Peter Green’s translation of the Odyssey keeps Homer’s repeated epithets and formulaic phrases fully intact. Achilles remains “swift-footed” whether he is fighting or sitting in his tent. Green’s English is plain and meant to be read aloud; he preserves the repeated epithets and formulaic phrases precisely because the repetition itself is part of the point. Read Green and you will hear “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” exactly as Homer repeated them.
Robert Fagles took the opposite approach. Uncomfortable with straight repetition, he worked to make the epithets contribute to the drama of each moment. Where Homer has Hector carry his “shining helmet” unchanged from line to line, Fagles makes the helmet flash repeatedly, until the device starts to feel more like a cinematic lighting effect than a Homeric formula.
More recently, Emily Wilson made the choice consciously rather than instinctively. She explained to the Chicago Review of Books that repetition means something different depending on who is listening: in Homer’s oral culture, repetition signaled that something is important and worth listening to and remembering. Back in 2017 she shared in that same interview her belief that in a literate culture like ours, the same repetition reads instead as unimportant, something to skip. She therefore chose to preserve the feeling of Homer’s repetition through variation, rather than reproduce the exact words. Dawn still appears as often as she does in the Greek, and each appearance keeps the recurring imagery of roses, flowers, pinkness, fingers, and newness, but the phrasing changes from occurrence to occurrence.
Wilson has since reconsidered that decision. After finishing her Iliad and living longer with the Homeric material, she returned to the Odyssey and began an entirely new translation. In a March 2026 talk at the University of Iowa titled “Realms of Gold: Re-translating Homer in the Twenty-First Century,” and in subsequent interviews, she has said that her experience has changed her understanding of repetition: she now sees more clearly how repeated phrases create patterns across the poem and help readers recognize connections between scenes. She is allowing herself more lines and syllables than in the first version precisely so that more of those repetitive elements can remain. The fact that she is willing to redo one of the most successful and widely read translations of the last decade because of this shift is rare and revealing.
Homer Against the Attention Economy – Public Discourse
— rogueclassicist ~ david meadows (@rogueclassicist) September 11, 2026
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