Usha Vance Is Reading ‘The Iliad,’ a Poem About Male Rage. Its Famous Translator Sees Irony.

In the three short months since her husband joined the Republican presidential ticket as Donald Trump’s running mate, Usha Vance—former registered Democrat, according to The New York Times—has appeared to subscribe to the Melania Trump school of political wifedom. Following her introductory speech at the Republican National Convention (during which she asked the age-old question, “Who wouldn’t want to be friends with JD?”) she has served in public as a largely silent companion. She rarely sits for interviews, and offers little insight into her thoughts on JD Vance’s strange campaign-trail behaviors, nor his racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant political stances.

This week, an interview by NBC News sought to shed light on Usha Vance. However, she remained steadfast in her unwillingness to illuminate. “I have not given a ton of thought to my own roles and responsibilities,” she said, of her potential future as second lady. “There are certainly things I’m interested in, but I don’t really know how that all fits into this role.” (Usha Vance did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair.)

Because she has been photographed carrying copies of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Tana French’s In the Woods, and most recently, Emily Wilson’s 2023 translation of Homer’s The Iliad, one of those “things” appears to be books, and so, clinging to the concrete, NBC headlined the article, “Usha Vance’s expansive reading list gives a glimpse of a private figure in the campaign.” The glimpse: that Vance is a member of a “slow pace” book club, and that she started reading The Iliad because her seven-year-old is interested in mythology.

I could attempt to glean further clues through the dubious exercise of parsing the contents of the books themselves—but why not do one better, and call up the people whose names are on the covers? Through representatives, French declined to comment and Doerr was unavailable, but Emily Wilson gamely answered the call. “Homer,” she says, “deserves whatever publicity they can get!”

Wilson has been wrestling with politicizations of her work for years. In 2017, much was made of her status as the first woman to publish an English translation of The Odyssey. And she caveats our conversation with the reminder that as a translator, her focus is less on what lessons readers may or may not be taking away from the book, and more on poetic techniques—how to deploy regular meter to retain The Iliad’s sense of voice, the song-like quality with which it would have been delivered to the ancient Greeks. She sees this as a spiritual endeavor as much as a scholarly and artistic one. Her work asks of her, “What is the solution to the impossible?” she says. “For that, you need the divine.”

Still, she also loves the poem for its plot, for the way it’s “always turning the intensity up to 11” and its handling of mortality, the way “different communities interact and destroy each other from really close quarters.”

And regarding Vance, she has some thoughts.

Vanity Fair: What did you think when you saw that Usha Vance was reading your translation of The Iliad?

Emily Wilson: I don’t know. I mean, it’s wonderful that she’s a reader. Like me, she went to Yale. She’s obviously an educated person.

I think there’s all kinds of ironies. The two ironies that I thought about most were, The Iliad is a poem about how men fight for control of women’s bodies—the whole plot is premised on that, and on the rage that happens between men over who gets to have absolute control over women’s bodies. One of the other driving features of the plot is the question of what happens when a very powerful man, in this case Achilles, refuses to accept a loss, and what happens in terms of the deadliness, and what is the death count. What is the cost to the fragile coalition of social bonds when a loss is intolerable, and the only possible response to a loss is infinite rage and infinite desire for destruction in revenge. So those themes seem, to me, to resonate in certain ways that might be relevant!

I think The Iliad is for everyone, including people whose politics I may not believe in. It’s absolutely great that people should read and engage and think about it in an open-minded way. I didn’t create these translations of Homer with an idea that these must only be read by people in one or other political party. That’s absolutely not how it is. Homer belongs to everyone, and it’s not like Homer is ever going to tell you how to vote. So I also think it’s funny how there are people who do seem to think Homer belongs only to one political party. There are these various attempts to co-opt literature to belong to one modern ideology. And I just think that’s so ridiculous.

One thing you’ve written about is that The Iliad is unique in not setting up the conflict as one between us and them.

