{"id":966,"date":"2026-07-17T16:09:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966"},"modified":"2026-07-17T16:09:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:09:03","slug":"mother-tongue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966","title":{"rendered":"Mother Tongue"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means \u201chostage\u201d is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us. The Iliad\u2019s subject is death, and the Odyssey\u2019s is survival. Both plumb the male psyche and women\u2019s enthrallment to its bravado. \u201cTell the old story for our modern times,\u201d Homer entreats his muse, in the Odyssey\u2019s first stanza. The translator Emily Wilson took him at his word. Her radically plainspoken Odyssey, the first in English by a woman, was published six years ago. Her Iliad will be published in two weeks.<\/p>\n

Read more Paul Thek\u2019s Eclectic Art<\/a><\/p>\n

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. A shrine in the town square shows the floor plan of a ruin, not far away, that may be the palace of Odysseus. She pointed to a crescent beach five hundred feet below, slung like a hammock between two mountains. 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\u2019s description of gifts that Odysseus received from the Phaeacians. \u201cWe\u2019ll swim there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Wilson is fifty-one, with expressive features that radiate alertness, and a lithe, sinewy physique\u2014more Hermes than Hera. She set a brisk pace on our hike down the mountain. As I watched from the deserted beach, she plunged into the water and headed for the cave with rhythmic strokes. The bay was glassy until a breeze ruffled its surface with purple shadows, suddenly making sense of Homer\u2019s \u201cwine-dark sea.\u201d It was Wilson\u2019s first visit to Ithaca. \u201cI felt the presence in that sea of protective deities,\u201d she told me later, though she hastened to add that, elsewhere in Greece, unprotected migrants were drowning in it.<\/p>\n

On our way to Stavros, we\u2019d passed cultivated valleys and hillsides terraced with vineyards and olive trees. But the landscape, like Homer\u2019s prosody, is mostly rugged and austere. (Ithaca is \u201conly fit for goats,\u201d the poet tells us.) It wasn\u2019t hard for Wilson to imagine the tar-blackened ships that Odysseus\u2019 father beached in its secluded coves, and the treasure he plundered stowed in its mountain grottoes. \u201cOld Laertes was basically a pirate,\u201d she said fondly.<\/p>\n

One of the grottoes is known as Eumaeus\u2019 Cave, in honor of the faithful swineherd who tended Odysseus\u2019 pigs and is said (improbably, given the terrain) to have fattened them on acorns there. Following Athena\u2019s directions, we found it near the spring of Arethusa, whose black waters are alleged to be a mother\u2019s tears for her dead son.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

After a vertiginous climb through thorny underbrush, Wilson and I reached a keyhole of rock in the cliff and slid down the moss-slimed rocks at its entrance into a humid cavern that looks like a rotunda some Titan sheared in half. She had sprinted ahead of me, and when I caught up with her she was sitting on a boulder, dwarfed by her surroundings. The air hummed with birdsong, and with the bells of the mountain goats that forage in the highlands. \u201cThat sound takes you straight back to Homer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In bringing Homer back from antiquity, Wilson also had to bridge the chasm of time that has elapsed in English literature since the first full translation of the Odyssey: George Chapman\u2019s, in 1616. But, she cautioned, \u201cyou can\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t try to make all that history\u2014layer upon layer\u2014visible in the text. My goal was to evoke an experience like the original, using the language of the people who will read it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The epics were originally performed by itinerant singers who roamed ancient Greece, entertaining guests at social gatherings. Travel inflected their speech with a mixture of dialects that they patched into their recitals. In classical Athens, the singers were known as rhapsodes<\/em>, from the verb meaning \u201cto sew songs together.\u201d Their diction was stately, but audiences of every class and age listened raptly to Homer\u2019s graphic imagery and impassioned dialogue, scored to a propulsive beat. Wilson\u2019s ambitious project of the past decade has been to re-democratize both the poetry and its audience. Her \u201cfolk poetics,\u201d as she calls them, are a reproach to predecessors who have \u201cturned a great poem into a hard one,\u201d or into a poem of their own. She rejects historical re\u00ebnactments that \u201carchaicize\u201d Homer\u2019s diction\u2014\u201che didn\u2019t sound archaic to the Greeks\u201d\u2014and modern renovations that expand his footage. The opening of Robert Fagles\u2019s widely admired Odyssey, she points out, uses two English words for every Greek one. Her own translation hews strictly to the original line count, and it retains the power of a storyteller\u2019s voice to fix itself in your memory. \u201cI write for the body,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

