Podcasts Education Self-Improvement Conversations with Tyler Emily Wilson on Translations and Language

Emily Wilson on Translations and Language

Published: March 27, 2019, noon

In a recent Twitter thread, Emily Wilson listed some of the difficulties of translating Homer into English. Among them: \u201cThere aren\u2019t enough onomatopoeic words for very loud chaotic noises\u201d (#2 on the list), \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to come up with enough ways to describe intense desire to act that don\u2019t connote modern psychology\u201d (#5), and \u201cThere is no common English word of four syllables or fewer connoting \u2018person 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 heroizing.\u2019\u201d (#7).

Using Twitter this way is part of her effort to explain literary translation. What do translators do all day? Why can the same sentence turn out so differently depending on the translator? Why did she get stuck translating the Iliad immediately after producing a beloved translation of the Odyssey?

She and Tyler discuss these questions and more, including why Silicon Valley loves Stoicism, whether Plato made Socrates sound smarter than he was, the future of classics education, the effect of AI on translation, how to make academia more friendly to women, whether she\u2019d choose to \u2018overlive\u2019, and the importance of having a big Ikea desk and a huge orange cat.

Read a\xa0full transcript\xa0enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded March 7th, 2019

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