Yes, I think it’s kind of extraordinary, because, of course, it is a Greek poem about a mythical war fought by Greek speakers against people living to the east of the Greek-speaking world. And a war that, according to myth, the Greeks won. So you might think, this is going to be a, “Yay, we won, we defeated the foreigners” kind of narrative. And it so much is not that. It’s very clear that the Trojans are just as dignified, just as admirable, just as complicated and human as the Greek speakers are. The poem is constantly trying to shift around our centering of whose perspective we are in.

You might think this is going to be a poem about a besieged city—that’s the Trojans—and the Greeks as the valiant attackers outside the besieged city. And in fact, for the center of the poem, it flips all of that around. So it’s the Greeks who are besieged, it’s the Trojans who are the attackers. We’re constantly having our expectations about, whose side are we on? We’re not actually allowed to be consistently on anyone’s side. We have this deep empathy for everyone. A phrase that comes up repeatedly is “the cries of those killing and of those being killed.” We’re constantly seeing both sides. Victory is defeat. Glory is grief, rage is grief. And these things are intertwined together, because you’re always seeing what it is to be the killer, what it is to be the killed.

‘The Iliad’ translated by Emily Wilson

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I think you were touching on this earlier, but there’s been an engagement with The Iliad by a sector of the internet that might be called the alt right, one that aligns with a certain kind of pro-masculine ideology. Why would The Iliad be a symbol of that?

I’m just speculating, because I don’t know those people in real life. Half of them are probably robots. I can’t really comment on the psychology of the bots. I get that, of course, there are people who are looking for justification for their own vision of the world. The idea that there’s a sort of quasi-history—of course, it’s not actually historical—to imagine ancient history involved this wonderful land where there weren’t really any women, and nobody bothered listening to them, and that these texts were totally simplistic, and you didn’t have to bother listening to anyone who’s learned the languages or studied these texts—because, in fact, you just know it all from the fact that you’re a man…

It must be so nice to be born with an inherent understanding of Homer.

It must be great, yes, I know! I worked on it for decades, but these people just knew it instantly. Of course, I’ve been in class with those people too. I’ve taught them.

In the profile Judith Thurman wrote about you for The New Yorker last year, she wrote that past translators have often been “united in presuming that readers will be ‘improved’…by their encounter with Homer.” What is your stance on personal improvement via these texts?

I do actually sort of believe in some element of the transformative power of literature. But I don’t think one can approach that with an idea that you’re going to know what the transformation will look like. Transformation can be damaging, right? Literature can be damaging, it can be dangerous. I think there’s a reason why Plato’s Socrates wants to keep Homer and the tragic poets out of his semi ideal city. It makes you feel intense things. Texts like The Iliad are inviting discussion. And discussion can go any number of ways. From what I was saying to you a few minutes ago, it seems to me that one of the things the poem does is invite you to have a profound empathy, including for those who may seem enraged or abusive, as well as for those who are in grief—and those are often the same people. And that profound empathy is part of what The Iliad can potentially teach.

But I’m a teacher, I know how difficult teaching is. Very often what you think people are going to get out of something, is not what people actually get out. There’s an unpredictability about it. And yet, I do also think this is a totally worthwhile thing to do. The process of going through and figuring out in an open minded way: what is this text doing and what is it doing to me? That’s really important, and also important to do in a community where, such as a classroom, not everyone will necessarily think the same things. In terms of civics, that’s an important thing that our society needs to have.

Where do you fall in terms of banning certain “dangerous” books?

I absolutely do not think we should be banning any books, yeah. You know, John Milton’s Areopagitica: a book is not an absolutely dead thing. And I think the killing of books, the killing of those voices—rage so often comes from fear. The sense of having lost and therefore wanting to impose loss on others. It’s very sad, but it also can be very damaging.

You became an American citizen just a couple years ago, right?

Yes, this is going to be my first time voting in a presidential election!

Was that the primary impetus to become a citizen?

I’ve been thinking for years that I should, but I haven’t got around to it. Partly because my kids are teenagers, I thought, I’m setting a bad example if I’m somebody who’s part of a society but not participating in the democratic institutions of a society—not eligible for jury service, and opting out of things that I actually think are really important to institutions I believe in.

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