Homer is having a moment. I mentioned this a week ago in a piece I called, too cheekily perhaps, “Homer and Hegseth.” In the piece, I argued that Peter Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War,” maps neatly onto the god Ares in the Iliad. Ares is narcissistic, violent, and, well, a bit stupid. Even his divine father doesn’t like him: Zeus says that of all the Olympian gods he despises Ares most. Homer has a way of skewering the pretensions of macho gods—and men. In this piece, I return to Homer but to Homer in translation, which will lead us fairly briskly to the Bible in translation and to the role of translation in interpretation generally. But first, Emily Wilson.

If Homer is having a moment, so is Emily Wilson. Her crisp and lively translations of Homer have brought the ancient poems to the attention of the reading public. It’s been widely reported that Christopher Nolan, director of the recent Odyssey movie, came to the poem through Wilson’s translation. She did not return the favor. She says of the movie:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible. (London Review of Books, August 13, 2026)

Besides that, she liked it.

Wilson not only translates ancient classical literature (she’s reported to be working presently on a new translation of The Odyssey), she writes copiously about the process and art of translation. For each of her Homer translations, The Odyssey (2017) and The Iliad (2023), she provides a lengthy introduction which includes comments on her translation choices. (She also provides a long introduction for the Scott McGill and Susannah Wright translation of Vergil’s Aeneid.) Recently, a book of her essays on classical literature, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea (2026), has appeared, with several essays devoted to the art of translation.

And like about almost everything else, Wilson has strong opinions about translation. Perhaps the most instructive essay on Wilson’s technique, for good and for bad, is the second to the last essay in Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, a rewrite of her introduction to The Odyssey. In this essay, she takes several passages from The Odyssey and compares her translations to those of others throughout the history of English Homer translations. In these comparisons, she inevitably—if you know Wilson—comes out the winner. But leave that as it may be, in considering the choices made by the translators, she points out many of the key issues involved in translation.

No translation can fully represent the original. Wilson says of her Odyssey translation: “My translation is, like all translations, an entirely different text from the original poem.” A translator is forced to decide what in the original to convey to the reader and what to pass over. I’ll return to this when I get to the Bible. A translation is not the original but in other words; it is adjacent to the original, an impression or representation of the original. In the end, it must stand on its own as a separate text.

Perhaps movies—as translations of literature into cinematic language—provide the readiest examples. Movies cannot simply reproduce a text. They are more-or-less faithful representations of the text. The key question is not how faithful, as if faithfulness to the original were on a sliding scale, but faithful in what way? To what elements in the original text does the movie director pay attention? And what elements does the director choose to forego? These decisions mark not only movies but all translations. A translation is a new text, not the original. To this, also, we will have to return when we come to the Bible.

For Wilson, a frequently passed-over aspect of Homer is sound. She says of her translation of The Iliad, “I began with sound.” The Iliad and The Odyssey are songs. The Homeric poems have meter, dactylic hexameter, but no end rhyme. How should a translator represent the sound of the poems? Wilson’s answer to that last question is to render the poems in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s idiom. As dactylic hexameter is the native sound of Greek epic verse, iambic pentameter with its variations, Wilson argues, is the native sound of English verse.

So first, sound. The translations of Homer should sing. And in her voice, they largely do. The question could be applied to biblical translations: do they sing? Have you ever noticed, to take one small example, how the New International Version (NIV) of Psalm 23 goes clunk in the first line: “The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing.” It’s the “I lack nothing” standing in for the King James (KJV), “I shall not want,” that offends. A clunky two beats followed by a trochee rather than the iambs of the KJV. Of course, the NIV team thought they were getting the verb right. There’s a difference between wanting and needing. Perhaps that’s so, but they did so at the expense of the sound of psalm. It no longer sings.

And to sound, Wilson adds pace. A translation ought to be fast where the original is fast and slow where the original is slow. Last week we stopped in Portland, Oregon and took our Sunday morning at Powell’s City of Books. To my point about Homer having a moment, the aisle for Greek and Roman classics was busy with shoppers—mostly young, I might add. I pulled two recent translations of The Aeneid off the shelf. The first, I’ve already mentioned, the Scott McGill and Susannah Wright translation with an introduction by Emily Wilson. I turned to the opening lines of Vergil’s poem. The translation seemed labored. Consider these lines:

Muse, tell me why it happened—what offense,
what painful insult led the queen of heaven
to drive a man renowned for faithfulness
through such ordeals, such endless miseries?
Do gods have so much anger in their hearts?

Five lines for Vergil’s four (Bk 1, lines 8-11). Try reading them aloud. With that attempt at translation in mind, I opened the second volume I had pulled off the shelf, Sarah Ruden’s 2021 translation of the poem. Here are the same lines:

Muse, tell me why? What stung the queen of heaven,
What insult to her power made her drive
This righteous hero through so much undoing
And suffering? Can the gods know such fury?

Four lines for Vergil’s four in iambic pentameter, and the pace is right.

The pace of a translation is related to a third way that translations can get it wrong: tone. Tone is a tricky thing. Wilson notes that many Homer translations tend toward archaic English, as if an older version of English better represents ancient Greek. But the Homeric poets (probably plural) were not writing in archaic Greek at the time. Theirs was the Greek of their own day. Homer’s Greek, Wilson reminds us, is straightforward, unlabored; the English translation should not be labored and obscure.

It’s the tone of the text that Eugene Peterson in The Message seems to me often to get it wrong. An egregious example is his Psalm 1. He begins it:

How well God must like you—
you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon,
you don’t slink along Dead-End Road,
you don’t go to Smart-Mouth College.

This is wrong at so many levels. It’s slangy, even smart-mouthed. It steers the reader in the wrong direction. It’s tone deaf. Psalm 1 is a rather solemn introduction to the Hebrew prayerbook. It defines the sort of readers the psalms require. It invites us to ponder whether we are worthy of them. Peterson’s translation does none of these things.

I point out these translation issues, matters of sound, pace, and tone, because these are matters to which biblical translators have paid little attention. Biblical translators are mostly concerned about the meaning of the text, as if the meaning can be divorced from how it sounds and how it reads.

In Wilson’s comments about translation, there are more of these instructions for translation. At the end of Wine-Dark Sea, Wilson attaches her “Twenty Rules” for translators. She includes among the “rules,” besides those I’ve already covered, “Be deliberate about what’s difficult.” If the text is obscure—“riddling” is the word she uses—the language of the translation should “feel riddling, enigmatic; the difficulty is essential to the poetic effect.” And, “If the original has multiple characters or perspectives or voices, don’t make them all sound alike.” And, “If the original was designed for oral performance . . . the translator should constantly read aloud the original and the draft in progress, and consider its effect on the ear as well as the eye.” And—what I consider a sovereign advice for all writing—“If you’re stuck, go for a walk.”

There’s more, of course. Emily Wilson is fun. Her translations are fun. They sing. And her essays, whether on Sappho or Aristophanes (“Punishment by Radish”) or the Stoics, are sprightly and informative. But there is nevertheless a certain weightlessness to it all. Nothing much—except perhaps tenure—is at stake. Compared to translations of Homer, translations of the Bible are weighty. Translation choices split churches, break up denominations, damage or heal people alive today. Central to the faith is the confession that the Bible is the Word of God. What does translating Homer teach us about translating and interpreting the Bible?

Wilson acknowledges the weight of biblical translation. She says, “The Greek and Hebrew Bible is an unusual and fascinating case because it is so often read in translation into multiple languages by people around the world, because so many people are passionately attached to incompatible opinions about ‘correct’ biblical translation, and because so many have died for getting it ‘wrong’ (Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, p.28). She’s right about the weight given to the Bible in translation. What she does not appear to notice is that translation occupies a unique space in Christian thought.

For the church, the scriptures have always existed in translation. The Bible of the early church was the Septuagint, the 3^rdcentury BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. The New Testament refers predominantly to the Septuagint, not the Hebrew text (one count has it 340 times for the Septuagint to 33 for the Hebrew text). What’s peculiar about this is that it’s Bible whether Greek or Hebrew. Later, in the 4^th century CE, when the first true Bibles were produced (codices with the books bound together), there were no breaks between the Septuagint texts and the Christian texts: no Old and New Testaments. The Bible is the Bible even in translation.

What this means is that our English Bibles are word of God. This affects how we think (or should think) about what it means for the Bible to be word of God. Translations are, as I’ve previously said, adjacent to the original text but not the same as the original. No translation can fully convey the experience of the original texts. Psalm 23 is not the same in Hebrew as it is in English. But both, in the Christian conception, are word of God.

This is true for, say, The Living Bible, Kenneth N. Taylor’s paraphrase from the 1960s, as it is for the NIV, a careful, if flawed, committee translation from the same era. Taylor reputedly did not know or use the original Hebrew or Greek. His is a translation of a translation (the American Standard Version). But still, in the proper context (read in a worship service, for example), despite its many errors, The Living Bible was read as and functioned as word of God for many people.

We live now in a world of many translations of the Bible. Just in the line stemming from the King James Version, we have the American Standard Version (the Bible I grew up with), the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, and now the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVue). And, along with those mainstream KJV descendants, in fundamentalist circles, we have the New King James Version and the English Revised Version. All of them Bibles. All of them, word of God.

And if the word of God resides in all these many translations, adjacent to but not duplicating the original texts, then we must abandon the idea that the word of God resides simply in the text and that our job is to pry it out so we can say about this or that topic: “Thus says the Lord.” It’s never that simple.

What is word of God is always bathed in interpretation. Translations are primary interpretations. But then, so is reading—including reading the text in the original language. At our church, I’ve been attending a class on Mark. Our teacher wants us to hear the gospel. She suggests that hearing and reading are not the same experience and that for its original audience, Mark was more often heard than read. Last week we listened to chapters 9-12. This time, she allowed us to follow along in Bibles she had brought, any version we might choose from The Cotten Patch Gospel to the NRSVue. I chose to open my Bible app on my phone and follow in the Greek.

The first reader chose the New Jerusalem Bible, a 1985 Catholic version. He read chapter 9. At the end of the chapter, there is a section, beginning with verse 42, about stumbling. The Greek word that appears throughout the section is skandalizō, “cause someone to stumble. We get “scandal” from it. The passage begins, “If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” It goes on to talk about hands and feet and eyes: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut if off. . .,” and so forth.

But when I heard these verses read, I didn’t hear skandalizō, the dire warnings about stumbling; what I heard over and over again was “hell.” Here it is in the New Jerusalem Bible. I’ve underlined the “hells.”

If your hand should be your downfall, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life crippled than to have two hands and go to hell. And if your foot should be your downfall, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life lame than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye should be your downfall, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell where their worm will never die nor their fire be put out. (9:43, 45, 47, 48)

Serious stuff, with lots of interpretative issues (including the repeating part about the worm not dying and the fire not being put out in verses 44 and 46, omitted in this along with most modern versions). But “hell.” Our word. The Greek has “Gehenna,” which is rather more complicated. Gehenna was an actual place, perhaps not far from where Jesus stood when he uttered the words quoted by Mark. At the time, it was a place where people threw garbage and where, one would expect, fires burned continuously. An odious place.

But it was not just a place. Gehenna was also a history. It—the Valley (Hebrew gēyʾ) of the son (or sons) of Hinnōm—was the place where in the time of Manasseh the Israelites had “passed their children through the fire”—child sacrifice.

And, by Hellenistic times, (in the book of Enoch, for example), the Valley had come to symbolize the place of final judgment. In Mark, it’s both judgment and punishment.

How to capture all of this in translation: the place, the history, the theology of judgment and punishment? “Hell,” doesn’t really do. As I said, “Hell” is our word. It comes with a lot of theological freight, much of it medieval. Not all of that is in “Gehenna.” And what, after all, is Jesus doing here? Is he teaching us about hell? Or is making a point about stumbling—the way we make others stumble and the way we make ourselves stumble? And using 1^st century Jewish theology to punch it up. Surely, in these verses “hand” and “foot” and “eye” are metaphors for something like actions (hands and feet) and perceptions (eyes). And no one, I hope, thinks that Jesus means for us to cut off our hands or feet or pluck out our eyes. So, again, how do we translate all of this into readable English? How can we make our English text sit comfortably adjacent to the Greek text of Mark?

Perhaps the best solution is to leave “Gehenna” as “Gehenna,” as does Sarah Ruden in her recent translation of the New Testament. “Gehenna” is strange enough word to make a reader realize that there is more going on in the text than meets the eye (or the hand or foot). There may be other solutions. What doesn’t work is “hell,” because “hell” belongs to a different set of texts—theological texts from a later time. If we hear or read “hell,” we fill up Jesus’s sayings with our ideas about hell rather than with warnings about stumbling, with Dante rather than with Jesus.

But let me not get too far into the weeds here. The point is not “hell” or “Gehenna” but the art and difficulty of translation. Perhaps the way to think about this is that any given translation (or reading of the original) is a conversation with the text and that this conversation cannot be reduced to single meanings.

And this we can learn from Homer. The Homeric songs have persisted because they invite conversation, conversation about, say, Achilles’s pouting anger or Agamemnon’s arrogant treatment of Achilles or Odysseus’s homecoming or Penelope’s waiting. These things come to most of us through translation, no translation ever the last word. And every time we read it, we read it anew, with new insights. What’s important is our engagement with the texts. And for most of us our engagement with the texts is mediated through translators. We need priests for this. Emily Wilson is such a priest. She points us to the truth about Homer: try this way of reading the poem. But it is not hers to claim that her reading is final.

And so too with our biblical translators. What they give to us is what they heard in the texts. And we hear it through them. They are our priests. But what they claim to hear in these texts is not just Moses or Matthew but the voice of God. With their translations, they are saying, “Here’s how we hear it. Here’s how the text spoke to us.” But no translation is ever final. Too often they go clunk where the original text sings. But no matter. We say to them: “Go back. Do it again. Perhaps this time we will hear it better.”

Clay