![]() As I watched from the deserted beach, she plunged into the water and headed for the cave with rhythmic strokes. She set a brisk pace on our hike down the mountain. ![]() Wilson is fifty-one, with expressive features that radiate alertness, and a lithe, sinewy physique-more Hermes than Hera. The cave at its far end was a site of Mycenaean goddess worship, and relics recovered from it include a set of bronze tripods which fit Homer’s description of gifts that Odysseus received from the Phaeacians. She pointed to a crescent beach five hundred feet below, slung like a hammock between two mountains. A shrine in the town square shows the floor plan of a ruin, not far away, that may be the palace of Odysseus. On a recent summer evening, Wilson surveyed the view from a precipice above Polis Bay, in the quiet village of Stavros, on the northwest coast of Ithaca. Her Iliad will be published in two weeks. Her radically plainspoken Odyssey, the first in English by a woman, was published six years ago. The translator Emily Wilson took him at his word. “Tell the old story for our modern times,” Homer entreats his muse, in the Odyssey’s first stanza. Both plumb the male psyche and women’s enthrallment to its bravado. The Iliad’s subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is survival. Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means “hostage” is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us.
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