Emily Wilson, trans., Homer: The Odyssey.
New York and London: Norton, 2018.
582 pp. ISBN 9780393089059 (hardcover).
Deborah H. Roberts
The opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey introduce us to the hero and his story and conclude with a request to the Muse: τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν (1.10: ‘From some point in this, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak to us too’.) The words ‘us too’ seem to convey the poet-narrator’s request to be allowed a turn at retelling, or to tell the story for yet another audience, but in two of the most distinguished and widely read recent translations (as also in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version) we find a rendering that marks poet and audience as belonging to a new historical moment and thus evokes not only the epic’s ancient audiences but the translator’s own: ‘Sing for our time too’ (Robert Fagles 1996); ‘And tell the tale once more in our time’ (Stanley Lombardo 2000). Emily Wilson, who joins their company with her engaging and thought-provoking new version of the Odyssey, suggests even more forcefully the contemporaneity of her own retelling in relation to a long tradition. Her wording, ‘Tell the old story for our modern times’, acknowledges at once the longevity and familiarity of the poem and the new era in which it will reach its latest readers.
Wilson’s introduction, which provides useful background, a reading of the poem and an explanation of her approach to translation, is attentive both to the poem’s antiquity and to the experience of its present-day readers. She provides us with a helpful account — always clear, never over-simplified — of the issues of date and authorship, of the epic’s origins in an oral tradition, of the world it pictures and of its historical contexts. Her interpretation of the Odyssey reconsiders long recognised themes (guests and strangers, family and home, gods and mortals) and addresses contemporary concerns (gender, class, power).
Wilson’s translation makes a formal commitment to the original: it has the same number of lines and is written in metrical verse. Where some translators view the poetry of earlier eras and other cultures as best translated into the dominant form of the receiving culture’s poetic discourse (free verse in our day), Wilson sees regular rhythm as an essential feature of Homer, and (with Allen Mandelbaum among recent predecessors) chooses unrhymed iambic pentameter, which she uses with a happy naturalness and to fine effect, as the best English equivalent to the epic’s dactylic hexameter. Wilson expects the reader to be aware of the sense of artifice that follows from this choice (82) and welcomes such awareness. She is, however, emphatically committed to ‘a style that echoes the rhythms and phrases of contemporary Anglophone speech’ (87), and although she doesn’t admit contractions and rarely makes use of obvious colloquialisms, she is careful to avoid both the kind of archaism once common in translations of classical texts and ‘the English of a generation or two ago’ (87).
Wilson’s own poetic register is varied, as is Homer’s, and readers may be struck first by a certain plainness, as when Athena’s description of Odysseus as trapped νήσῳ ἐν ἀμφιρύτῃ, ὄθι τ᾽ὀμφαλός ἐστι θαλάσσης (1.50), ‘on a sea-girt island, where the navel of the sea is’ (Murray-Dimock 1995) becomes ‘sea all around him, sea on every side’. But this plainness, like Homer’s own, is often powerful, as here and as in the sequence of monosyllables in Odysseus’ account of his near-return to Ithaca, aided by Aeolus’ winds but thwarted by his companions:
we were so near we saw men tending fires (10.30)
Because her translation uses a shorter metric line than that of the Greek and has the same number of lines, Wilson must condense the text. But brevity suits her aims in other ways; her rapid ‘narrative pace’, intended to ‘match its stride to Homer’s nimble gallop’ (82), also meets the modern reader’s expectations of story-telling. If she occasionally forgoes detail, she regularly attains – especially in descriptive passages, similes, and other heightened moments – the combination of simplicity and sublimity she aims for. Take for example the simile at the end of book 5:
ὡς δ᾽ ὄτε τις δαλὸν σποδιῇ ἐνέκρυψε μελαινῃ
ἀγροῦ ἐπ᾽ ἐσχατιῆς, ᾧ μὴ πάρα γείτονες ἄλλοι,
σπέρμα πυρὸς σώζων, ἵνα μή ποθεν ἄλλοθεν αὔοι,
ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς φύλλοισι καλύψατο(Odyssey 5.488-91)
And as a man hides a brand beneath the dark embers in an outlying farm, a man who has no neighbours, and so saves a seed of fire, that he may not have to kindle it from some other source, so Odysseus covered himself with leaves.
