Zephyr (ze´-feer): the West Wind. 2.421.
Zethus (zee´-thus): son of Zeus and Antiope. Together with his brother Amphion, the founder of the city of Thebes in Greece. Zethus married Aedon, who mistakenly murdered their son. 11.263.
Zeus (zoos): most powerful of the pantheon of Greek gods, associated with masculine power, kingship, fatherhood, and hospitality. The husband of Hera, he is often linked with eagles. As the god of the sky, he controls lightning and thunderbolts. 1.9.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks go to Pete Simon at Norton, whose wonderful idea it was that I should translate the Odyssey. Pete is an amazing editor who combed through my first drafts of every book with an unfailingly keen ear for clarity, English idiom, and poetic impact, and inspired me to keep at it. This book would not exist without him.
In the process of planning and creating this translation, I have shared pieces of my work in progress, as well as thoughts about the process, with engaged and helpful audiences at several institutions. I will not be able to thank by name all those who asked questions and made useful comments on those occasions, but I would like to extend a general and heartfelt thank you to those who invited me, listened to me, and engaged with me, at the Barnard Center for Translation Studies; classics graduate students at City University of New York; undergraduates and faculty at Swarthmore College (especially Rosaria Munson and Grace Ledbetter); various people at Columbia University (especially Julie Crawford, Jenny Davidson, and Molly Murray), and the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Delaware. I was lucky to be able to participate in a Penn Alumni Travel cruise round Sicily and the coast of Italy toward the end of this project; I am grateful to Emilie de la Rosa for inviting me, and to all my fellow passengers for discussing Homer with me while we sailed past the land of the Cyclops.
In my home institution, the Penn Humanities Forum provided two years of partial course relief and the stimulating company of two very different but equally impressive groups of scholars in the humanities; the Odyssey was part of the Year of Violence and then, equally suitably, the Year of Sex. I am grateful to all those who participated in those groups and helped expand my mind, with particular gratitude to Jennifer Conway, Jim English, David Stern, and Zeb Tortorici. Thanks also to the members of the Penn Undergraduate Humanities Forum on Translation, and to Andrea Goulet for inviting me to speak with them; to the lively students of the Penn Philomathean Society; and to all the students in Peter Struck’s Iliad class, as well as Peter himself. Warm thanks to all those who attended my Library Tea presentation at Van Pelt here at Penn, and especially to Rebecca Stuhr, our classical studies librarian, who has been an engaged and thoughtful interlocutor for this project. Thank you also to all the graduate students who took my seminar on Greek poetry in translation.
I presented pieces of this project at two different Penn Classical Studies Colloquia, and am grateful to the audience members who asked useful questions on both occasions. I have benefited enormously from the company of my colleagues at Penn, especially those in the Classical Studies Department. I owe particular thanks to Bridget Murnaghan, magnificent Homerist and fellow translator, who generously read and commented on the majority of this volume, and who has taught me an enormous amount about the values and narrative strategies of the Odyssey. Thank you to all those faculty, graduate students, and post-bac students who regularly showed up, in the middle of their own busy weeks, to listen to me reading books-in-progress at “Homer Reading Group,” and offer comments, questions, and suggestions for improvement. Particular thanks to my colleague Cynthia Damon, for wonderfully incisive questions about characterization, tone, and narrative perspective. Thank you to all the graduate students who participated in this context, including but not limited to: Lucy Ayers, Amelia Bensch-Schaus, Wes Hanson, Amy Lewis, Daniel Mackey, Isabella Reinhardt, and Jeffrey Ulrich. Thank you also to all the occasional visitors to the group, including Rita Copeland, Seth Schein, and Mira Seo.
In the final stages of this large project, I was greatly helped by a team of classicist readers whose eagle eyes saved me from innumerable infelicities. Thank you most especially to Alice Hu and Bill Beck, both extraordinarily quick, acute, and diligent readers of Homer and of me, who commented on the entire poem and introduction and helped me compile the glossary. Thank you to Jacob Feeley and Brian Rose for help with the maps, as well as the fine cartographer who drew them, Adrian Kitzinger. Deep thanks for alert, prompt, thoughtful reading and commenting on individual books and the introduction go to Addie Atkinks, Ginna Closs, Tom Elliott, Matthew Farmer, Julie Nishimura-Jensen, Hannah Rich, Ralph Rosen, Lydia Spielberg, Alison Traweek, Caroline Whitbeck, and Kate Wilson.
I have been lucky to have the help of Joanne Dubil, the ever-reliable administrator in my alternate home, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, for providing a warm and secure environment in which to work. I am also grateful to my mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, who read many early sections of the poem, and to my sister, Bee Wilson, for essential emotional support.
I would like to thank those who have tried to educate me over the years, especially Jasper Griffin, with whom I first read Homer in Greek, and the late-lamented Oliver Lyne and David Quint, both of whom, in different ways, taught me to look for the stories and voices of losers in epic. Looking further back, I would like to thank the women who taught me Greek at Oxford High School for Girls, including Deborah Bennett, Eda Forbes, and Caroline Mayr-Harting. I would also like to thank the teachers at St. Barnabas Primary School, Oxford (especially Mr. Penfield, aka The Cyclops), for inspiring my eight-year-old self with a lifelong interest in the Odyssey.
Thanks to Trent Duffy for his excellent copyediting services, without which the line numbering and capitalization would have been hopelessly inconsistent. All remaining errors are, of course, my fault. Thank you also to Gerra Goff at Norton, who has helped keep everything on schedule.
Thank you to Holly Danesi, for the tattoo of Athena’s owl that has helped me through the project.
Thank you to each of my three daughters, for letting me work sometimes, and for sharing my love of stories, pretend-play, magic, goddesses, adventures, and home. Thank you also to all the wonderful staff of St. Mary’s Nursery School/Afterschool Program, without whom I could not have finished this book.
Finally, I am grateful to and for David Foreman. Thank you.
OTHER BOOKS BY EMILY WILSON
Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton
The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint
The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca
TRANSLATIONS
Seneca: Six Tragedies
Four Tragedies of Euripides
Copyright © 2018 by Emily Wilson
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