The Never-Ending Quest to Retranslate Homer
Imagine spending a decade of your life rendering roughly 12,000 lines of ancient Greek poetry into modern English — every word choice a small battle, every line a negotiation between worlds separated by nearly three millennia. That is precisely what translator Emily Wilson did before publishing her landmark 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the first English version completed by a woman, and one that immediately ignited passionate debate among scholars and general readers alike.
Wilson’s work is just one example of a remarkable truth about the literary world: ancient classics never really stop being retranslated. New versions of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and other foundational texts appear every generation, and for good reason. Language evolves, cultural assumptions shift, and each era brings fresh questions to old stories. But the process of producing a genuinely new translation from scratch — rather than lightly updating a predecessor — is among the most demanding undertakings in all of literary scholarship.
Starting From Zero: The Raw Materials of Translation
A true retranslation begins not with a prior English version, but with the ancient source text itself. For a Homeric translator, that means grappling directly with ancient Greek — a language that no living person grew up speaking, and one that existed in multiple regional dialects. Homer’s epics are written in a hybrid literary dialect that was never anyone’s everyday spoken tongue, making it even more stylistically complex.
Translators must first establish which version of the ancient text they are working from. Scholars rely on critical editions — scholarly reconstructions of the most accurate possible text, assembled from thousands of ancient manuscripts, papyrus fragments, and historical quotations. The standard reference for Homer’s Odyssey runs to multiple volumes of apparatus, footnotes, and variant readings. A translator must decide, line by line, which readings they find most convincing.
Then comes vocabulary. Ancient Greek is famously dense with meaning. A single word like polytropos — the first adjective Homer applies to Odysseus — can mean “much-traveled,” “cunning,” “versatile,” or even “shifty,” depending on interpretation. Wilson chose “complicated,” a deliberately modern and morally ambiguous word that set the tone for her entire version. Critics argued about that single choice for months.
The Weight of What Came Before
No translator works in a vacuum. There are more than 60 notable English translations of the Odyssey alone, spanning from George Chapman’s 1614 version — immortalized by Keats in a famous sonnet — to Robert Fitzgerald’s beloved 1961 edition and Robert Fagles’s widely taught 1996 translation. Each new translator must reckon with these predecessors: acknowledging their achievements, identifying their blind spots, and making a case for why another version is necessary.
This is partly a scholarly argument and partly an artistic one. Richmond Lattimore, whose 1965 translation of the Iliad remains standard in many universities, aimed to preserve the long, rolling rhythm of Homer’s dactylic hexameter in English. Others have argued that a more natural modern prose serves contemporary readers better. There is no consensus, and that ongoing disagreement is part of what keeps retranslation alive as a practice.
The process also involves cultural reckoning. Wilson and other recent translators have scrutinized how earlier versions subtly whitewashed slavery, softened depictions of violence against women, or rendered female characters as more passive than the Greek text actually suggests. A retranslation is never purely linguistic — it is always also a reinterpretation of values.
Wilson reportedly spent about ten years on her Odyssey, including years of research before a single translated line was written. The finished book runs to 582 pages and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, introducing Homer to a new generation of readers who might have bounced off drier academic versions.
A Living Conversation Across Centuries
What makes this labor worthwhile? The answer lies in what translation actually does: it keeps dead languages and ancient stories breathing in the present tense. Every new version of the Odyssey is an argument about who Odysseus is, what his journey means, and what we value in storytelling. Those arguments are not merely academic — they shape curricula, influence popular culture, and quietly inform how we think about heroism, homecoming, and survival.
As long as readers continue to care about where human storytelling began, translators will continue the painstaking work of building new bridges to the ancient world. The classics, it turns out, are never quite finished.