As a brotherhood of nomads, the bards must have imbued their songs with a yearning for nostos:<\/em> the homecoming that crowns a hero\u2019s journey. Homer keeps us in suspense about Odysseus\u2019 nostos<\/em>. He left Ithaca unwillingly to fight the Trojans and spent his youth at war. His return is disrupted by misfortunes, but \u201cdreadful, beautiful, divine\u201d Calypso rescues him from the sea. After seven years of captivity, her charms have palled. When Zeus finally orders her to set him free, she looks for him on her island\u2019s shore:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

His eyes were always
tearful; he wept his sweet life away, in longing
to go back home, since she no longer pleased him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A jealous goddess is dangerous, as anyone would know who had languished for ten years at Troy:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

So Odysseus, with tact,
said, \u201cDo not be enraged at me, great goddess.
You are quite right. I know my modest wife
Penelope could never match your beauty.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.
But even so, I want to go back home.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Odysseus knows how to massage an ego; that was his role in the fractious Greek camp. He\u2019s also the con man who thinks up the Trojan horse. Homer introduces him with the adjective polytropos<\/em>\u2014literally, \u201cof many turns.\u201d Previous translators have called him \u201cshifty,\u201d \u201ccunning,\u201d and a hundred other things. After grappling with the alternatives, Wilson chose \u201ccomplicated,\u201d hoping also to convey the sense of \u201cproblematic.\u201d Her first sentence\u2014\u201cTell me about a complicated man\u201d\u2014instantly makes him our familiar: that charismatic prince who\u2019s too impossible to live with and too desirable to live without.<\/p>\n

Part of Odysseus\u2019 appeal, not least to modern writers, is that he redefines heroism as imagination. \u201cYou love fiction,\u201d Athena teases him. The decade of his odyssey passes like a dream, as episodes of hardship and violence alternate with voluptuous idylls. And the mind games he plays to outwit his captors\u2014lusty nymphs, ravenous cannibals, vengeful gods\u2014have, Wilson notes, \u201ca \u2018meta\u2019 element that\u2019s about language and storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Iliad feels suffocating by comparison. Its central protagonist, the demigod Achilles, is problematic without being complicated. His \u201ccataclysmic wrath\u201d fuels a story that begins in medias res\u2014not with Paris\u2019 abduction of Helen, or the massing of an invasion force, but at the end of a nine-year stalemate, with the demoralized Greeks camped on the Trojan coast and the Trojans trapped in their impregnable city. The action is compressed into about six weeks, whose grinding carnage would numb your senses if Homer\u2019s poetry didn\u2019t keep stirring them. Yet the Iliad\u2019s greatness is inseparable from its claustrophobia. Against a background of blight and bleakness, the characters dazzle us with their vivid idiosyncrasy. Perhaps even more than Odysseus, they\u2019re our familiars: beleaguered humans in tragically stressed relationships, at the mercy of fate.<\/p>\n

Apollo sparks the conflict that will engulf them. One of his priests is a Trojan ally with a cherished daughter, \u201cbeautiful Chryseis.\u201d Achilles captures her in a raid, and Agamemnon, the Greek commander, claims her as his war trophy. The priest offers to ransom her with a priceless treasure, which Agamemnon spurns rudely, and Apollo punishes this sacrilege with a plague. Only after the Greek armies have been decimated does their general relent and send Chryseis home. But then he consoles himself by mortally offending his greatest warrior: he confiscates Achilles\u2019 trophy from an earlier looting spree, \u201cfresh-faced Briseis.\u201d And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.<\/p>\n

While Wilson was contemplating the Greeks sickening in their camp, and the Trojans caged behind their city walls, the plague of Covid<\/em> forced her family of five into lockdown. She didn\u2019t want to push the analogy (\u201cI never thought, \u2018Oh, no\u2014Achilles has to order online groceries\u2019\u00a0\u201d), but she was conscious of both how volatile confinement can be and how primal the need for company becomes. \u201cYou can either rage at the people you\u2019re stuck with or grow more devoted,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Wilson teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania and lives near the campus in a rambling old house that she shares with her partner of nine years, David Foreman, an administrator at Swarthmore, and her two school-age daughters, Psyche and Freya. (Her eldest daughter, Imogen, is now in college.) When we met last May, she greeted me at her door in running clothes. I was surprised first by her youthfulness, then by the luxuriance of her tattoos. \u201cI didn\u2019t used to read as a tattoo person,\u201d she told me, as we settled on the deck outside her bedroom, which is painted Aegean blue. \u201cWhen you get tattooed in places that show, it changes your identity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Wilson\u2019s tattoos became visible as she worked on the Iliad. They inscribe her closest relationships: with her children; Foreman; her late mother; her younger sister Bee Wilson, the noted British food writer; plus a pantheon of Greek deities and creatures sacred to them. The birds and flowers are emblems of a tender heart, while the armory of spiky weapons\u2014a spear and a bow on her calves, the thunderclouds of Zeus on her shoulder\u2014are badges of a fighting spirit.<\/p>\n

