REGISTER

In the old days there were sixteen bodhisattvas. When it was time to bathe they got into the bath together. They suddenly realized the cause of water and said, “This subtle touch releases the brightness. We have become the sons and daughters of the Buddha.”

—Blue Cliff Record Case 78

There is something about the above koan that reminds me of the warriors, women, and gods of The Iliad. Their bath is on the plains of Troy, where they find themselves immersed in love, fighting, tears, and, ultimately, death. “Human mortality is at the center of it all,” writes classics translator Emily Wilson. “I know of no other narrative that evokes with such unflinching truthfulness the vulnerability of the human body.”

Perhaps more than anything, The Iliad centers on the story of two great warriors: the Greek Achilles and the Trojan Hector. After Hector kills Achilles’ dear friend Patroclus, Achilles seeks murderous revenge, finally cutting Hector down. The gods wish Hector to have a proper burial, and direct his proud and grieving father, Priam, to go to Achilles’ camp and offer ransom for Hector’s body. On arrival, wholly exposed to his enemy, old Priam supplicates himself.

This made Achilles yearn
to mourn for his father. With his hand, he gently
took hold of the old man and pushed him back.
Then both remembered whom they had lost.
Curled like a ball beside Achilles’ feet
Priam sobbed desperately for murderous Hector.
Achilles wept, at times for his own father,
and sometimes for Patroclus.
So their wailing suffused the house.

Wilson writes, “I have now lived with this poem for some thirty-five years—rereading it, teaching it in the original and in various translations, and now, rendering it into English. For the last six years, I have worked intensively on this translation. But even now, when I turn back to lines I have read hundreds of times already, I find that the raw power of the Greek still startles me, like Athena suddenly tugging Achilles by the hair to stop him in his tracks. Often, I am unable to read without goose bumps, tears, or both.”

Emily Wilson is a British American classicist, author, and translator. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023.

Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She attended Oxford University and Yale University, receiving a Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature.

Wilson has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.

More books by Emily Wilson: Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007), and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (2014)

sources: Wikipedia, emilyrcwilson.com

The effect [of Wilson’s translation] is not so much to bring the characters of the Iliad into the contemporary sphere, as to bring us into theirs. … A poem you read with your heart in your throat.

—A. E. Stallings, The Spectator, September 2023

This event is funded in part by the 2024 Frederick P. Lenz Foundation “Women in Buddhism” Grant.

Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.

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