How to Tackle Intimidating Books, with Emily Wilson

20:37It's not like with texts that have just came out this year in Romanian or whatever, then maybe there's only one translation option. That's not going to be the case with Virgil or Ovid or Homer. So you have many options. I mean, I do think if it's a poem, I personally am very committed to a poem should be translated as a poem. If it has rhythm in the original, it should have rhythm. It should invite performance out loud. But I know different readers have different preferences. If you want to read a prose translation, that's not what I would do, but you should do you. It's fine.

21:12Jeff:Also, the book gods are not going to descend and drag you to reader hell. Right, yeah. I was turned off by the classics in high school because we read a prose translation of the Iliad that I found absolutely deadly. I was like, this is not for me. So I think if you can go to, say, a used bookstore, for example, and thumb through a few different copies, just see one that speaks to you. Which one do you find yourself continuing to read beyond a sampling of it at the same time? One thing that I always find useful when I'm encountering a new book, a new author, a new literary tradition, is sort of try to understand it in context.

21:50Like what was it? Who was writing it? Who was listening to it or reading it? I'm glad Rebecca brought up the audiobook because as people may or may not know, these would have been spoken aloud. There was no edition of the Odyssey that you were picking up in the Mediterranean 3 ,000 years ago or whatever. Can you talk to us a little bit about the scene of performance of these, the best of our understanding, who Homer was, who would mind listening to them? This maybe goes a little bit to the spoiler comment you made a little while ago where this would have not have been a shocking revelation that these characters existed and they had relationships to each other.

22:20One of the reasons that In Media Res works is because you kind of know, you would have known who Odysseus was in the broad strokes here at some time. How can we sort of travel back in time to understand what this book, these words would have felt like and what work they would have done in their sort of originary context? Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of the original is quite difficult to reconstruct for the case of Homer. Just the one minute version of the historical background is there were the Mycenaean Greeks, Mycenaean civilization fell, then there were the multiple centuries in which the Greek speaking world had no literacy.

22:55and it used to be called the Dark Ages in a sort of pejorative way because there's no text that must mean that they were plunged into terrible lack of culture in fact it was a time of great cultural formation insofar as it was a time both of technological innovations like the use of iron but also the development of these poetic traditions and storytelling about there used to be these great days of heroes which are sort of folk memories of the Winnemyseneans who were much more hierarchical and centralized forms of power than there were in the quote-unquote Dark Ages. So poets were developing these oral traditions of storytelling.

23:35And then in the 8th century BCE, so the beginning of the Archaic period, writing came to the Greek-speaking world again in a new form, borrowing from the Phoenicians. And then using that new tech of writing, fairly soon afterwards, these monumental written poems came into existence through whatever means much debated. Right. I think it's enough to know that it's debated, right? Like that's interesting itself. It's interesting in itself. Somewhere or other in the eastern part of the Greek-speaking world, these two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were created using writing. But as you say, for the following few centuries, rhapsodes who were performers, single-person performers, would learn off the whole of the Iliad or sections of the Iliad and perform it as an entertainment thing, as something that could be rhapsode poetry slams of people who get the prize for the best performance and also, of course, as entertainment at a drinking party but also at a civic or religious festival.

24:35The distinction between a civic festival and a religious festival doesn't really operate in antiquity. So it was entertainment of many different kinds, many different contexts, but primarily listening to a rhapsode was how you experienced Homer in most of antiquity. Although it also, I would argue, existed as a written text, but that's the crib sheet for the rap. So it's not that you're primarily going to be going off by yourself to read this text. You're going to show up to listen to the performance of it.

25:04Jeff:What a wonderful image of like a poetry slam where this is happening. That alone makes this feel more accessible and still relevant and relatable to me. I know that as people dive in, they're going to be wondering, like, am I getting it? How can I know that I'm getting it, Emily? I mean, I'm not sure if you... I mean, that's partly why I would recommend reading the introduction. If you're having that kind of self-doubt, it's not like the kinds of thematic things I trace are things that you're not going to be able to come up with yourself. You're going to figure out, OK, there's something complicated going on about Telemachus' journey towards manhood and how this poem is representing adult masculinity.