That afternoon, Wilson took me for a walk through a neighborhood of abandoned factories, then along the banks of the Schuylkill River, crossing wild meadows to a glade, a route she\u2019d chosen for its \u201cIliadic contrast of beauty and desolation.\u201d Her Iliad won\u2019t be the first by a woman, but she considers \u201cthe first-woman thing\u201d a sexist distraction: \u201cIt slights the many brilliant female scholars who\u2019ve worked on the poems. And no one mentions the gender of the men.\u201d What she didn\u2019t say, though her followers do (the flaws and merits of her Odyssey have been vehemently debated on social media), is that it slights her translations\u2019 real singularity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ancient Greeks teach one to be modern,\u201d the poet and classicist A. E. Stallings observed to me. \u201cThey taught that to me and to Emily. It was time to strip away all the mannered layers\u2014the tarnish of centuries\u2014and she does that. Her translations have the freshness of the sky after a storm. Their briskness and simplicity are faithful to the oral tradition, and she brings the poems to a new generation, which struggles to read harder texts and wants clarity.\u201d Wilson feels an acute, almost maternal sense of duty to those lay readers: \u201cThey need to trust that I\u2019m telling them the truth, both about the language and the psychology. There are no lazy ways to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

On rare occasions in her Iliad, a word would jar me: \u201cflirty,\u201d \u201cflabbergasted,\u201d \u201cinappropriate.\u201d Or a slangy outburst made me laugh at a dramatic moment: \u201cStop! You are acting crazy, Menelaus!\u201d But that line is worth pausing to consider precisely because none of Wilson\u2019s predecessors would have written it. Among the notable translations of the past century\u2014by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, Peter Green, Caroline Alexander, Stanley Lombardo, Robert Graves (who pivots from prose to poetry to highlight dramatic moments; there\u2019s a lot of mansplaining in Homerdom)\u2014each has its strengths. Their authors are united in presuming that readers will be \u201cimproved,\u201d as pious critics used to say, by their encounter with Homer. But Wilson reminds us that a great storyteller conceived the poems as entertainment. Her language is so vitally urgent that even the Iliad\u2019s endless battle scenes feel, to use an un-Homeric simile, like listening to the Super Bowl on car radio. Stallings said, \u201cDoes Emily\u2019s clarity betray that element of the epic register that Matthew Arnold calls \u2018nobility\u2019? Some critics think a certain grandeur is missing. But every translation is a compromise, even a great one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Wilson\u2019s mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, was an eminent scholar of Elizabethan literature who died in October of complications from Alzheimer\u2019s. Her father is A. N. Wilson, the prolific English writer whose subjects as a biographer include Jesus, Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton, Hitler, and Queen Victoria. When I spoke with him in June, at the British Library, he was researching a life of Goethe. His latest book, \u201cConfessions: A Life of Failed Promises,\u201d is the memoir of a writer\u2019s triumphs and travails. Among the latter, his first marriage set the high-water mark.<\/p>\n

The Wilsons met at Oxford. Katherine was a teaching fellow, and Andrew was an undergraduate of twenty, a decade her junior. They married hastily in 1971, when she got pregnant with Emily. \u201cMom did all the housework and cooking and was always apologetic about it,\u201d Wilson said. Andrew Wilson told me that he found talking to his daughter difficult: \u201cSometimes she was completely mute, and sometimes she would burst into tears.\u201d Even as a little girl, Emily was conscious of her father\u2019s rage at his vassalage to a family, for which she felt he blamed her: \u201cI was the one who had ruined his young life by being born.\u201d For reasons that are a bit inscrutable under the circumstances, the couple had Bee when her sister was two.<\/p>\n

