YouSaid · the spoken record

Emily Wilson

lines on the record: 83
first: 2019-03-27
most recent: 2019-03-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“She should read things that interest her that she loves. I don't think it has to be that I prescribe her canon, but she should be reading in her own language as well as in ancient Greek.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would tell her read lots of English poetry. I think it's very common for classicists to be a little bit too overspecialized and to have just read ancient literature and have not read enough literature that isn't. And she should start where?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The factory. I have a very big desk for Ikea and I have a huge orange cat who's mostly on it and I also have a couple of Greek dictionaries, usually a couple of commentaries, the Greek text, a notebook, a laptop. So I usually do some writing of a draft by hand in the notebook first and then I type it up on the laptop and then I revise it and I can consult the various texts that are spread around me on my big desk at various points.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You come back to them? I still struggle with that all the time. Right now I'm not teaching, so I'm able to spend the morning doing one and the afternoon doing another. I like it if I can do at least some translating in the course of a day and then some writing in the course of a day. I like to sort of balance out because I feel like they use different parts of my brain.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole incentive scheme is messed up because the kind of writing that's valued almost exclusively is the peer-reviewed monograph, which is, I think it's partly that the humanities are supposed to come up with the kind of quote-unquote original research which is imagined to work in exactly the same structure as peer-reviewed research in STEM fields, which then means that it has to has to qualify in the same way. And then if you do a different kind of work, which is not the peer-reviewed monograph, it doesn't look as much analogous to the research in the STEM fields, so we don't count it.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a combination of that academia in the States much more than perhaps in France or Italy devalues translation so that you don't get tenure for translation, which then also means if you're a category of person who might”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure. I mean, it's very striking that there's been a translation of the Odyssey by a woman into French since the 18th century. There were several by women into Italian. There's one by a woman into Turkish. I think the whole culture of translation is different in European countries to what it is.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are there within the field of literary translation in general and classical literary translation in particular? Why is that a strong?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a much shorter book and not covering the whole of the Renaissance. It's a sort of stamp piece in a way trying to do the same kind of thing that I'm doing on Twitter in terms of trying to explain to the general reader what exactly is translation, what do translators do all day, what do literary translators do all day, and also trying to figure out why is it, which to me was puzzling when I realized it was true, why is it that, for instance, that I'm the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English or to publish a translation of the Odyssey into English? I was surprised when I realized that. And then I realized this is part of a much more gender disparity that is not that there aren't any female homerists. Of course there are. Of course, there are plenty of female classicists. And yet the field of literary translation within classics is really skewed towards men. And I wanted to figure out why is that? What kinds of issues?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's going to be a broad but selective account of how that played out in, I mean, it's going to be primarily Britain and Europe. I can't skip Italy. And going through primarily literary texts and discussing the ways that literary authors of that period both build on and talk back to ancient authors.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to be a sort of survey of how people used to unself consciously call the Renaissance, or I always hesitate over that word because Americans say Renaissance, and I say Renaissance. Anyway, so in that period, the rebirth of classical antiquity, what exactly was it imagined that classical antiquity was being reborn? So it's going to be about what was that weird idea about. Is there a figure?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It made me know that it wasn't weird to want to read all the time, said So that in itself is a formative realize it was a formative thing. I didn't have to learn that it's okay to be reading all the time.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's partly why stuck down because I didn't quite know. I considered going to med school, but I realized that I'm actually not very good with blood. I considered going to law school, but then I actually thought I'm... I want to spend more time in the library than I think I'm going to get if I do that. I considered also being a literature scholar but not a classicist. I knew I wanted to read poetry and keep on studying poetry, but I didn't necessarily think it had to be ancient poetry. I thought it could be later poetry as well would be fine.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Academic I could have taken many parts, and in fact I think I wouldn't have been an academic at all. That's another possible path when I consider.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was younger than 14, I loved all books that had magic in them, so I loved the Nania books, Diana Wynne Jones. I didn't want to read anything that didn't involve going through a portal to another world. And then I think that started to change when I was 14, and I started to read Jane Eyre, maybe around that age, and I loved it. Jane Austen, I read Dickens. I went through a very religious phase and I read the Bible. It might have been my favorite book at 14, that kind of thing.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether the unexamined life is worth living, I bet I was frustrated. And what did you conclude? I need another few years examining it to figure it out. Worth living in a life.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would want. How should we? I don't know. I mean, I think there should be more equity. I mean, I don't feel like there should be such a disparity between the people like me who are lucky enough to have a good salary and guaranteed medical benefits for the rest of my career unless I go crazy and quit. And then the adjuncts who get none of those things. I feel like there should be something closer to a leveling. And I don't know what I can do to fix that.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pay some people more. Pay everybody, I mean, pay all the adjuncts. I mean, that's the area that I think really needs to get fixed in general. Of course, there's the trend towards these people who not only don't have tenure, but also don't have any kind of contract beyond the single course, which is a terrible deal.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very important, and I don't think I have an easy answer to how we get there. And I think part of it has to do with Family friendly hiring policies, family friendly retention policies, because they're also glass ceilings, right? In terms of how many women get tenure, as opposed to how many get hired, as opposed to how many finish their PhDs, women drop off at every stage. Should we just abolish?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it depends which ancient Greeks we ask, right? I mean, if you ask Odysseus, he'd say, great, you should get as much stuff as possible. You should try to come home not just broken in a borrowed boat, but with as much treasure as possible. If you asked Socrates who went around with no sandals and one cloak somewhere in winter, maybe not so interested in the accumulation of kudos.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a lot of summary of how the world's going to be terrible, terrible, terrible. And then, yes, it's going to be terrible some more, which is now in terms of narrative and characterization, it's much less interesting than the first 10 books.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He showed up. Which to me makes perfect sense. Yes, it's a wonderful poem. So I wanted to try and obscure my love for Shakespeare and Milton in the style I was writing, but also for it to be there on the down low. And I wanted to try and write a kind of narrative verse that was informed by pre-20th century narrative verse but that was not archaizing. So in some ways I wanted to try and make it more like Elizabeth Bishop or Auden than like Shakespeare, even though I also have spent a huge amount of time reading Shakespeare.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So my translation of the Odyssey is all in iambic pentameter. As I said earlier, my first book, which is my dissertation, came out of a set of questions about Milton's Paradise Lost. I was very much aware that English already has epic poems, and I also was very much aware that I didn't want to make Homer sound sub-Miltonic. I didn't want to make it sound like Paradise Lost. I didn't want to make it sound like the Fairy Queen. I didn't even want to make it sound like Tennyson, even though I loved Tennyson's idols as well as his Ulysses and Loads. He has one of the most ambitious.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Be the difference in the authors pretty easy to read. I mean, Homer's syntax is really very easy. And that's part of what I wanted to bring out. I mean, I hope that in a way I would like it if my Seneca translations are less easy to read than my Homo translations. That's correct. They are less easy to read. I hope so, because stylistically those authors are very different. I mean, so I think it's partly just about the source text and it's also about the cultural perception of the source text, right? I mean, most people in contemporary society don't believe in Athena. So we have a different idea about how should divinity be represented in this text versus in a text where there are people who still worship the God of the Hebrew Bible, right?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know more about happens. I would definitely say funnier, but I also say even though the text we have are primarily by elite men, I think even from those texts which are already tiny demographic, we can say they're more diverse in terms of how do they look at the world than we might have thought, that the generalizing about this is the Athenian worldview doesn't actually make any sense if you look at the array of different opinions that are articulated in the text.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say if you're asking about Pericles, I would say that if I'd spent longer studying Pericles' speech in Thucydides, I might have a deeper understanding of the rhetorical tropes that are being used and of the ways that rhetoric interacts with ideology within the representation in that passage, within the representations in multiple literary texts of that period. I think I might have a deeper understanding of how cultural representations operate in classical Athens.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say I have a pretty deep knowledge of word choice and poetics and style and literary form of each of the texts I've studied.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My method is, well, I do have some cat photos as well, but my method about translation is to take a tiny bit of mostly the Odyssey, but occasionally some other text and analyze what different translators usually, if it's the Odyssey, including me, have done with it and just show how complete how very, very different the meaning of a sentence can be depending on how exactly a translator chooses to one word versus another word and how there can be very, very different interpretations, all of which are valid readings of the Greek.