(Murray/Dimock 1995)
as when a man who lives
out on a lonely farm that has no neighbors
buries a glowing torch inside black embers
to save the seed of fire and keep a source –
so was Odysseus concealed in leaves.
(Wilson 2018)
Wilson retains throughout the typical framing of the epic simile (with variants of ‘As when… so’), but she chooses not to reproduce another characteristic feature of Homeric epic, the formulaic elements whose presence on many levels of the narrative is a pervasive mark of oral origins; she sees these repetitions as likely to be misread – or not read – by literate audiences. Wilson gestures towards tradition by introducing early in the poem one of the epithets most persistent in the western literary tradition (‘the wine-dark sea’, 1.183) and by offering a series of elegant variations on another, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, but when she translates the repeated formulae that describe characters as they speak or respond to others, her variations are significant and reflect her sense of what the context calls for. In this respect her practice is similar to that of several predecessors, especially Lombardo — a translator equally committed to contemporary English idiom — but goes somewhat further, in keeping with her view that translation should in a strong sense reflect the translator’s own search for meaning and attention to subtext (88). Consider her depiction of Telemachus in the first two books of the poem, as he engages in conversation with the hated suitors, with Athena disguised as a family friend, with his mother Penelope, with his old nurse Eurycleia and with other Ithacans. The line used most often of his responses is:
τὴν/τὸν δ᾽αὖ Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος ἀντίον ηὔδα
Then wise Telemachus answered her/him (Murray-Dimock 1995)
The participle πεπνυμένος means wise, shrewd, sensible, clear-headed. Wilson adds semantic and syntactic variations that suggest the character’s different thoughts and feelings at different moments.
Telemachus said moodily, ‘My friend’ (1.230)
Sullen Telemachus said, ‘Mother, no’ (1.345)
Telemachus, his mind made up, replied (2.208)
Wilson’s modernity is most striking in her realisation as translator of an interpretive approach very much conditioned by contemporary concerns. She not only points out in her introduction what she calls ‘the cracks and fissures in [the poem’s] constructed fantasy’ (88) and draws our attention to its various hierarchies and structures of power, but is also committed to using the translator’s agency to bring these features of the poem home to the reader. Her version of the poem’s opening lines is both exemplary of her practice and programmatic:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times,
find the beginning.
All the other Greeks
who had survived the brutal sack of Troy
sailed safely home to their own wives – except
this man alone. Calypso, a great goddess,
had trapped him in her cave; she wanted him
to be her husband.
Before Odysseus is named, he is described in the opening line as polytropos, ‘of many turns’, which may be understood to refer either to Odysseus’ meandering travels or to his characteristic versatility and cunning. Some translators stay close to the Greek and thus allow for both literal and figurative senses; Odysseus is the ‘man of many ways’ for Richmond Lattimore (1965), and for Fagles ‘the man of twists and turns’. In a few translations, the physical sense prevails – Philip Stanhope Worsley, who in 1861 produced a translation in Spenserian stanzas, renders it as ‘wandering’ – but most take the word as a description of Odysseus’ character. He is a man ‘ready at need’ (Butcher and Lang 1879), a man ‘who was never at a loss’ (Rouse 1937), ‘that resourceful man’ (Rieu 1946, Green 2018) ‘that man skilled in all ways of contending’ (Fitzgerald 1961), ‘a man of many wiles’ (Mandelbaum 1990): the dominant sense here is of Odysseus as both clever and variously capable. Wilson too focuses on Odysseus’s character rather than his travels. But in rendering polytropos as ‘complicated’, she offers a different sort of evaluation, suggesting not that Odysseus has certain qualities, but that the qualities he has make of him someone we must regard as complicated, perhaps because they are at odds with each other, perhaps because they make him morally complex. In so doing she anticipates not only her own reading of the Odyssey, but the mixed treatment of Odysseus in the later literary tradition.
