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 heroizing.’” (#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’d choose to ‘overlive’, and the importance of having a big Ikea desk and a huge orange cat.
Transcript and links
Follow Emily on Twitter
Follow Tyler on Twitter
More CWT goodness:
Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State
Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress
Glenn Loury on the Cover Story and the Real Story
Paul Salopek on Walking the World
Rick Rubin on Listening, Taste, and the Act of Noticing
Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words
Conversations with Tyler 2022 Retrospective
John Adams on Composing and Creative Freedom
Jeremy Grantham on Investing in Green Tech
Ken Burns on the Complications of History
Mary Gaitskill on Subjects That Are Vexing Everybody
Reza Aslan on Martyrdom, Islam, and Revolution
Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy
Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market
Vaughn Smith on Life as a Hyperpolyglot
Shruti Rajagopalan talks to Daniel Gross and Tyler about Identifying and Predicting Talent
Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky
William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation
Leopoldo López on Activism Under Autocratic Regimes
Matthew Ball on the Metaverse and Gaming
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Navigating Life After 40
Teaching Learning Leading K-12
Regenerative Skills
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast