By Genevieve Nix
For my 17th birthday, my parents graciously gifted me hardcover editions of Emily Wilson’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. The cover art is gorgeous, but for those out of the loop, these copies are also the first published versions of either text translated by a woman. Putting aside the fact that it took until 2017 for us to get a translation of The Odyssey done by a woman, and a further six years for The Iliad, the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest interpretation of The Odyssey has reignited discussions of her work in online spaces. And unsurprisingly, there is a particular demographic not fond of Wilson, or her writing.
The social media site X (formerly Twitter) is a hot spot for self-proclaimed “classicists”, who despite their totally “legitimate” qualifications, spend their time online attacking anything they deem “woke” or “feminist”. Right now, Emily Wilson is the name in their crosshairs.
Meet the “Classicists”
Every trailer cycle seems to produce the same wave of overnight Homeric experts, all speaking with total authority on translation choices most of them couldn’t assess in the original Greek. A lot of the criticism starts with something completely reasonable, for example, comparing Wilson’s opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” with Fagles’ “Sing to me of the man.” But within a few replies, the focus shifts from translation to the translator, with Wilson’s voice, appearance, motives, and status as a “real” classicist—despite holding a PhD and a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania—coming under fire.
Some of these critics are happy to establish the authority themselves. One X user prefaced their criticism with, “as a person who holds degrees in classical languages”, before placing the blame for Nolan’s “bad” adaptation on the “woke feminist Greek scholar Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey”. Whether or not that qualification is genuine is difficult to establish from their social media bio, but the appeal to authority is telling. The comment never actually describes what is wrong with Wilson’s translation, they just maintain that “woke” is synonymous with “bad” and expects the reader to accept that as fact. Another user claimed that Wilson’s “woke ideology” is “exactly the version Nolan needed, arguing that aligning with a “ideologically approved, modern take” Nolan gave The Academy “exactly what they reward.” Again, with these criticisms, there’s no mention of grammar, rhythm, metre, dictation or what Wilson’s translation does with Homer’s Greek grounded in scholarly argument. One X user used a photo of Emily Wilson, a middle-aged woman with tattoos, to explain why her translation of the Odyssey “sucks.” Another user described Fagles’ translation as “brilliant” and Wilson’s as an attempt to make a “political statement”. The issue isn’t that Emily Wilson is beyond critique, it’s that so much of the criticism is directed at her as a person rather than her work.
There is No Original to Defend
This discussion raises the question, “Why do we translate at all?” It’s a simple concept: translation allows people to read texts that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. We translate because most people cannot read the original Greek. Every translation reads differently because it must. Grammar, rhythm, and voice all shift between languages, eras, and societies. With over 60 English translations of The Odyssey—and no two reading alike—”more accurate” is rarely as objective as people would like. It’s a preference presented with more confidence than it’s earned. Every translator makes interpretive choices. Fagles did. Fitzgerald did. Wilson’s simply attracts more scrutiny than theirs ever did. Male translators have been borrowing from and responding to each other’s choices for years, and nobody seems particularly bothered by that. When Wilson introduces something new, shaped by a contemporary read of the character, it’s often framed as a departure from the “true” text, rather than just another interpretation in a long lineage.
There’s a real resistance here to the idea that this story could be told any differently than it already has been—as if the version you grew up with is the only legitimate one. It’s strange to treat a three-thousand-year-old story as if changing the way we read it will somehow destroy it. If anything, The Odyssey has survived because people have kept retelling, translating and reinterpreting it. The attachment isn’t really to The Odyssey itself, so much as the way many readers first encountered it—Wilson’s version threatens that familiarity by simply existing. People bring up academic qualifications when they want to discredit Wilson but seem far less interested in those same qualifications when they’re agreeing with someone. It’s worth asking how many of the commenters claiming to have classics degrees could actually substantiate that. But whether the degree is real is almost beside the point. Underneath that argument sits another assumption: a classics degree grants someone a final reading of a text that was never fixed to begin with.
Untangling Wilson from Nolan
These two controversies are often treated as one, but they’re worth separating. Wilson didn’t write Nolan’s script, wasn’t a credited writer, and has been notably unimpressed by the film. In early press for the movie, Nolan told Empire magazine that he used the opening line of Wilson’s translation as a guide for bringing his Odysseus to life (Variety, 2026). However, Wilson’s own assessment has been considerably harsher than that of most critics. In a lengthy essay for the London Review of Books, she wrote that Nolan’s film carries his “usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality”, and that she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script” (Wilson, 2026). Elsewhere in the same piece, she was blunter still, writing that the film “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” and called the writing “abysmal”. The backlash becomes a little difficult to follow logically: men criticising Nolan’s film as “woke” are directing their frustration at a woman who reviewed it more critically than almost anyone else. It’s hard to take that seriously. Wilson has been far harsher on the film than many of the people supposedly angry about it. By their own logic, she should be an ally, not a target.
Wilson’s Still the One Doing the Work
Wilson’s translation remains the one most closely tied to the biggest Homeric adaptation in a generation, regardless of whether Nolan’s finished film held up to her own standards. With the publication of her Iliad translation in 2023, she became the first published woman to translate both epics into English, and with a new essay collection, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, the criticism hasn’t slowed her down. None of this is really about Emily Wilson in the end. It’s about what happens when a woman does something well and publicly in a space that assumed it would remain untouched. The debate will likely resurface every time Homer does. Wilson, for her part, will keep doing what she’s always done—translating very old stories for whoever’s willing to read them. Homer has survived three thousand years of reinterpretations. One more translation isn’t gonna break him.
