Emily Wilson is translating Homer’s The Odyssey again, this time as a complete retranslation rather than a polish of the 2017 version that made her a leading name in classic translation. She said the new work is about halfway done.
The timing matters because Wilson’s earlier Odyssey has been pulled back into the spotlight. Sales of that 2017 translation rose sharply after Christopher Nolan mentioned it in an early interview about his film, and Audible later said purchases were up by more than 600% year over year across its U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces. Daily global title sales also rose nearly sixfold during the week the movie premiered.
Wilson’s first version was a milestone on its own. Published in 2017, it was the first major English translation of the poem by a woman, and it won praise for being faithful and easy to read. It was also built around strict formal limits: verse, steady rhythm and the same number of lines as Homer’s ancient Greek poem, which Wilson used to mirror the structure of the original as closely as possible.
The new translation loosens those rules. Wilson said she wants more room this time, with more lines, longer words and repeated phrases allowed. She used the same kind of freedom in her 2023 translation of The Iliad, and she has said the point is to free herself from the constraints she accepted in the earlier Odyssey. Even so, she is not treating the first book as a mistake. She said she is proud of it and thinks there are many good things in the compression and choices it forced her to make.
That is what makes the project unusual. Wilson is not replacing a failed translation or trying to fix a widely rejected one. She is revisiting a version that was already a bestseller nearly 10 years ago and was already widely regarded as a readable gateway into a 2,800-year-old poem. Peter Simon said she has poured so much of her life and scholarship into The Odyssey that the new approach is bound to be thrilling.
Wilson also said the next version will be more heavily annotated, with the number of endnotes set to quadruple because, as she put it, endnotes are fun to write. That suggests a translation aimed not just at smoother reading but at more explanation, more texture and more room to steer readers through the poem’s choices.
For now, the biggest unanswered question is not how Wilson will approach the poem but when readers will get to see the result. She has given no publication date, only the halfway mark. The old translation made her name; the new one will test whether a classic can still be reopened by the same translator and feel newly alive.
