About this Event
Moderating this discussion is bilingual writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri. This event will be hosted on the 6th Floor of the Strand Building at 826 Broadway.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by August 20 to request.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected].
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"An enthralling and profoundly relevant book." —Salman Rushdie
"I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature." —Madeline Miller
From the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.
In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson—whose renditions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination—explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work. Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world. Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.
Photo credit: Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania
Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.
Photo credit: Laura Sciacovelli
Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 forInterpreter of Maladiesand is also the author ofThe Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, andThe Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian:In Altre Parole (In Other Words),Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books),Dove mi trovo(self-translated asWhereabouts),Il quaderno di Nerina, andRacconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English,Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Strand Building, 826 Broadway, New York, United States
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