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think there are some misunderstandings about translation that are really common. So I'm trying to articulate just sort of translation one on one to the How do you do that in 280 characters? Is it all tweeted?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I usually do a lot of reading and rereading the original, and then I usually write a draft of a little bit out in a notebook. I do a lot of looking up different words in different dictionaries and trying to figure out connotations. I read my drafts out loud to myself before I read them out loud to anyone else, and then I fix things and change things and try and change things that didn't sound right, and then I change them again. And then after I've tinkered with it for a long time myself, once I've got a whole complete book, I send the complete book to my lovely editor at Norton, Pete Simon, and he doesn't know Greek, but he looks at it next to other translations and thinks about does this sentence work as an English sentence. And then he sends it back and then I reread it again and I fix lots of things, including things he hadn't commented on. And then eventually I share it with other people as well. I go through multiple stages of revisions.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I started doing it right away, or almost right away after I finished Theodosy because I thought I'm on a roll now. It's not that different in terms of language than the Odyssey. And then I got really stuck for the last few months that I was working on it. I was feeling completely stuck in questioning everything because the mood of the poem is so different. It's not all that different linguistically, but it's different enough that I felt I had to sort of step back.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that question. The Greek text has a lot of uses of the now Nostos from which we get nostalgia, the journey of homecoming, the event of homecoming, and then of cognate words. And I wanted to use the word home as a way of signaling the centrality of the concept of home and of defining the concept of home in the poem, that it's already a very loaded word in English, I think. It's a word which means so much more than just house or place where you live. I think the Odyssey is fascinating in the ways that it defines home as something which involves both a living space and a particular kind of community and a space where at least one member of the household has the choice about who to keep in, who to keep out.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of languages I don't know, but so I'm not going to have time thanks to my refusal of your lovely offer of immortality. That's in fact something I would do if I had. You could learn them all. I would learn them all, for sure. I mean, I don't know any Asian languages. I feel guilty about that. I know one semester's worth of Russian. I mean, I read French, German, Italian, a little bit of Spanish. My daughters go to a Spanish emotion school, so I know elementary school Spanish. But I'd love to know some languages which are more different from those I do know. I mean, I'd love to know Chinese, Japanese, Arabic would be great.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope so. I think it's a great shame that so many languages are dying right now. I think in every language you think differently, you see the world differently. So the fewer languages that are known by anybody on earth, the fewer visions that we have of what life's about, the fewer ways of thinking.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it follows that difficulty of syntax implies intellectuality of ideas or concepts or anything else. I think they require different kinds of thinking.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father, Ian Wilson, wrote a biography at Victoria. I don't know about Victoria. I don't think I have an opinion. Maybe I can stay in the middle”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You like about Philip Sydney? Are we doing plugs for every member of my family? Yes, you choose. Great. Okay, so my mother, Catherine Duncan-Jones, wrote a very good biography of Sir Philip Sidney, partly explaining why he's so underrated. He's underrated. I think it's extraordinary that so many people have read Shakespeare but haven't read Sydney, who was both a formative influence on Shakespeare and also an extraordinary both poet and prose writer in his own right. He wrote both versions of what in many ways the most important early proto-novels in English, the Old Arcadia and the New Arcadia. He also wrote an amazing sequence of sonnets called Astrophil and Stella. He was a great poet, great writer.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He probably could have been, but then psychologically, in terms of his personality, not everybody is Tiberius, not everybody wants to just go off and sit on Capri for the rest of their life.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had to maintain orderly rule, and of course everybody would have said he was absolutely insane and come up with the worst possible excessive stories, even if he actually wasn't quite as insane as made for a good story.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Under In fact, my sister wrote a book called Consider the Four. I love this book, yes. Maybe this is a chance to plug her book. So it's about kitchen technologies and just the ways that people eat given that we have both knives and forks, which most people, you know, before fairly recently people ate without forks. And it encourages a very different approach to cutting up food into small pieces and therefore being able to not have an overbite in your jaw. And the whole model of eating and even the structure of the face is different thanks to the fork.