Month of Joy: Listening to the Odyssey by Kate Heartfield
This fall, I taught an evening course at a university about an hour’s drive from my house. The drive in was a dismal drive at the tail-end of rush hour, and at this latitude at this time of year, the journey was dark both ways. In those dark and tired hours, I found a source of great joy: The audiobook version of Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey. Experiencing an epic poem as an oral performance is entirely different from reading it. Wilson used iambic pentameter, the traditional meter for English verse. The lines are shorter than in Homer’s dactylic hexameter, but the number of lines in the poem remains the same, in Wilson’s translation. Wilson also used simple language because “stylistic pomposity is un-Homeric” and to encourage a more visceral engagement with the story.
