Emily Wilson, 'Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea'

This is a review of Emily Wilson’s recent essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature (Profile, 2026). It is a somewhat revised and expanded version of a piece commissioned originally for Literary Review. As such, it is available in full to paid subscribers only.

Emily Wilson is an accomplished translator, best known for her versions of the Iliad and Odyssey into pacy and consistent iambic pentameter. Her Homer is a welcome counterpoint to the looser prose or semi-prose of most recent translations and deserves to be widely read. This new book gathers thirteen essays about ancient literature and its translation, including but far from limited to Homer, and drawing upon Wilson’s own extensive experience as a teacher and translator. A professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson also writes regularly for various periodicals, especially the London Review of Books — her recent review of Nolan’s Odyssey garnered quite a lot of attention.

This is a grumpier book than I expected. Wilson is erudite and generally engaging but she also often sounds rather fed-up — by Anne Carson’s abstractions, by mediocre eighteenth-century poetry or by academics who ‘have built careers out of “translation theory” without translating anything themselves’. (I have to admit I sympathise with the latter point.) I suspect this tonal quirk is linked to the origin of almost all these pieces in review essays: adopting quite a “strong” position on a topic or even a whole field can be effective in a one-off essay but risks sounding a bit grudging when repeated across sequential chapters.

The emphasis is on Greek more than Latin: there are pieces on Sappho, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Epictetus and Aeschylus as well as Homer; in Latin only Catullus and the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence (taken together) receive essays of their own. A brief afterword offers ‘Twenty Rules’ for aspiring classical translators, and a few wider-ranging essays deal with depictions of Helen, classical translation more generally and the role played by the translation of Greek in the emergence of Roman literature. The latter is a revised version of a review of Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek, published in the TLS in April 2016, and other chapters originally appeared as review essays in the New Republic, Nation or NYRB. Five are based on essays written for the LRB.