Wilson’s translation of the opening lines similarly emphasises Odysseus’ responsibility for the loss of his companions. The Greek tells us that for all his efforts to bring them home, Odysseus did not rescue his men, although he longed to (οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ 1.6). Where most translators offer something like ‘he could not save them’, Wilson writes that ‘he failed to keep them safe’; she omits the emphatic (and exculpatory) claim that ‘they were destroyed by their own recklessness’, and calls them not just ‘fools’ but ‘poor fools’. In later passages, when Tiresias and Circe predict that Odysseus may return home ὀλέσας ἄπο πάντας ἑταίρους (11.114, 12.141) a phrase usually translated as ‘having lost all his companions’, Wilson chooses a rendering also in keeping with the Greek but more incriminating: he will return home ‘having destroyed’ or ‘having caused the death’ of his companions.
Finally, Wilson’s translation of lines 11-12, ἔνθ᾽ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες, ὅσοι φύγον αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον,/ οἴκοι ἔσαν (‘Now all the rest, as many as had escaped sheer destruction,/were at home’, Murray/Dimock), is unusual in its rendering of αἰπὺν ὄλεθρον (‘sheer destruction’) as ‘the brutal sack of Troy’, which turns our attention from the misfortunes of the Greeks to their harsh treatment of the Trojans. The two are linked in the tradition, in which the gods punish the homebound Greeks for their impious behaviour at Troy, and we will be reminded again of Odysseus’ own role in the sack when the story of the Trojan horse is told in books 4 and 8. But Wilson’s translation insists that the reader bear in mind from the outset not only what Odysseus suffered but also what he inflicted.
As the poem proceeds, we encounter other such shifts of emphasis and sympathy, notably in book 9, where Odysseus begins the narrative of his adventures and tells the story of the Cyclops. Wilson’s reading of this episode ‘as an attempt to justify Greek exploitation of non-Greek peoples’ (22, cf 88) and her critical description of Odysseus’ behaviour there are further realised by the title she provides (‘A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave’ – contrast Fagles’s ‘In the Cave of the One-Eyed Giant’). Her suggestion that ‘we may well see him as an unreliable narrator’ (22) is reinforced by her translation in the book’s formulaic opening line of πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς (resourceful/cunning Odysseus) as ‘Wily Odysseus, the Lord of Lies’.
The wording of Wilson’s translation sometimes asks us to reflect on modern analogues to the poem’s realities: a character may be called a migrant, or a homeless person, and she draws a line between the world of the poem, the ancient Greeks’ ‘own growing dominance’ in relation to non-Greeks (22) and modern colonialism when she has Menelaus use the words ‘driving out the natives’ (4.177) or has Odysseus describe the Cyclops’ island as a potential ‘colony’ (9.131). But perhaps her most remarked-upon choice as translator is the attention she draws to an ancient reality with her regular identification of the many people who perform household tasks — from important characters like Eurycleia and Eumaeus to the nameless servants who pervade the poem, including the minor divinities who serve Circe — as slaves. Wilson notes that the term ‘slave’ is less specific than the array of terms used in the text, but for her such specificity is outweighed by ‘the need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery, and to mark the fact that the idealised society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted’ (88-89). In some instances this means that the translation not only detracts from specificity but diminishes status, perhaps because Wilson wants to avoid any glossing over of the slave’s fundamentally low standing, as when (at 15.138) an αἰδοίη ταμίη (‘respected housekeeper’) in the house of Menelaus becomes ‘another lowly girl’, or when Athena describes Eumaeus not as someone who has affectionate feelings (ἤπια οἶδεν, 15.39) towards Telemachus but as someone ‘who is better than most slaves’.
