APS TOGETHER
The Odyssey by Homer
Hosted by Stefania Heim
Began on February 5, 2025 (40 Days)
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Homer’s Odyssey is a story about a person trying to find his way home. It is a story about a warrior grappling with the end of war. It is a story about women seizing power through any available means. It is a story about monsters, witches, and gods. It is a story about hubris. It is a story about marriage. It is a story about the pressures of growing up. It is a story about telling stories.
I came to The Odyssey late, when my first daughter was young and obsessed with the d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, bought for her by a close friend of mine whose own childhood was shaped by those stories and drawings. One thing led to another—hours examining the image of some cyclopes behind Hephaestus in the d’Aulaires’ led to Gillian Cross and Neil Packer’s illustrated Odyssey, led to long family drives accompanied by audiobooks of various Odyssey translations and heated arguments about their merits, led to my husband and me building an experimental summer course around revisions of The Odyssey’s central theme of nostos, the search for home. When Emily Wilson’s riveting and radically direct translation was published, it was a family event—we read it slowly together, daily, during lockdown, and it brought my younger daughter under its spell too. A communal event.
The Odyssey is a story that has been retold countless times; indeed, it is a story that has always existed through and as retelling. As riffs and reverberations and revisions and rebuttals. And, not just in the places and forms you expect. Translating Giorgio de Chirico’s posthumous novel Mr. Dudron, the meandering, humorous, and totally ordinary adventures of a roving, dreaming painter, I realized, Hey! This is The Odyssey!
I am excited to read The Odyssey along with you; to pay close attention to the ways Wilson retells it, and to bring in some of the epic’s many riffs and reverberations along the way.
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Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey.
Stefania Heim
is translator of Geometry of Shadows: The Italian Poems of Giorgio de Chirico and de Chirico’s posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron, both published by A Public Space Books. She is also author of the poetry collections Hour Book and A Table That Goes on for Miles. With Catherine Gander, she is editing Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser. She is an associate professor of literature at Western Washington University.
Emily Wilson
is a classicist and translator who serves as a professor of classical studies and chair of the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. She has also published an award-winning translation of The Iliad as well as translations of other works by Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