The Wilsons lived in poisonous silence, beneath a veneer of civility. (\u201cWe had a fatal gift for politeness,\u201d as Andrew put it.) Emily often locked herself in her room, from which she heard Bee sobbing through the wall. \u201cMy parents weren\u2019t listeners,\u201d she said, \u201cso it was hard for me to imagine that I could be heard.\u201d Encouraged by her mother, she took refuge in books, and excelled in school, though she refused to say a word in class. Her other sanctuary was a world of fantasy: \u201cFor a year or two, I pretended to be a gorilla. I would thrust my lower jaw out, even though it was painful to walk around that way.\u201d Her other alter ego was an orangutan, which referred to itself in the third person. \u201cIt felt liberating to speak in another voice,\u201d Wilson told me. \u201cIt drove my parents completely crazy, which is also why I did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Emily was eight, a perceptive teacher saw through her camouflage and cast her as Athena in a school production of the Odyssey. (The headmaster played the Cyclops, and the children relished poking his eye out.) \u201cIt was a turning point in my life,\u201d Wilson writes in the notes to her translation. The experience kindled a love of theatre shared by her mother; it also, she suggests, gave her a model of \u201chuman and nonhuman\u201d shape-shifting. \u201cTranslators have to be chameleons,\u201d she said, \u201cleaping from a green leaf to a brown one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Both sisters told me that they were, at times, hostages to their mother\u2019s depression, though they never doubted her devotion to them. Their father could be charming, but he played favorites capriciously. \u201cOne day you were the scapegoat, the next you were his chosen one,\u201d Bee told me, over lunch in Cambridge. \u201cIt was a toxic game which served to teach us that love is conditional.\u201d It also served to cast them as foils. In Bee\u2019s telling, she was the \u201cnormal\u201d one who loved comics and television, didn\u2019t cause much trouble, and cleared her plate. Emily was the brooding \u201cgenius.\u201d At around fourteen, she stopped eating, then coming to the table altogether, though neither parent commented on her blatant anorexia, even when she was living on apples. \u201cAs E got smaller, I got larger,\u201d Bee wrote in a poignant essay on sisters and their eating disorders.<\/p>\n

Unhappy families tend to spin conflicting narratives, and there would probably be no literature without them. \u201cI found this when I was working on my memoir,\u201d Andrew Wilson said. (His daughters are mentioned in it only in passing.) \u201cIt was my version of events, not theirs, about which I won\u2019t comment, except to say that what they may tell you about me is true, or partially, because they felt it.\u201d No one, however, took issue with Emily\u2019s account of the bitter scene that took place on January 1, 1988, when she was sixteen. The Wilsons had gathered for a New Year\u2019s lunch, and they went around the table announcing their resolutions. \u201cMy resolution,\u201d their father told them, \u201cis to get a divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrew Wilson decamped to London, where he eventually remarried and had a third daughter. Duncan-Jones went on to write \u201cUngentle Shakespeare,\u201d a biography that reads the Bard\u2019s work deeply but portrays the man as a cad. \u201cMom knew that great literature is written by imperfect humans,\u201d Wilson said. Her father read \u201cUngentle Shakespeare\u201d as a swipe at \u201cUngentle A.N.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Bee went to boarding school, then to Cambridge, Emily stayed in Oxford to support their mother, \u201cwho was devastated for a long time.\u201d She read classics at Balliol and earned a master\u2019s in English literature at Corpus Christi, but by then England \u201cfelt like the wrong place for my well-being.\u201d In 1996, she took a blind leap. Knowing nothing about America or about Yale\u2014\u201cI hoped it was by the sea\u201d\u2014she arrived in New Haven to pursue a doctorate. Her marriage to a former fellow graduate student ended shortly after Imogen\u2019s birth. A second union also foundered and was followed by the familiar trials of single motherhood.<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s thesis became a book: \u201cMocked with Death,\u201d a treatise on the tragedy of \u201coverliving\u201d\u2014a penal sentence, by age or loss, to the terminal privation of whatever made a life worthwhile. Her mother\u2019s dementia hadn\u2019t set in yet, but she was attracted to writers who have dramatized this \u201chorror\u201d: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Milton. \u201cMost of us,\u201d she wrote, \u201cstruggle in vain to outlive our own past selves.\u201d That struggle may not be in vain, if the self that survives it is the authentic one. But, Wilson wondered to me, how do you recognize her? \u201cI\u2019m not sure I have a stable identity\u2014or perhaps it only emerges through an engagement with language.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

At lunch, Bee had wanted to show me what one of Emily\u2019s past selves looked like, so she\u2019d brought a family album. In a grainy photograph from the nineteen-seventies, the Wilsons pose in an English garden. The parents\u2014a dapper young fogy with ramrod posture and a soulful, slightly rumpled bluestocking\u2014stand behind two tidy little girls in matching sailor suits. The taller one is refusing to smile. \u201cIt\u2019s funny, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Bee said. \u201cEmily escaped to a world where people were free to express anger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Christopher Nolan Has Always Been Making \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