As with other recent receptions (notably Margaret Atwood’s 2005 The Penelopiad), Wilson draws our attention specifically to the horrifying execution, ordered by Odysseus and carried out in even more brutal fashion by Telemachus, of the twelve slave girls who have slept with the suitors. By using the word ‘rape’ in passages where the Greek speaks of the suitors as having ‘forcibly dragged’ or ‘forcibly slept with’ slave women (16.108-9, 22.37), Wilson makes stark the tension in the poem between two views: that the suitors have forced themselves sexually on the women of the household and that these particular women have made a choice that marks them as disloyal. And when Odysseus commands their death, Wilson makes sure that we bear in mind (and that Odysseus acknowledges) the lack of agency her translation has stressed: instead of saying that they will forget the sexual pleasure (Aphrodite) ‘which they had with the suitors when they lay with them in secret’ (Murray-Dimock), Odysseus declares that ‘They will forget the things/ the suitors made them do with them in secret,/through Aphrodite’ (22.445-6).
I have had the pleasure of teaching Wilson’s translation in a course on classical reception and of hearing it read aloud by multiple readers including Wilson herself in a twelve-hour Odysseymarathon. In both contexts the translation proved accessible and enjoyable. The marathon readers, most of them students, handled its language and metre clearly and expressively, and the audience listened for hours with undiminished attention and delight. My class readily took to the translation and responded thoughtfully and with questions of their own to its poetry and its provocations. Every new class, like every new translation, brings with it a new experience of teaching the poem, but this class, with this translation, did so more decidedly. If Emily Wilson has like other recent critics drawn her readers’ attention to troubling complications in this hero, his story and his world, she has also by deliberately realising both subtext and interpretation as text made of Odysseus’ story a more strikingly new story for ‘our modern times’. As she says in the conclusion of her introduction, which advises readers to invite this wandering stranger to sit by their fire: ‘Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect’.
Works Cited:
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Canongate, 2005.
Butcher, S.H. and Lang, A., trans. The Odyssey of Homer. London: Macmillan, 1879.
Fagles, Robert, trans. Homer: The Odyssey. Viking Penguin, 1996..
Fitzgerald, Robert, trans. Homer: The Odyssey. Doubleday, 1961.
Green, Peter, trans.. Homer, The Odyssey. University of California Press, 2018.
Lattimore, Richmond, trans. The Odyssey of Homer. Harper & Row, 1965.
Lombardo, Stanley, trans. Odyssey: Homer. Hackett, 2000.
Mandelbaum, Allen, trans. The Odyssey of Homer. University of California Press, 1990.
Murray, A.T., trans., rev. Dimock, George E. Homer, Odyssey, 2 vols. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Rieu, E.V., trans. Homer: The Odyssey. Penguin, 1946.
Rouse, W.H.D., trans. The Story of Odysseus. Nelson, 1937.
Worsley, Philip Stanhope, trans. The Odyssey of Homer, 2 vols. Blackwood, 1861.
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Comments
I have already read Homer's 'Odyssey' in class. I know this is not only an ancient literary epic but also a real historical source for studying so-called Homeric period of ancient Greece. I'd love to read it again in Emily Wilson's translation. After all, it is interesting how the 'Odyssey' was translated into a hexameter. I remember, that I read this work with great enthusiasm, but when I was given the task of preparing a small written research based on Homer's work, it turned out to be a difficult task. Fortunately, I found a good site https://assignmentbro.com/us/solve-my-assignment and received a great ready-made paper. It helped me understand more aspects and problems that can still be revealed to me. I hope that with this translation of 'Odyssey', I will be able to solve my assignment and better investigate the historical period described by Homer.
Link / ReplyI'm an utter amateur, so take my criticism with a grain of salt.
Link / Reply"this man alone. Calypso, a great goddess,"
Am I the only person bothered by the scansion of this line? Why did Wilson include an extra syllable? It spoils the rhythm for me, and it's only the first page.
Someone, please convince me that I'm wrong.
Tell the old story for our modern times’, acknowledges at once the longevity and familiarity of the poem and the new era in which it will reach its latest readers.
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