Emily Wilson presents Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea
About this Event
Wilson will discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, with Dana Stevens. This event is presented by Community Bookstore and the Old First Preservation and Community Foundation.
Tickets include a paperback copy of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, which will be available for pickup at Community Bookstore starting on 9/1/2026, or at the event. Emily Wilson will be available to sign books following the program.
Doors open at 6:30 PM. Please note that the entrance to Old First is on 7th Ave.
About Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea:
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.
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.
Dana Stevens has been the film critic at Slate since 2006. She has also written on film, books and culture for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Yale Review and Bookforum. Her book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century was named a best book of 2022 by the New Yorker, NPR, and Publishers Weekly.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 27.24