25:48Okay, there's something complicated going on about how are goddesses and women represented in this poem. As I said, there are ways that this poem is playing with two core cultural ideas, one of which is the journey home of a warrior from war, a nostos. So that's what the Odyssey is, tracing the story of this nostos. That's the word from which we get nostalgia. and it's sort of tracing the relationship of one man's journey home to all of the other people who don't go home, including all of the people who are impacted by the journey home once Odysseus arrives back in Ithaca halfway through the poem.

26:26So again, this paradoxical thing of a journey home isn't just a geographical thing. And then the second key concept is xenia, which is impossible to translate, though of course I translate it, which is the word from which we get xenophobia and the sadly less common xenophilia. So a Xenos is a guest or a stranger or a host. And of course, we don't have a word that covers all of those things. And so the noun, the abstract noun, Xenia, is usually translated as hospitality or guest friendship. So it's the word for this social structure whereby elite men who are not related to each other can travel to each other's homes, show up, get and get welcomed into the home, exchange gifts, get sent on their way and form this lasting network of friendship.

27:14And it's a really important social structure in a world that's before norms of international law, right? Before you can sort of rely on, I show up in a weird place where nobody knows me. Are they just going to kill me? Or is it just going to be bandits? Or is there a way that I can assume if they're Greek speakers that they'll have an idea of Xenia? So the Odyssey is sort of exploring what happens when that goes horribly wrong. What happens if you go to other people's houses and instead of giving you a nice meal, they swallow you up. You become the meal. You become the meal. Or you become the drink.

27:49Or the entertainment of forever. So you can never leave. Or you get turned into a pig. These different ways of – and of course also the students of Penelope are uninvited guests who won't leave. And then Odysseus arrives back in his own home and treats the uninvited guests not very nice, just as these other hosts have treated their uninvited guests not very kindly. So I think just having a sense of look out for hospitality, be aware that Senea is an important thread in this poem, that might be enough. It's not like you necessarily need to read the whole hundred pages of it. Maybe you just saved yourself a whole, however many hours it is.

28:29Jeff:I mean, we do the homework here. Yeah, we do. Well, and that reminds me, something you just said triggered when we talked about Oedipus Rex in the fall. And one of the things I was trying to again wrestle with, as you say here, is, you know, this is a work of politics, sort of proto-legal thinking, religious thinking, literary thinking. that's something that those of us who grew up in sort of the post-enlightenment world don't really get. Like we saw sort of in the last couple of hundred years, science break off, religion break off, philosophy break off, political economy break off. But these were the texts as far as we understand, like they sort of did everything at the same time.

29:07One thing I've always struggled with is thinking about, say we're at this poetry slam, you know, listening to a rap episode. Am I believing the story? Do I have some other kind of relationship for it? Am I thinking of them as being instructions? Am I sort of nodding my head the whole time? Or I'm like, whoa, that was weird. I know that's not answerable, but this is one of the questions I was like, how can I get somewhat in the mindset of this work, keep myself, you know, hold my own judgment and abeyance and experience as close as it can be. I can always bring my consciousness along later. But like, that's one, I guess maybe one reason that's where you could get your liberal education, because to explore texts like this, you kind of have to use all the tools in the basket.

29:46That's where you keep tools because I'm a real handyman. I keep my tools in a basket. Yeah. Good. I love that. Just a little footnote, Oedipus, to an us, is not proto-legal because, of course, by the time of classical Athens, there was a very extensive written law code. And the play is really playing on the legal identity of being a non-citizen immigrant in a city. And what does it mean if Oedipus is an immigrant or is not an immigrant? Because, in fact, he's the son of the former king. Right. Little does he know. Anyway, just a little footnote. But this is a really good question. I constantly try to remind my students that people listening to the Iliad, whether it's in the archaic period or the classical period, were also worshipping Athena.

30:30We may think, oh, this is myth. It's religion as well. It's not that she's just there as a fantasy narrative device. She's also a divine being. But at the same time, does that mean this is a sacred text in the way that the Torah is or the way the New Testament is? Absolutely not, because that's not how Greek religion worked. I mean, one of the slightly oversimplifying tropes about ancient religion is that it's much more about orthopraxy than orthodoxy. It's not necessarily about you must believe in this creed and we're going to burn you alive if you don't. Did you show up at the festival and did you do the right things?

