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’s description of gifts that Odysseus received from the Phaeacians. “We’ll swim there,” she said.

On our way to Stavros, we’d passed cultivated valleys and hillsides terraced with vineyards and olive trees. But the landscape, like Homer’s prosody, is mostly rugged and austere. (Ithaca is “only fit for goats,” the poet tells us.) It wasn’t hard for Wilson to imagine the tar-blackened ships that Odysseus’ father beached in its secluded coves, and the treasure he plundered stowed in its mountain grottoes. “Old Laertes was basically a pirate,” she said fondly.

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

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. “That sound takes you straight back to Homer,” she said.

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’s, in 1616. But, she cautioned, “you can’t and shouldn’t try to make all that history—layer upon layer—visible in the text. My goal was to evoke an experience like the original, using the language of the people who will read it.”

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, from the verb meaning “to sew songs together.” Their diction was stately, but audiences of every class and age listened raptly to Homer’s graphic imagery and impassioned dialogue, scored to a propulsive beat. Wilson’s ambitious project of the past decade has been to re-democratize both the poetry and its audience. Her “folk poetics,” as she calls them, are a reproach to predecessors who have “turned a great poem into a hard one,” or into a poem of their own. She rejects historical reënactments that “archaicize” Homer’s diction—“he didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks”—and modern renovations that expand his footage. The opening of Robert Fagles’s 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’s voice to fix itself in your memory. “I write for the body,” she told me.

As a brotherhood of nomads, the bards must have imbued their songs with a yearning for nostos: the homecoming that crowns a hero’s journey. Homer keeps us in suspense about Odysseus’ nostos. He left Ithaca unwillingly to fight the Trojans and spent his youth at war. His return is disrupted by misfortunes, but “dreadful, beautiful, divine” 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’s shore: