Danziger Annual Lecture Series with Emily Wilson

The Department of Classics presents the 2025 Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Distinguished Lecture Series with Emily Wilson, College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

Translating the Violence of the Iliad

The talk will assess the challenges of interpreting and translating Homeric scenes of violence and massacre. I will suggest that the idea of force as inherently “dehumanizing” runs through influential critical assessments of the poem, including Simone Weil’s famous essay, and is also to be found in several prominent Anglophone translations. I argue that this set of modern ideas about violence is informed by the modern history of warfare and political thought, and is fundamentally different from what we find in the Iliad itself. I treat the central theme of violence as an important test case in the limits and possibilities for understanding and recreating the alien features of ancient poetics and imagination, and I use it to discuss a core challenge of my own work as a translator: how to convey the features of Homer that modern readers may find surprising or even incomprehensible.

Lecture | 4:30

Reception | 6:00

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