RaveThe Spectator (UK)Arguably the most radical thing about the translation was that it conveyed the Greek in a strict iambic pentameter ... The translation is uncompromisingly metrical, strongly rhythmic and designed to be read and heard aloud, but Wilson has allowed herself to expand beyond the line-for-line scheme of her Odyssey ... Wilson achieves her register – at once plain spoken and slightly removed from everyday speech – partly by studiously avoiding contractions and allowing for metrically convenient epicisms ... I have to say that for all that I enjoyed her Odyssey, I have been even more absorbed by her Iliad.
Roberto Calasso, Trans. By Richard Dixon
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewYou can dip in at any point, and be carried along as in a lively cafe conversation — that is, if your friend happens to be a polymath with seemingly all of European literature (in the original languages), as well as Vedic writings, in his head, but whose flow of associations leaves you feeling not out of your depth, but smarter and better read ... The author enjoys making provocative statements and letting them twinkle before moving on ... Calasso is especially good at describing the characters of myth and legend with a novelist’s omniscient authority — and the occasional zinger ... That these stylish sentences come through with such verve in English — one is almost never aware the book is a translation from the Italian — is due in no small part to the translator, Richard Dixon ... The connection of the book’s later chapters to the celestial hunter (Orion, forever stalking through the heavens) is less clear; by the end, the book seems less about man’s transformation from hunted to hunter than about the larger topic of metamorphosis.
