On hearing Emily Wilson discuss why she varied the epithet for Dawn in her translation of the Odyssey
A woman splits the root of rosy-fingered
into weathers. Over the hero,
the sky’s alive. Now the reader
can step inside the story the way we step
without our bodies into memory
and deduce—from the way light moves,
from the shade of red—a good place to hide.
A shifting light sharpens the scene.
I see what she means—how the women
Telemachus hanged were not like birds
in the sense centuries of men translated
as “less-than-human,” but in how they aimed
for home.