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'd probably keep on amusing myself, but it would probably get hard. I mean, once there were no more humans left, it's going to get tough. And once all the books have rotted, I'm not going to be able to run the power plants all by myself.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to come up with good examples, so as fine, I should have prepped for that. Michael Jackson. I guess that's, yes. Well, but there's also post-mortem reckoning very often too, right? The whole Salonic line of call, no person, have you till they're dead?”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right after the fall. So I think it's an interesting idea just to realize that we have this idea from Shakespeare that, of course, tragedy is all about when you have the heaps of corpses up on the stage at the end of Hamlet. But of course, that's not actually all that tragedy is about, especially if you go all the way back to Athenian tragedy. There's a number of tragedies in which there aren't any corpses on stage at the end. So I'm interested in it both as thinking through how does narrative represent death, how does narrative represent the experience of not being dead, and also in terms of just imagining what is the tragic genre all about, what does it say about both life and death.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a term that I took from Paradise Lost by Milton. And Adam says after he's eaten the apple and he's fallen, he realizes that the only thing to look forward to is death, and yet he's not dead. So it's a moment when Milton's character is grappling with what you could see as a continuity error in the book of Genesis that Adam and Eve don't die immediately after eating the apple, which was supposed to result from eating the apple. And he says, why do I overlive? Why am I mocked with death? And so that comes at a moment in Paradise Lost, where after the narrator has said, I now must change my notes to tragic. So I was interested in trying to figure out why does Milton imagine not death, but a failure to die as being part of a tragic genre, this sequence of the poem is both tragic and about the failure of Adam and Eve to die.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk me out of that? I think that's a perfectly reasonable point of view, yes. I'm sure that Socrates didn't have the whole edifice of metaphysics and also obviously he wasn't the enormously impressive literary stylist that Plato is. I think Plato was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary thinker. It does seem as if there's good evidence partly because Aristotle seems to confirm this, that Plato, that Socrates himself did come up with some pretty interesting ideas, such as the idea that nobody willingly does wrong, that insofar as anybody does anything wrong, it's because of a mistake we don't realize it's wrong, which I think is actually still something which is worth some ethical philosophical grappling. It's an idea that's worth some grappling.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I deeply admire him with some serious reservations. I mean, the reason I'm constantly sort of turned back to thinking about him partly because as an academic and also as a writer, I'm sort of constantly thinking about what does it actually mean to try to educate people. I'm interested in the Socrates whose claims that he isn't teaching anybody anything, and yet he's living this life of engaged being engaged in conversations which are clearly designed to either draw things out of people or else put things into them insidiously. So I'm interested in whether all educators are somehow in that double bind of am I actually helping you find something out or am I imposing my own vision on you? I'm interested also in the figure of the dying Socrates as an image, in a way this is related to the Seneca questions, as an image of integrity, of what does it mean to live with so much integrity that you can be absolutely yourself at every moment.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here we are having a conversation. Look at us being socratic. It's so hard to say what our Socratic ideals because, of course, Socrates didn't write anything about, as we referred to earlier, we were talking about the Republic. That's Plato's Socrates. It's not necessarily Socrates' Socrates or history's Socrates, insofar as the Athenians voted to have Socrates drink the hemlock, you could say, well, maybe that was the low point of Socratic ideals back then in 399. Maybe it's all been up since then.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he probably knew about it. I don't know if he actually got his hands bloody or wet, but I think he probably knew about it.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I translated most of Seneca's tragedies rather than his prose, but I think the same issues would apply for both. I had a hard time figuring out how much I could get away with pulling out all the stops rhetorically because he writes in this wonderfully ornate purple style. It's showing off, showing off, showing off bombast. And I think the risk is always that it's going to come across as too silly to be impressive. And it has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally don't think you would. But Seneca has a lot of very wonderfully rhetorically ornate explanations for why, in fact, that's perfectly reasonable because Stoics had this distinction between there were things that are good in themselves. The main thing that's good in itself is virtue, being a good person. The thing that's bad in itself is being a bad person. But then there are also things in the middle, which are neither good nor bad, but might be preferable. So it might be preferable not to be a slave, or it might be preferable not to be homeless and impoverished, and it might be preferable to have millions and billions of dollars. And so it's not that it's actually bad as long as you can hang on to virtue despite being in the midst of corrupting power, then even better.”
2019-03-27 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily Wilson on Translations and Language · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source