She was thinking of ancient Greece, but her sister also escaped to an angry new country. Wilson became an American citizen last year, in order \u201cto vote where I live,\u201d and to engage with the political arguments raging around her. Had she not emigrated, she doubts that she would have seen the need for new Homer translations. \u201cBeing from two worlds is part of the story,\u201d she said. In that respect, she\u2019s also a dual national of two education systems. Her own \u00e9lite schooling had come to seem cloistered, shielded by \u201cwalls of class\u201d that also insulate some of her students. The ones who went to private schools \u201cdon\u2019t doubt that they belong\u201d in a classics program, even if \u201cthey have some unlearning to do,\u201d she said. The public-school kids \u201cneed more nurturing to feel welcome. As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

My first visits with Wilson took place during graduation weekend at Penn, which happened to coincide with Taylor Swift concerts in Philadelphia, so the city was a zoo. Worried that I\u2019d get stuck in traffic, she gave me strict instructions to take the trolley. I shared a car with Swifties in lam\u00e9, graduates in mortarboards, and their elders of three generations. Wilson\u2019s chair had been endowed by the College for Women class of 1963 (Penn became coed a decade later), and the alumni who had gathered for their sixty-year reunion would celebrate her at a banquet. Many were the same age as her mother. \u201cToday\u2019s her birthday,\u201d she said quietly. \u201cShe would have been eighty-two.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked Wilson about the evening\u2019s dress code, she apologized for having \u201cno idea.\u201d But she typically wears something talismanic when she performs. For her readings of the Odyssey, it was often a sequinned owl T-shirt that channelled Athena. (Homer, she notes, has an eye \u201cfor things that sparkle.\u201d) Athena is a shape-shifting goddess. She has the power to make herself invisible, and at luminous moments in Wilson\u2019s translations, especially private ones between foes or lovers, so does Wilson. Those exchanges are often monosyllabic and charged with unspoken feeling. Her aim, she said, was \u201cto give the characters breathing room for their ambiguities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

That evening, her sandals paid homage to Achilles\u2019 mother, \u201csilver-footed Thetis\u201d\u2014a daughter of the sea god Nereus, who was forced to marry King Peleus of Phthia, after he had raped her with the gods\u2019 connivance. Thetis is a tutelary spirit for Wilson: \u201cI\u2019ve come to see the Iliad as a poem about the pain of a goddess mother who adores her mortal child and can\u2019t protect him. The theme of a mother\u2019s tragic love structures the whole poem. But that anguish teaches you a hard truth: you can\u2019t prevent your children from ever being hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The banquet was held at the Penn library, and we got there early, so that Wilson could review her notes in a quiet corner. As the guests drifted in for cocktails, a few came over to introduce themselves. One regretted that she\u2019d never studied Greek. Another suggested that the Iliad was ripe material for \u201ca rap musical like \u2018Hamilton,\u2019\u00a0\u201d and Wilson nodded politely. As a jazz group played oldies, her co-speaker, Stuart Weitzman, checked out her footwear. \u201cI can see you\u2019re a lady who\u2019s into comfort,\u201d he said. Weitzman, a Penn megadonor, is a \u201963 graduate of Wharton who made a fortune in the shoe business. \u201cI should really have planned a talk around various characters tying on their sandals,\u201d Wilson told me later. \u201cThey abound. But I wanted to read a violent slaughter passage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diffidence is Wilson\u2019s default mode, the legacy of a childhood spent biting her tongue, but her ferocity emerges onstage. \u201cI think there\u2019s a tension,\u201d she told me, \u201cor at least for many people a surprise, in the gap between my mostly shy persona and the intensity of emotion I try to express in performance.\u201d Her sonorous voice gives ancient Greek the rumble of a cataract, though she also brings an impious verve to passages of dialogue. In a video I watched online, Penelope might have been Lady Chatterley and gruff Odysseus her sexy gamekeeper.<\/p>\n

Some of Wilson\u2019s YouTube readings have an edge of zaniness; she pulls faces and changes character with comic props\u2014a cardboard crown, cat ears, a dishevelled wig. But that night, dressed sombrely in black lace, she recited one of the Iliad\u2019s most heartrending passages. The gods have been intriguing furiously. Thetis begs Zeus to avenge her son\u2019s honor, although the plan he hatches will also fulfill the prophecy that torments her: Achilles can choose to either die young as a hero or live to an obscure old age.<\/p>\n

