Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea

"An enthralling and profoundly relevant book." —Salman Rushdie

"I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature." —Madeline Miller

From the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.

In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson—whose renditions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination—explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work. Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world. Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.