Welcome to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien and in this month's bonus episode,

which is one of the last before season two starts coming out, we're joined by Dr. Emily Wilson, author, translator, and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

She's best known for being the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English and she just

followed that up with the translation of The Iliad. Hot tip they make a great gift

set. Dr Wilson thank you so much for doing this.

Jogo, yes, I'm excited for this.

It's so fun for me to get to speak to you.

I'm a fan on many levels, but the reason I thought that it would be cool to talk to you on in this forum is because

I feel that the role of translator is profoundly important and vastly under-examined.

And it's so easy for an average reader, let alone

listener to any kind of news that might be coming

from another part of the country to not give it the proper

weight and credit. And I'm speaking from experience, including very recently, embarrassingly enough,

you know, reading Lydia Davis's translation of Madam Bovary and seeing how incredibly different it was from

the Madam Bovary that I read in high school that was Steiegmiller's version and of course I had read

Bovey in the original in college but I think my French wasn't good enough to

really appreciate all of the nuances so that's sort of where I'm coming from with sort of going like oh wait

nobody gets how important this connector is so I was wondering if you could just start by talking about

what the role of translator means to you. Yes I think that was a fabulous introduction to it. I mean I

think there's all different kinds of translation in the world I mean literary

translation is just a small subset of the work of

interpreters who I think I admire so much people who are able to you know generate

...