the announcement as a surprise, noting that Wilson had enjoyed the translation process enough to want to undertake it again.
Wilson has also explained that translating Homer again gives her an opportunity to reconsider decisions she made the first time.
What would she change?
One example she has given concerns the word “slave.”
Wilson told the AP that she now believes she used the word too frequently in her first translation. Ancient Greek, she explained, contains different terms that can distinguish among different forms and circumstances of enslavement. A single English word can therefore erase distinctions present in the original text.
The issue illustrates a larger problem with translating Homer: there is no simple mechanical process for transferring an ancient poem into modern English.
Every translator has to make choices about rhythm, repetition, tone, vocabulary and meaning.
Wilson’s first Odyssey was deliberately concise. She used iambic pentameter and kept the same number of lines as the Greek poem. Critics noted that this gave the translation speed and accessibility, but also meant that some passages were necessarily compressed.
Her Iliad gave her more freedom.
In that translation, Wilson allowed the English poem to run longer than the original and was less constrained by a strict one-line-for-one-line approach. The result gave her more room to reproduce the rhythm and texture of Homer’s poetry.
That experience now informs the new Odyssey.
A different way of preserving Homer
One of the most interesting changes concerns repetition.
Homer’s poems contain extensive repetition, including recurring phrases and epithets attached to characters. Such repetition can sound strange to modern readers, but it is an essential feature of the poems’ oral and formulaic character.
Wilson has explained that she was more willing in her first Odyssey to vary some of those repeated expressions so that the English would feel less repetitive.
After working on the Iliad, she has become more interested in preserving those repetitions.
The change reflects a broader question: should a modern translation make an ancient poem feel more natural to today’s reader, or should it sometimes preserve features that may initially feel unfamiliar?
Wilson is now leaning more toward preserving those features.
In the Instant Classics discussion, she reflected on the changing meaning of an “accurate” translation and on the fact that translations inevitably become part of the history of how ancient works are received.
That does not mean her 2017 version was inaccurate. It means that Wilson’s understanding of what an English translation should preserve has evolved.
The woman who translated both Homeric epics
Wilson is particularly well positioned to rethink the Odyssey because she has now translated both of Homer’s major surviving epics.
Her Odyssey appeared in 2017.
Her Iliad followed in 2023.
The two poems tell very different stories.
The Iliad centers on Achilles, the Trojan War and the consequences of rage, while the Odyssey follows Odysseus on his long journey home to Ithaca.
But both poems depend heavily on the distinctive language, repetition and formulaic structures of ancient Greek epic.
Translating both has given Wilson the unusual opportunity to compare her own approaches to the same poet.
Now she is applying what she learned from the Iliad to the Odyssey.
The Odyssey is having another moment
The timing is also significant.
Homer’s Odyssey has become a major part of the cultural conversation in 2026, particularly because of Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation.
Wilson’s 2017 translation became part of that conversation as well. Nolan has discussed the importance of the translation, while Wilson has sharply criticized aspects of the film in recent months.
Greek Reporter previously covered Wilson’s criticism of Nolan’s Odyssey.
The new translation is a separate development, but it comes at a moment when interest in Homer has reached a new audience.
Wilson’s own career illustrates how dramatically the audience for ancient literature can change.
Her first Odyssey was not written as a screenplay or a modern retelling. It was a translation of an ancient Greek poem. Yet its accessible language helped bring the work to readers who might otherwise have found older English translations difficult or remote.
The success of the book also demonstrated that there remains a large audience for new approaches to ancient Greek literature.
A second Odyssey, not a replacement for the first
There is no indication that Wilson expects the new translation to make the 2017 version obsolete.
Rather, the two books will represent two moments in the same translator’s career.
The first translation reflects the choices Wilson made when she was approaching Homer’s Odyssey for the first time. The second will reflect what she has learned since then, particularly through her work on the Iliad.
That makes the project unusual.
Translators frequently revisit famous works, but Wilson is effectively becoming her own predecessor, placing two different interpretations of the same ancient poem side by side.
The new version is expected to be longer than the first and to contain more extensive notes. Wilson has not announced a publication date, and the work remains in progress. The AP reported that she was approximately halfway through the translation when she spoke with the publication.
For readers, the most intriguing question may therefore not be whether Wilson’s first Odyssey was “right.”
It is what she now believes she can hear in Homer that she could not hear in quite the same way in 2017.
The ancient poem has not changed.
The translator has.
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