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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, a literary editor to The Spectator, and I'm very pleased to have as my guest this week, the classicist and translator Emily Wilson, whose verse translation of the Odyssey has received global acclaim. Her new book is Crossing the Wine Dark Sea Journeys Through Ancient Literature. Emily, welcome.

Now, thank you for having me.

These are, as you say, journeys, but it's a book that seems to hold together.

Very well. What were you sort of trying to do with it?

Is it a sort of manifesto for your translation and practice,

or is it kind of introduction to ancient literature for the uninitiated? It's a bit of both.

I mean, it goes much further than just my particular translation practice and not all of the

essays are about translation. Most of them are in some way or other about ancient literature

with some glances forward to its later receptions, which of course includes translation.

So a lot of them are wrestling with translation in various different ways, but not all of it

is about me personally or text that I happen to have translated.

And I mean, you say in the introduction you use as one of your load stars, Louis MacNeice,

can you talk a bit about how instinctively you, yourself,

in your practice and in your understanding of the actual works, seek to balance that kind of

altarity, the fact they are so bloody different from us, with the way in which the ancients

still speak to us in their literature? Yes, exactly. So I sort of start as kind of the hook of the book is that famous passage from

Morton Journal by McNeese in which he suggests both that it was all so unimaginably different.

And yet there's also this yearning to imagine oneself among them.

And that binary of we can on some level imagine what it was like to be in antiquity

because we have these vivid texts.

It's not that these are completely inaccessible to us.

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