![]() “They will forget the things / the suitors made them do with them in secret.”Īs a woman, Wilson believes she comes to the Odyssey with a different perspective than translators who have gone before her. “Hack at them with long swords, eradicate / all life from them,” Odysseus says in Wilson’s translation. When Odysseus returns home and kills all the suitors, he also tells his son Telemachus to kill the slave women who had sex with (or were raped by) the suitors. “She’s constantly still being judged by, is she like him.” What’s more, the heroic-Penelope reading focuses on a wealthy woman at the expense of the many enslaved women in the poem, some of whom meet an untimely and brutal end. “I think there’s so many things wrong with that,” Wilson said. Some feminist readings of the Odyssey have tried to cast Penelope as heroic in her own way, sometimes by comparing her to Odysseus. It’s all about hiding herself, hiding her desires, and creating something whose only purpose is to get nowhere.” “His work always gets him somewhere,” Wilson told me. To buy time, she says she can’t marry until she finishes weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, but every night she undoes the day’s work, making the task last as long as she can. Penelope, meanwhile, has to wait around while boorish suitors drink and carouse in her family’s home, pressuring her to marry one of them. Odysseus may have trouble getting home, but at least he gets to travel the world and have sex with beautiful women like Calypso and Circe. This was one of the reasons I was drawn to the Odyssey as a teenager, and why I’ve returned to it many times over the years.īut the Odyssey is hardly a feminist text. Circe, Calypso, and the goddess Athena all play important roles. The Odyssey, however, devotes significant time to the life (and even the dreams) of Penelope. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself.Ī battlefield epic, the Iliad has very few major female characters. Translating the long-dead language Homer used - a variant of ancient Greek called Homeric Greek - into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. Her translation of the Odyssey is one of many in English (though the others have been by men), including versions by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and more. ![]() Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated plays by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides and the Roman philosopher Seneca. (The introduction to Wilson’s translation includes a longer discussion of the question of who “Homer” was.) While the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, the Odyssey picks up after the war is over, when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, is trying to make his way home.īoth poems are traditionally attributed to the Greek poet Homer, but since they almost certainly originated as oral performances and not written texts, it’s hard to tell whether a single person composed them, or whether they are the result of many different creators and performers refining and contributing to a story over a period of time. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.” Why it matters for a woman to translate the OdysseyĬomposed around the 8th century BC, the Odyssey is one of the oldest works of literature typically read by an American audience for comparison, it’s almost 2,000 years older than Beowulf. ![]() ![]() It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translation lays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. In the course of the poem, that man plots his return home after fighting the Trojan War, slaughters the suitors vying to marry his wife Penelope, and reestablishes himself as the head of his household.īut the Odyssey is also about other people: Penelope, the nymph Calypso, the witch Circe, the princess Nausicaa Odysseus’s many shipmates who died before they could make it home the countless slaves in Odysseus’s house, many of whom are never named.Įmily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. It says so right at the beginning - in Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation, for example, the poem opens with the line, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.” ![]()
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