As the story unfolds, Agamemnon is tricked into thinking that he can win the war without his greatest fighter. The Trojans\u2019 champion\u2014Hector, King Priam\u2019s son\u2014makes the most of this advantage, without knowing it\u2019s a ploy. But a wary seer warns him to seek Athena\u2019s favor, so he leaves the gory plain to organize a sacrifice. Back in the city (briefly, he hopes), he finds his wife, Andromache, watching the war from the battlements with a nurse cradling their infant. In the passage that Wilson read, she grasps his hand and implores him:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

What are you doing, Hector? You strange man!
Your will to fight will kill you! Do you feel
no pity for your little baby son,
or my unhappiness, my life of loss?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Achilles, she reminds him, raided her father\u2019s kingdom, killing him and her seven brothers and enslaving their mother. Hector is torn. If he stays behind on the walls, he can defend the citadel. But the supreme imperative of the noble warriors on both sides\u2014Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, Aeneas, Sarpedon, Patroclus, and even foppish Paris\u2014is, as Hector exhorts his fighters, to \u201cbe men.\u201d A man is someone who courts death for glory, hoping that his deeds will be immortalized by a poet. (This worked out for all of the above.)<\/p>\n

Hector tells Andromache, \u201cNo one matters more to me than you.\u201d Yet he offers her no comfort:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

One day some bronze-armed Greek will capture you,
and you will weep, deprived of all your freedom.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.
But as for me, I hope I will be dead,
and lying underneath a pile of earth,
so that I do not have to hear your screams
or watch when they are dragging you away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hector routs the besiegers and sets fire to their ships. The desperate Greeks throw every man they have into the field. While Achilles sulks in his tent, his beloved comrade, Patroclus, who shares his bed, bravely joins the battle in Achilles\u2019 armor. This imposture cows the enemy, but Hector slays Patroclus anyway, sealing everyone\u2019s fate. Maddened by grief and rage, \u201cthe best of all the Greeks\u201d butchers the Trojans and seizes twelve of their young boys to sacrifice on Patroclus\u2019 funeral pyre. He spears Hector through his neck, then drags the corpse around the city walls until old King Priam abases himself to beg for its return. The poem ends with the laments of three royal women\u2014Helen, Hecuba, and Andromache\u2014whose losses, Wilson writes, \u201ccan never be recuperated,\u201d except in the retelling.<\/p>\n

Wilson has spent the past decade contemplating her kinship with these warriors. \u201cMy childhood self was an Achilles,\u201d she said, \u201choled up in protest, then emerging later to reveal his power. But I also had a dutiful Hector self, doomed by compliance.\u201d I told her that I thought Hector\u2019s speech to Andromache, with its vision of her degradation, was tinged with sadism, but she disagreed: \u201cBrusqueness is often a mark of fear. You push people away when you worry that you need them too much.\u201d And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman\u2019s fitness to do Homer justice. \u201cAny woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

This insight, and the lucidity Wilson brings to it, may be the greatest revelation of her Iliad. The poem\u2019s machismo has often bored or estranged me, and, in more grandiloquent translations, its heroes\u2019 mindless bloodlust obscured the pathos of boys and men who are shamed literally to death by weaknesses that they\u2019ve been bred to suppress. Her plainsong conveys the tragedy of their bravado, and, listening to her voice, I felt it for the first time.<\/p>\n

