Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on The Odyssey, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

The Odyssey
by Homer
translated from the Greek by Emily Wilson
(W. W. Norton & Company)

Emily Wilson’s fresh take on this ancient Homeric epic is both scholarly exacting and a pleasure to read. Rendered into a colloquial iambic pentameter that matches the same number of lines as the Greek hexameters, her buoyant rhythms and fresh, vivid imagery weave a gripping, brisk-paced narrative that is hard to put down. Wilson’s efforts can also be considered an intervention to slough off the anachronistic biases and oversimplifications found in many previous translations. The result is a work that is crisp, forceful, daring, and nuanced, a monumental rendering of a monumental text, “an old story for our modern times.”