Homer and the Decisions of a Translator

 Sing, Muse, of how dribs and drabs of news have trickled out regarding casting decisions in Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie of the Odyssey, and as a result Twitter exploded into long discussions of whether reading Emily Wilson's "woke" translation of the Odyssey ruined Nolan's chances of making a good movie.

The root of the conversations were often stupid, but it has actually been really fun reading some of the intelligent people discussing Homer and how the work of translation is done.

While many of the Twitter objections have been overwrought, I actually would not necessarily recommend Emily Wilson's recent translation of the Odyssey, due to the critiques which John Kuhner (classicist and proprietor of the Bookmarx bookstore in Steubenville) discusses in this piece from when the translation came out.

The thing to recommend Wilson's translation is that she writes in well turned iambic pentameter, which compared to many of the less structured verse choices made by modern translators is refreshing.  The two key problems, however, are first that she committed to having a line-for-line translation of the Greek despite having much shorter lines:

The best way to get a sense of how pervasive Wilson’s reductive approach is simply to calculate the kind of constraint she set herself. The Odyssey consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, with lines between thirteen and seventeen syllables and averaging about fifteen. Wilson also has 12,110 lines, but her line averages ten syllables. And this is the reason why her work reads so much more quickly than any other version: her poem is shorter than the original by a third. This is felt everywhere, first of all as an increase in the poem’s velocity—which I appreciate—and second as a kind of stripping away of everything but the book’s plot—which I felt with increasing distress as I proceeded. In almost every line some kind of nuance is shed. In many ways, her work should be counted as an abridgement of the Odyssey more than a translation per se.

And second that she has some fairly strong viewpoints on what it means to do a feminist and anti-colonialist translation which result in some odd choices.  The oddest choice in this regard seems to be her decision to regard the cyclopses as having been victims of colonialism:

Homer describes Polyphemus, who eats six of Odysseus’s men raw, as “athemistos”—literally something like “without a sense of divine right or wrong,” but “lawless” usually does the job in English. Lack of respect for themis, true right and wrong, is posited by Homer’s contemporary Hesiod as the cause of all human evil. Wilson, however, decides in her introduction that the story of the Cyclops is really a story about colonialism (“the Polyphemus episode seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization”), and hence it is her duty to resist any tendency to dehumanize the sixty-foot-tall, one-eyed, flesh-eating son of the sea-god. She translates athemistos as “maverick,” an offense not only against sensibility, but also against the aesthetics of her poem—the word leaps off the page, wildly inappropriate to Wilson’s typical register. Needless to say I just about fell over laughing. And huperphialos, which she is happy to render “insolent” and “arrogant” when it comes to the suitors, she changes to “highminded” for Polyphemus. The sight of drunk Polyphemus vomiting up wine and chunks of human flesh in his cave was not enough to get Wilson to shy away from calling him “highminded.” I suppose ideology is not dead. She also uses the odd circumlocution “the Cyclopic people” for the Greek plural Cyclopes, which also jars. The shame of all this is that it subverts her own thesis: she claims the passage has some relevance to colonization. It’s much easier for a student to see the resonance between this episode and Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the Law” if athemistos is translated “lawless.” But as I have said, it is very hard to do any kind of close reading of Homer using Wilson’s translation alone. It simply is not faithful enough.

These strike me as good reasons to go with another translation of the Odyssey, of which there are several good ones.  MrsDarwin recently read (and I have in my reading pile) the translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, and he both offers a more structured verse form and also does not radically shorten the poem. Mendelsohn has also been one of those who has contributed some fascinating thoughts on translating Homer on Twitter lately:

However, although I would not recommend Wilson's Odyssey, she seems to have taken the issue of length to heart when producing her Iliad (which came out after her Odyssey -- perhaps in part because while the publisher could trumpet Wilson's Odyssey as the first major translation by a woman, Caroline Alexander had just put out a well received translation of the Iliad in 2015.)  When Wilson did her translation of the Iliad, she did not limit herself to the same number of lines as the Greek original, and so she did not have the radical shortening which the Odyssey suffered from.

I'm reading Wilson's Iliad now, and it's a very good read, as John Kuhner noted in his review of that volume when it came out.

Wilson does, of course, still have her point of view.  But since she's not radically shortening the poem, her choices as to exactly which of the possible range of meanings from the Greek she chooses to use in her translation is less of a bias.

