Written in iambic pentameter verse, Emily Wilson’s book is a lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer’s “nimble gallop”, bringing an ancient epic to new life. Or is it?
I found it a delight to read with a style that’s appealing and a narrative that is fast paced and yes, enchanting. The introduction material and notes are excellent. . Every discussion I’ve read is prefaced with the fact that hers is the first English translation of the poem by a woman, even though Caroline Alexander’s Iliad (2005) was published to much less hoopla, as was Sarah Ruden’s Aeneid in 2009.
Suddenly, perhaps because of a growing MeToo era, an d with an interest in women’s voices, Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey is everywhere. I hope that all new translations of ancient works are greeted with such interest. Its fascinating the discourse over Sydney Nolan’s epic has spawned so much reaction as to generate a heavy dive into classical interpretation. Her Odyssey is more readable, more alive with a dictionary that’s straightforward and the lines shorter. The effect is to turn the book into a quick-paced page turner. What’s not to love about her translation, as it is an open invite for dialogue.
After all, her ubiquity in the media reminds us that we are dealing with one person’s version of the Odyssey. Translation is always an act of interpretation, considering the poem itself is concerned with ambiguity and issues of understanding, the Odyssey often points to the difficulty of interpreting words and stories, delighting in the notion of signs the have the need of interpretation, and requires readers to make sense of its mysteries by themselves.
For this humble reader, there are too many colloquialisms in her translation which is subjective as compared to historian Fagles’ translation. The work of Homer is among all its wonderful qualities, also extremely repetitive. Every time a character turns around, he has to drink sweet wine, get his feet washed with oil and sacrifice a bull to a fickle G-d. Sure its a signature of oral storytelling as the familiar phrases are convenient memory handles for the story teller and the listener alike. Probably the most famous of those repetitions is the arrival, every morning, of ”rosy-fingered dawn”, which sounds surreal as an image. EmiIy Wilson’s crisp and musical version is a cultural landmark. Armed with a sharp scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculine readings of the poem which will change the form as it is read in English.
Clarity and clean lines are her watchwords. Her epic words are not grandiose or pomposity. I love the way her Odyssey scrapes the barnacles of Homer’s hull. Not only has it been a long time coming from letting women learn the classics in the 17th century because the classics were closely associated with elite institutions that came to symbolise a certain kind of cultural and political power that powerful men were loathe to give up. Who knows what seditious secondary readings they might have concocted if women had unmitigated access to the Greek Gospels…. considering Homer’s was in Greek. Against this background of misogyny and fear it is surprising that the first English translation of the Odyssey had only come out in 2017
Classicist Emily Wilson understated version sweeps away much of the nostalgic detritus from the tale of Odysseus’s wandering way home after the Trojan War. If you’ve come away with the vague idea that much of the Greek canon took place in some idyllic part of pre-contemporary England, what with the harks and hails, thous and thees, woes and alases, fair maids and noble lords, the puzzling fact that everyone’s first initial seems to be o. Why call them”handmaids” when they were slaves? Wilson does have a certain double sensibility that often translates male grandeur with a female half-smile. Her nuance suits Homer’s tricksy, layered tale of Odysseus’s voyage, which is told in nested stories that often contradict each other and is accompanied by the fantastic lies he tells his hosts as he is washed from island to island.
She was right about something. The rebellious and wild potential of translation, in all its morphing and slippery layers, its winks and double meanings.
Highly recommend.