31:12Did you sacrifice in the right order to the right deities? If you did, yay, great. The deity is going to be really pleased with you. Good things will happen. Good things will ensue if you did the right things. And there were, of course, multiple variations on every single myth, including every single story about every deity. So we know from later sources that there were many alternate versions of how exactly did the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope play out, at what stage did she recognise him? How exactly did the whole bow scheme play over the axe heads? There were the various different versions of that in later sources, which may also have been part of the earlier oral tradition.

31:58So it's not like somebody would say, oh, you told a variant on that mythical story. That means you are impious. There were laws in classical Athens against impiety, but nobody was going to say Euripides has to drink the hemlock because he made two different versions of Helen. They're two totally different versions of Helen because that's entertainment, that's tragedy. And there's no point in writing a play this year that's the exact same as the play you wrote last year. And there's something similar going on with the Homeric poems that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are taking these very familiar stories but also creating really interesting wild riffs on the usual stories.

32:39and packing them into this monumental narrative, which, of course, is too long to perform all at once. No matter how. Maybe you can just stick it out with the audiobook, but I think in antiquity, a rough episode would be getting... With a long night. A lot of wine. A lot of wine. Yeah. Some people say maybe they were divided up into three or four nights, which is a possibility, but I actually think one shouldn't be too rigid about it because probably there were multiple different performance contexts. But I hope that sort of... Right. The question of belief is, you know, yes, they worshipped Athena and the other deities.

33:12And yes, there was also a cult to the heroes of Odysseus on Ithaca. So I've talked about the deities, but what is a hero? We may have this sort of anachronistic idea that a hero is a guy like Batman or Superman who's all about saving the city. And that's why, you know, relief workers are heroes and nurses are heroes. but that's not what a heros is in Homeric Greek or in archaic Greek thinking. It's an extraordinary person. In fact, in Homeric Greek, it just means warrior or man, but it also, the connotations include later in that language, the idea that it's a person who's extraordinary and close to the gods, but that isn't about being nice, right?

33:59Not necessarily a role model. An anti-hero and hero are sort of bound up in the same thing in sort of modern. contextual context very much so.

34:06Jeff:I want to pull on the thread of something that you were saying just a moment ago, that these are kind of wild and exciting variations on the stories that were told. And one of the things that you've written about one of your principles when you're translating is to try to work with and against readers' possible expectations. You said if readers may expect this text to be boring or archaic or simple-minded and those things aren't true of the original, think through how you can enable them to see something else. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how readers ourselves can be pushing against those expectations.

34:37Jeff:Like, if there are folks who want to be the kind of person who has read the Odyssey before they go see the Odyssey, but they're also resisting because it feels like homework in some way, how do they push against that assumption that it's going to be archaic or boring? Yes. I mean, I think it's a sign of something really weird and prejudiced in us that we have this idea that archaic means something bad, There was an iconic period in ancient Greece. It wasn't necessarily bad. There were human beings there who actually created some really good art, both poetic art and other kinds of art. And they had feelings just like other human beings.

35:13So why do we have that assumption? I think it's worth pushing back on that. But I already talked about syntax and also about narrative energy, but also just the creativity of the storytelling. There's something exciting if you can sort of realise, wow, this poem is doing weird things with narrative structure. It's not starting where I expect it to. It's not interpreting what a homecoming journey is the way I expect it to. And also that I may think, depending on what your background is or where you're coming from, you may think, OK, back in the day, it was all just about macho guys being macho.

35:46which is what you might get if all your only access to the ancient world is that terrible cartoonish movie is 300. Did either of you see that? Yes. It was awful. Anyway, the ancient world is actually not like that very much. And the fact that there were these layered relationships and that there are plenty of very interesting female characters or gender fluid characters, if we're depending on what we think Athena's pronouns would be, because she mostly manifests as a guy. There are ways it's surprising in terms of, yes, this comes from a society where women were mostly subject to men, and yet many of the most powerful and fascinating characters aren't men.

36:24It comes from a society where it focuses on an elite man, and yet we have these multiple really interesting and well-fleshed out characters who are different social identities, including really interesting enslaved characters, interesting animal characters. We're not going to spoil what happens to the poor dog, because that will make people not want to reach home. Anyway.