I met Wilson in Athens before we left for Ithaca. The city, in late June, was more crowded than Philly had been, and considerably hotter. One morning, we hiked up to the Acropolis, but the wait for tickets was two hours in the sun, so we hiked back down. Over coffee in a little square, I told her about a vintage shop near my hotel. She was delighted by the prospect of taking her girls there. Finding a treasure in a thrift store, she said, gives her a sense of accomplishment akin to \u201cwhat feels so satisfying in translation. Working within strict constraints like syntax and meter is like digging out the gem from a donation bin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson translated Homer into Shakespeare\u2019s meter\u2014an iambic five-foot line, natural to an Anglophone\u2019s ear. She tuned her text like an instrument by reciting it aloud. But she avoided reading her predecessors, who suffered, in her opinion, from reading one another. None of them, she said, felt \u201cparticularly sacred, beyond Pope and Chapman, and that\u2019s because they are both in very different ways great poets.\u201d In writing for the body, she searched not only for the most visceral equivalent of every Greek word but for the least slanted one. Toward the end of the Odyssey, the hero\u2019s son, Telemachus, proves that he has become a man by hanging twelve of his mother\u2019s serving women, who have slept with the suitors besieging her. Most translators, Wilson writes, describe them as \u201csluts\u201d or \u201cwhores,\u201d terms that don\u2019t figure in the Greek. Instead, she calls them what Homer does: \u201cslaves,\u201d or, in an echo of plantation culture which felt apt to her, \u201chouse girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s translations are the first in English to jettison slurs or euphemisms that mask the abjection of women in a society where a goal of war, according to the Iliad, was to rob men of their women, and where female captives of every rank were trafficked for sex and domestic labor. (Boys were, too.) Yet she isn\u2019t aiming to generate outrage at the sexual politics of a Bronze Age patriarchy: \u201cIt\u2019s too easy.\u201d To the degree that she\u2019s outraged, it\u2019s by the sexual politics of her vocation. \u201cThe \u2018faithful\u2019 translation,\u201d she writes, is a \u201cgendered metaphor.\u201d It presupposes a wife-like helpmeet whose work is subordinate to that of \u201ca male-authored original.\u201d To some of her critics, especially the trolls on Twitter, Wilson\u2019s \u201cwokeness\u201d perverts Homer\u2019s world view. In her own view, the biases of previous translators have distorted Homer\u2019s \u201cexperiential truth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Homer\u2019s goddesses are thrilling models of female power. Aphrodite takes her pleasure where she finds it (everywhere). Semi-divine Helen, Zeus\u2019 daughter, has a witchy seventh sense, a ventriloquist\u2019s voice, and a pharmacy of magic potions. In Wilson\u2019s view, \u201cNothing beats Hera, dressing up with super-chic earrings and skin creams to mess with Zeus\u2019 plans.\u201d (Her craftiness evokes a conjugal eye roll: \u201cShe always thwarts whatever I decree.\u201d) But the poems\u2019 mortal women are subject to the dictates of their husbands and fathers, and even, like Penelope, of their barely postadolescent sons. None of them challenge that convention, yet Wilson is alert to the ambivalence in their stoicism. Where Andromache\u2019s is explicit, Penelope\u2019s is opaque. (Her name means \u201cveil over the face.\u201d) \u201cIs Penelope really glad to see her husband after twenty years?\u201d Wilson asked me. Yes, but her translation of their reunion gives us a moment to wonder:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

She crossed the threshold
and sat across from him beside the wall,
in firelight. He sat beside the pillar,
and kept his eyes down, waiting to find out
whether the woman who had once shared his bed
would speak to him. She sat in silence, stunned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After coffee, I went prospecting for gems at the National Archaeological Museum. Its most famous artifact is a funeral mask of hammered gold leaf that Heinrich Schliemann, the German archeologist, found in what he believed to be Agamemnon\u2019s tomb at Mycenae. The mask, from the sixteenth century B.C.E., predates the war, if there was one, by about three hundred years, but it\u2019s the haunting likeness of an old king with an archaic smile, and, whatever terrible crimes he succumbed to or committed, he seems to be at peace.<\/p>\n

The ancient gold in the vitrines reminded me of a passage from Wilson\u2019s introduction to the Odyssey. Helen and her husband, Menelaus, she notes wryly, \u201cseem to have suffered no obvious ill effects from her escapade\u2014beyond the fact that so many people\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. died as a result.\u201d Their marriage, she concludes, might have been cemented by a mutual appreciation for \u201cwonderful consumer goods.\u201d They surely would have coveted the goods that were on display: exquisitely wrought diadems, tripods, wine cups, sword hilts, and jewelry, the likes of which Homer inventories with the concupiscence of a Sotheby\u2019s catalogue.<\/p>\n

If you learn one thing from the Iliad, it\u2019s that the greed for stuff, the drive for sex, the fear of death, the bonds of love, the pull of home, the glamour of fame, plus all the insecurities\u2014especially about virility\u2014that generate violence in the world are still the same. I will confess that, in the next gallery, I tarried for longer than was strictly seemly at the statue of Paris\u2014a monumental nude youth with surely the most beautiful face ever sculpted. Of course Helen eloped with him. Abduction, my foot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

When Odysseus at last reaches Ithaca, he doesn\u2019t recognize the island. Athena has shrouded it in mist to buy him some time for plotting his revenge before he confronts the suitors. Once she unveils the landscape, Odysseus, elated, knows just where he is: in a bay like Polis, shaded by a wooded mountain. A \u201ccave sacred to nymphs\u201d lies at one end of the beach, and that is where they hide his treasure\u2014the Phaeacians\u2019 \u201cheroic gifts of bronze.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Ithaca, Wilson and I often crossed paths with mountain goats, whose bleating kids rooted at their udders, but we never met a goatherd. \u201cThey\u2019re all off composing poetry,\u201d she said. We never met a soul, in fact. It was as if the gods had decided to reward her with a private tour of their haunts.<\/p>\n

