Sirens first appear in the literary record with the Odyssey (written around 750 BCE) in a segment that’s much briefer than you’d think considering the cultural impact of these mystical, singing creatures. The linguistic or mythic precursors to the Sirens are somewhat mysterious, Wilson told Audubon. Many translators, she concluded, have let modern culture influence their translations, ultimately warping our image of these mythological creatures and the nature of their seductive power. In a recent Twitter thread, she dug into the linguistic origins of Homer's verses on the Sirens.

The story of Greek warrior-king Odysseus’s far-flung, 10-year journey home from the war in Troy was first translated into English in 1615 notably, Wilson is the first woman to publish a full English translation. This forgotten mythology was unearthed by Emily Wilson, a University of Pennsylvania classicist, whose historic new English translation of Homer’s Odyssey has won her accolades for its modern language and style. Today, Sirens are almost always represented as voluptuous mermaids, whose beauty and sexuality lure men to their deaths. But the Classical Greeks understood the Sirens differently: as bird-women, creatures that Mediterranean cultures traditionally associated with hidden knowledge. But somewhere along the way their form was confused. The story of the Sirens has inspired writers, poets, and artists for millennia. Those who did never left the island their bodies remained, rotting amid the flowers, for none who heard the Sirens' song could escape it. Once they heard it, they were enchanted they had no choice but to land and seek out the singers.

Those who passed in their black ships heard only voices, twining over the windless waves, singing a song that promised knowledge of all things. No buildings occupied its flowery meadows no fisherman worked its shores.

In the wine-dark expanse of the Aegean Sea, far from the halls of civilization, there was once a small island-or so Homer, the famed poet of Ancient Greece, wrote in his epic The Odyssey.

Sirens & muses a novel