36:49Jeff:You have mermaids, sirens, there's cyclops. So there's like all sorts of like what we would think of as science fiction or fantasy characters and moments here today that this is just a big adventure story. It's a big adventure. Well, you know, actually, I would kind of challenge that characterization. And also the sirens are bird ladies. They're not mermaids. And so they're a different kind of temptation from the sexy mermaid thing, which is the 19th century imposition on the idea of the sirens, which gets picked up and, you know, whether we're out there or that kind of stuff. They're offering an aesthetic, poetic and cognitive temptation rather than a look at me with my sexy, slimy tail kind of temptation.

37:33Clamshell bra. Exactly. The little mermaid kind of thing. But it's also, to me, the Odyssey, obviously the eight-year-old me loved the adventure story and also loved the way this is a poem, which in a way reflects the experience of being a child. And you're aware there are these older forces scheming, but you can't quite get a grip on it. Here's Poseidon. Here's Athena. kind of like mom and dad but who knows what's going on with them but then the adult me is actually less interested in that than in this whole second half of the poem where there's nothing explicitly weird but then Ithaca is the weirdest place of all humans are the weirdest they're even we're even weirder than goddesses and the ways that humans relate to each other and the depth with which the Odyssey really digs into social emotional complexity is part of what I think is really surprising because if you just come to it with the sort of kids retelling thing, you think it's all going to be about the sirens.

38:27The sirens get finished in like 12 lines. It's not all about the sirens. I mean, the sirens are great, but it's mostly about the human relationships. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC.

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39:56Ship UPS Air with our money-back guarantee, exclusively at the UPS Store U.S. retail locations. Visit the upsstore.com slash air shipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, the Iliad writes similarly, too, where you think it's going to be all fighting, fighting, fighting, but my favorite parts are Book 9, when Achilles is having people come to his tent and talk, and then Priam coming at the end and crying. and say, I've done what no other mortal man has done. What scenes do you come back to? I think you've written, correct me if I'm wrong, that you're more of an Iliad person than an Odyssey person.

40:26You don't have to choose, but your sympathies lie there. Mine do as well. But in the Odyssey, in the Iliad, are there scenes that you especially, first among equals, maybe to borrow that language, which ones give you sustenance? Which ones do you come back to, either in a good way or a splinter in the mind, like you can't figure out what's going on or you're still trying to reckon with what's happening in those moments? Yes. I mean, you already stole two obvious choices, but that's okay. It's fine. It's fine. Not a problem. So I'm going to try and focus on the Odyssey, which is certainly in my top two out of the Homeric poems.

41:03So it's great. I would say that I love the whole sequence when Odysseus comes back physically to Ithaca in book 13, the Phaeacians give him the self-steering ship. I love the way that it's both so precise about the physical details of how the boat moves through the water while also being so totally non-naturalistic. Zoom, self-steering ship, who has that in there? You actually don't get that. And I also love that after that, Odysseus, who's being zonked out for the whole voyage, wakes up and doesn't recognize his own island and then doesn't recognize his own patron goddess, Athena. And she has this whole, I think, hilarious dialogue in which she's explaining just how far superior she is at his own superpower, which is being smart and outputting people and disguises.

41:59So that's a great one. They're all, I mean, every single, I guess, this is, again, a very obvious thing to say, but Penelope's dreams are great. and the dreams about the geese, the whole complexity that we, I was saying part of what I love about it is the social complexity, also the emotional complexity of how we never fully get to glimpse what exactly does Penelope think about all these suitors? Is there a part of her that kind of likes them even though does she fully want her husband to come back? In the dream sequence, she cries when the geese are killed and the eagle says, don't worry, the suitors are dead.

42:37That was the geese. I'm your husband. And then Odysseus in disguise says, don't worry, I can interpret this dream. Odysseus said it was fine. And Penelope says, you know, actually dreams are kind of confusing. Two gates of dreams. We don't know what this dream meant. So there's a real ambiguity about it, which I think is something very powerful about the withholding of an idea that they both think exactly the same because they don't. I mean, I love that. I mean, this is a final one. I love Nausicaa, everyone loves Nausicaa. Who doesn't love a laundry scene in an epic? Great. I feel like the later epic poets copied things like the obvious Council of the Gods scenes, but they didn't get a laundry scene in there.

43:20So Homer wins on that. But I also love that it's only when chatting up Nausicaa that Odysseus mentions the ideal of marriage in terms of homophrosuner, meaning like-mindedness between husband and wife. Doesn't talk about that when he's talking to his actual wife, because maybe they don't have that. Maybe there's something different they have, which is about building up the honor of the household. And that's actually a more difficult and in some ways more painful emotionally in terms of what it costs every member of the household to build up honor, which is going to be costly both in terms of who dies for it and also in terms of who suffers for it.

44:00Yeah. And that's something that reading, one thing we found is that reading any book, it could be 20 years ago, 25 years ago, let alone 2 ,500 years ago, they tend to be stranger than the common understanding of them are. They kind of get flattened out in a cultural memory just because there's so many and so on and so forth. It's also fun to sort of, in those moments, and those are wonderful moments, just try to play a game with yourself. Where does the text seem to maybe be pushing against itself? Like, where are there contradictions? Where is there something? You know, dream sequences, as you say, are a common one where something gets left in.

44:30But is there a language? Is there a character that's sort of pushing back against? And you may be right or you may be wrong. It's less interesting to me than to sort of – it lets you do some active reading to say, okay, is this consistent, right? Because most of these things aren't consistent. There are dissonances in them, and that's part of why they survive is because if they were just sort of monolithic, flat, homogenous morality tales, you'd get them after a while. It'd be a bit boring. It's no fun. It's no fun. And the Odyssey is not boring. And so if people are put by it thinking it's going to be boring, please give it a try.

45:01We'll give Claire Danes a lesson and I think you'll find it actually kind of fun. Yes. I wanted to ask you about this because this is one thing that most readers of these poems will never have access to is the original language, the ancient Greek. You say in your own translations that you begin with sound. Give us 60 seconds on what we should know. So, like, just what should I have on my index card about ancient Greek and how it influences how these things are put together that might be useful for me coloring my understanding of the world I'm entering into? Can I do 60 seconds of ancient Greek so you can get that?

45:36Please. You can do 60 seconds of whatever you would like. Okay. 61 even. Okay. Ready, set, go. Mm-hmm.

46:22So that's the beginning of the Odyssey. And I hope you could hear that it has a rhythm. It's clearly designed for oral performance. What you were hearing in terms of the rhythm is dactyls. It's called dactylic hexameter. A dactyl is a finger, a dactylos. So it has a long joint and then two shorter joints. andramoi da da da da da da da da da it's doing that rhythm all the way through with variations so you can have two longs substituted so that's why I'm kind of a little bit stump posty about I actually think Homer needs to be translated with traditional poetic meter I don't think the use of dectylic hexameter in English works only one person has tried it I felt it was interesting but didn't quite work Nice gimmick but maybe not so much Yes, that was the translations by Rodney Merrill.

47:11People want to dip into them. And you can sort of see that he's forced into phrases like Sion of Atreus, because you can't do Son of Atreus because he doesn't fit. In any case, so that, I think, is a problem. So to me, to echo the traditional rhythmicality, I needed to use iambic pentameter. So that sense of, there's a traditional rhythm to it. It sounds like narrative verse is supposed to sound or like protodramatic verse is supposed to sound. And it has a lot of alliteration. It has a lot of assonance. It has these poetic qualities to it, while also having relatively straightforward syntax. So it has, if you think in terms of, in a way, it's like a ballad kind of thing.

47:52Jeff:Thank you so much for reading that for us. And hearing you do it reminded me, especially since you mentioned the iambic pentameter that your translations work in, when we've talked about Shakespeare on the show, I've talked about how one of my sort of formative educational experiences was a teacher saying, listen to these on audio as you're reading the text and try to pair them up that way. And it helps you build out the experience more fully. It seems to me that that would be a wonderful way to approach translations of Homer and these other ancient works as well, to pick up a paperback copy of your translation of the Odyssey and listen to Claire Danes read it at the same time and feel that rhythm in our bones and be able to picture the stories.

48:31Jeff:I think that's a great idea. I've also heard of people, and I always get happy when I hear about it, of people doing little book clubs where they read it out loud together. which I think in a way is even more authentic, right? You're having an in real life experience with others experiencing it out loud and you guys get to ham it up and you get to put on voices and it's super fun. We actually got an email from a listener last week who said that she and some of her friends are doing that this summer, reading it aloud together in the run up to the movie. So if you're listening to this right now, you're doing it right.

49:01Jeff:Doing the right things. Yes, do that. Speaking of the movie, so the Odyssey's coming to theaters. It's a big deal, at least in the West. Like we're excited for it. A lot of people are excited for it. this is your home water, so to speak. I'm sure it's exciting. Also, maybe some trepidation. Like, what is your expectation of people? Forget about whether the movie is good or not. Put it to the second. Like, what do you think people are going to experience? Or what are you hoping people get out of, like, having a reason to turn to the Odyssey and Homer again? I mean, I basically just feel excited that, you know, it's going to turn more people back to the original IP, which is great.

49:34It's wonderful. You know? I mean, of course, there's already, even though there's only, you know, a couple of two-minute trailers, there's already online discourse with everyone having so many opinions about a movie they haven't seen. It's a little bit exhausting, and I know that it will continue to be a little bit exhausting in the level of Keyboard Warriors. But I also just think, you know, you can put that aside and out of your mind and celebrate the fact that so many people are going to be engaged with this really rich, interesting story. It seems like it has a great cast. I'm sure no one would do interesting things with it.

50:09It's going to be fine. It's going to be fun.

50:12Jeff:And Nolan has said that he's referring to your translation in his work. So that has to be thrilling. It's very exciting. I did not get a screenwriting credit or anything. Yeah, you didn't. Yeah, okay. And I know he read The Fagels as well, or at least he looked at The Fagels as well. I'm not sure. Maybe. I feel like he hasn't just read it. We were delighted to see that name check happen for you. So we're going to get a big budget odyssey. if you could snap your fingers, we're going to get you out on this. This is a fan's question. You could snap your fingers and there's an equally huge production of some other story from the ancient world.

50:45And you, Professor Emily Wilson, got the green light. The green light was for you to pull the, that's how lights work. You pull on things, right? Is there a story that you'd like to see done differently that's never been done? Do you want to do the Aeneid? Where do you want to go? Do you want to do some Ovid? You can go anywhere you want. What would you as a fan, as a scholar, as a person who spent your life doing this, love to see a full-throated theatrical version of? I think The Aeneid is a great choice because, I mean, actually, Troy was not really a movie about the Iliad. I would like a better movie actually based on the Iliad.

51:20That might be my top choice. But I would also love to see an Aeneid. I think it's really, in a way, startling that there hasn't been one. I think it's maybe quite a difficult poem to imagine putting into cinema, but I think it could work really well, especially now that CGI is getting so good. So you could do the various shipwrecks, which would have to be very convincing, but I think you could do them in a compelling way, in a way that you maybe couldn't have done 15 years ago. So I'd love to see an Aeneid. I feel like there's been a lot of Ovid reception, including theatrical and musical. And of course, the Aeneid has been continuously read and riffed on in a whole lot of different ways, but not so much in the movies.

52:02And I think it would be nice to see Aeneid and see how does the famously nebbishy protagonist translate to the big screen.

52:12Jeff:Well, let's hope Hollywood's listening. Yeah. Didn't really advertise Aeneid or the Aeneid very well, but it's actually a good poem and really interesting in terms of the ways that it's sort of themes about community. and about migration and immigration really are both, of course, resonating with the imperial Roman period, but also with our own era. Just as the Odyssey is also resonating with our own era in terms of globalization and migration. We'll get you out on this. You have a book coming out in the fall, September. Can you talk a little bit about what people can expect from that book? I'm very much looking forward to it, though I don't really.

52:46It's essays, right? That's my understanding. It's essays. What should we expect in that? It's a short book of essays. you can expect some pugnacious takes on various things. The whole cluster of things that it's about is primarily about reception and translation of ancient literature. So it's both a sort of Classical Studies 101 and Translation Studies 101 kind of book, which includes some stuff you may have always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask about ancient Greek and Roman, especially poetry, but I do a bit of prose as well. And then also, what are the gaps and what are the connections between the ancient and modern worlds?

53:28So, yeah, so you've had hot Greek summer, everyone out there. You've seen the Odyssey. You've blasted on some takes. You've read your Odyssey and Iliad. You're ready for, OK, now I'm really going to get into it. So you can check out Crossing the Wine Dark. See, that's out September 1st. Professor Emily Wilson, thank you so much. A delight and a joy to get to talk to you for a little while. It was really fun. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

53:52Thank you.