To reach the palace of Odysseus, we set out from Stavros a little before dusk, when the heat had abated. About a mile from the village, on a steep mountain road, we found a sign that vaguely pointed toward the \u201cSchool of Homer.\u201d Turning onto a rocky path, we climbed for another twenty minutes until an ancient flight of steps delivered us to a plateau that is one of the island\u2019s strategic high points. In the distance, we could see Af\u00e1les Bay and, beyond it, the Ionian Sea shimmering in a violet haze.<\/p>\n

Schliemann poked around this acropolis in the mid-nineteenth century, and many archeologists have followed him. The existence of the palace has been disputed for millennia, and alternative locations have been proposed in Cephalonia, Paxos, Sicily, the Baltic, southwestern Spain, and elsewhere on Ithaca, but the School of Homer is a contender. Its ruins were once a complex of buildings pieced together from massive blocks of limestone, and sited so that ships or strangers were visible as they approached. Whoever lived here would have given those strangers a cordial welcome, according to xenia<\/em>\u2014the sacred code of Greek hospitality, whose breach by Paris (it was bad form to run off with your hostess) led to the Trojan War.<\/p>\n

If these are indeed the ruins of the palace, they don\u2019t fit the Odyssey\u2019s descriptions of a royal seat with a vast banquet hall, a storeroom secured by \u201cdazzling double doors,\u201d and an upper story where Penelope worked at her loom and hid herself from the rowdy suitors. A mosaic floor in one of the roofless chambers looked Roman. (Rome occupied Greece for hundreds of years.) In the seventeenth century, some of the stone was used to erect a church, dedicated to St. Athanasios. The School of Homer got its name in English some two hundred years ago, from a local priest who showed the site to a British classicist. He saw shards of pottery, perhaps Mycenaean, scattered in the rubble; Odysseus was unlikely to have been the first Achaean prince to live there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

The birds singing in this ruined choir might have told us its history, but there was no one to interpret their song. Wilson wandered off alone and spent a while looking out to sea. Later, she told me that she\u2019d been thinking about her mother: \u201cShe was the home that I came back to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nostos<\/em> may also imply the yearning for a home that doesn\u2019t exist, or no longer, or only as an ideal: a place where the people you love the most finally recognize and embrace you. \u201cI often feel like an Odysseus,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cHe was always reinventing himself and, like a translator, pretending to be someone else and telling that character\u2019s story. But maybe a true self can emerge from the lies.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we got back to the road, a sudden apparition arrested us. The setting sun backlit a spider\u2019s web. She hung like a dense onyx bead precisely at our eye level between a gnarly olive tree and a pine whose scent mingled in the warm air with jasmine and goat dung. Wilson whispered, \u201cAthena is with us.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Donald Trump\u2019s Ad-Lib Strategy on Iran<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judith Thurman on a translator whose vitally urgent renderings of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the \u201ctarnish of centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annals-of-literature"],"yoast_head":"\nMother Tongue - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mother Tongue - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Judith Thurman on a translator whose vitally urgent renderings of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the \u201ctarnish of centuries.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-17T16:09:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"32 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Mother Tongue\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-17T16:09:03+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966\"},\"wordCount\":6315,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Annals of Literature\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966\",\"name\":\"Mother Tongue - City Relocation News\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-17T16:09:03+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp\",\"width\":1280,\"height\":720},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=966#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Mother Tongue\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/\",\"name\":\"City Relocation News\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\",\"name\":\"admin\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"admin\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?author=1\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Mother Tongue - City Relocation News","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Mother Tongue - City Relocation News","og_description":"Judith Thurman on a translator whose vitally urgent renderings of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the \u201ctarnish of centuries.\u201d","og_url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966","og_site_name":"City Relocation News","article_published_time":"2026-07-17T16:09:03+00:00","author":"admin","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"admin","Est. reading time":"32 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966"},"author":{"name":"admin","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#\/schema\/person\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4"},"headline":"Mother Tongue","datePublished":"2026-07-17T16:09:03+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966"},"wordCount":6315,"commentCount":0,"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp","articleSection":["Annals of Literature"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966","url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966","name":"Mother Tongue - City Relocation News","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp","datePublished":"2026-07-17T16:09:03+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#\/schema\/person\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp","contentUrl":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/872d8cc2f1ac00e4d3d93ab541ff0a95.webp","width":1280,"height":720},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=966#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Mother Tongue"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/","name":"City Relocation News","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/#\/schema\/person\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4","name":"admin","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/50b1ad2e498f523425ee0a8cc5180a210646db1622662a3d56cc405d3e0c346a?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"admin"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com"],"url":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?author=1"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}