![]() ![]() The poem lying open before us was Homer’s “Odyssey,” the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the “Iliad,” in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them. On the wall hung pictures of Wilson’s three young daughters the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. “ Polytropos,” Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word - πολuτροπον - of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. Late in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek. ![]()
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