Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is actually a selection of lines, maybe 75 lines, from Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, which came out a year or two ago.

Emily Wilson is a British classicist and professor of classics

at the University of Pennsylvania, and she was the first woman to publish a translation of Homer's

Odyssey into English. A few years back when the book came out, I did interview her over on our podcast

Forma, so if you want to check that out, please do. The lines that I want to read today are some of my

favorite, and I really like what

Emily Wilson did with them. They are from book one, and it's, of course, during the Telemarchy,

kicking off the Telemarchy, that section of the Odyssey where Delemachus is discovering,

I think he's discovering what it means to be Odysseus' son. He's on a little bit of an identity

quest of his own. And until that sort of works itself out, then Homer doesn't even turn to Odysseus

yet. And he does that in book five. But here in book one, the goddess Athena comes to Telemachus

in disguise. And Telemachus tells him, well, the disguised Athena,

about the suitors who are overrunning his house and doing the things that they're doing and destroying

Odysseus's kingdom to some degree. And they have a conversation. And this is how Athena responds.

I'm only going to read this once, but I do have some thoughts on it,

but it's about 75 lines or so.

And it goes like this.

Athena said in outrage,

This is monstrous.

You need Odysseus to come back home and lay his hands on all those shameless suitors.

If only he would come here now and stand right at the gates

...