To give a sense of how three different translators take a passage which can be interpreted in slightly different ways, I picked a passage in Iliad, Book 6 where Hector confronts his brother, Paris, who has just ducked out of a duel with Menelaus (admittedly due to the interference of Aphrodite, but Paris is a heel) and then has a brief exchange with Helen, who is in the awkward position of being the bone of contention in this war which has already stretch on for ten years.

Here is Helen's self deprecating speech to Hector in the classic (and fairly literal) translation by Richard Lattimore from 1951:

but Helen spoke to him in words of endearment: ‘Brother 

by marriage to me, who am a nasty bitch evil-intriguing,

how I wish that on that day when my mother first bore me

the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me

to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea deep-thundering

where the waves would have swept me away before all these things had

    happened.

Yet since the gods had brought it about that these vile things must be,

I wish I had been the wife of a better man than this is,

one who knew modesty and all things of shame that men say.

But this man’s heart is no steadfast thing, nor yet will it be so

ever hereafter; for that I think he shall take the consequence.

But come now, come in and rest on this chair, my brother,

since it is on your heart beyond all that the hard work has fallen

for the sake of dishonoured me and the blind act of Alexandros,

us two, on whom Zeus set a vile destiny, so that hereafter

we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future.’

In Caroline Alexander's translation, the term of abuse "kunos" which is connected to the word for dog (and thus Lattimore's translation as "bitch" which is an abusive term for a woman derived from the term for a female dog) is translated more literally, though if one is used to how some cultures view dogs negatively it's not hard to see what's going on.

But Helen addressed him softly:

“Brother-in-law of me, an evil-thinking dog that strikes cold fear,

would that on the day when first my mother gave me birth,

some foul-weather storm of wind carrying me had borne me

to a mountain or a swelling wave of the tumultuous sea,

where the wave would have swept me away before these deeds had

    happened.

But since the gods have so decreed these evils,

then would I were the wife of a better man,

a man who knew what righteous blame was and the many reproaches

    that men make.

But the wits of this man here are not steady now, nor will they be

hereafter; and I think that he will reap the fruit of this.

But come now, come in and take your seat upon this stool,

brother-in-law, since the toil of fighting has mostly stood astride your heart

because of me, a dog, and Alexandros’ infatuation,

we on whom Zeus has laid this evil fate, so that even after this

there will be songs of us for men to come.”

And then finally, here's is Emily Wilson's translation:

Then Helen spoke and tried to make him stay.

“Brother-in-law, I am a source of fear

and source of evil strategy—a dog.

I wish that at the start, right when my mother

gave birth to me, a cruel gust of wind

had borne me to the mountains, or the waves

of loud-resounding sea, and swept me off,

before all this could happen. But the gods

ordained these troubles as they came to pass.

I wish I shared a bed with someone better,

a man who understood the condemnation

his actions would incur from other people.

This man has no good sense, no self-control,

and no capacity to change. One day

he surely will receive his retribution.

But come now, brother, sit down here with me.

You have endured the greatest pain and grief

because of us—because of me, a dog,

and Paris with his folly and delusion.

Zeus set an evil lot upon us all,

to make us topics of a singer’s tale

for people in the future still unborn.”

What I'd note here is:

If you're trying to really get a feel for a Greek (or if you've trying to check your schoolboy translation) the Lattimore approach gives you something close to a word by word or phrase by phrase translation, which still has feeling and pungency.  He's not just translating mechanically, there's art to it, but there is an alien feel to the Lattimore translation which feels like (and often is) the Greek peeking through at you.

Caroline Alexander takes the concepts and produces a translation which is in English, not that Greek-peeking-through feel of Lattimore.  It's a more readable translation, but it still feels translation-ish.

Wilson has a drive and power of its own which is fully English but also puts through the meaning of the original.  Yes, she (like Alexander) chooses not to go from "dog" to "bitch" even though in some idiomatic sense that might convey abuse better.  Wilson does not want to use phrases she sees as misogynist.  But you're not really missing any meaning and there is a clarity and drive to her verse which is missing in the other two.

I'm very much enjoying my progress through Wilson's Iliad, and if you're looking for a translation of that specifically it's a solid modern verse choice.