Thursday, March 1, 2018

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey




On First Looking into Wilson’s Homer




A Review of Emily Wilson’s Translation of HomerOdyssey,

Including a Discussion with the Translator


Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2018





Homer
Translated by Emily Wilson
Norton, $39.95


Book clubs have always had a dubious reputation among elite readers and writers. From soi-disant elitist Jonathan Franzen deriding the Oprah Book Club for picking what he called “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” novels (note that Oprah’s second selection for the club was Toni Morrison’s staggering Song of Solomon), to bona fide elitist Vladimir Nabokov mocking book clubs in the introduction to his second English-language novel, Bend Sinister, serious literary folk have always turned their noses up at the amateur reading public, despite greatly profiting from it. Being almost totally antisocial, my own proclivities have mostly leaned in that direction too, but after moving to the East Coast a few years ago with no job, no contacts, and no plan—and being the virtual definition of the word amateur myself—I cautiously dipped my toe into a few area book clubs as a way of meeting likeminded people, and the results have been illuminating. A few groups were just people who wanted to get out of the house and gossip, with some attendees not even having read the book, while a few other groups treated the books with more seriousness and sophistication, and after some trial and error I eventually discovered a magic cabal of serious readers who were devoted to examining classic literature in profound depth. The first discussion I attended with this group was for Dante’s Inferno, and I was amazed to discover that the group’s facilitator had named her only child Dante. These were my people.


Homer and his homeys on Mount Parnassus
(detail), Raphael, 1509–10
We immediately went on to read the rest of Dante’s Comedy, which I was thrilled to reread along with such a diverse crew of barkmates, and since then we’ve gone on to discuss a virtually Dantean panoply of my old favorites: Virgil’s Aeneid, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Nabokov’s Lolita, among many, many others. We’ve also surged forward into territory that’s been new to me, finally getting me around to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, as well as the aforementioned Bend Sinister. The general trend these past two years with them has been toward digging deeper into the foundations, though, as the three-meeting Dante discussion eventually led us to a two-meeting discussion of the Aeneid, which has now finally led us back to Homer. We spent two pitched meetings on the Iliad, and then we went straight into the Odyssey, and in an amazing stroke of authorly coincidence, a new version of the Odyssey came out in the short time between our two meetings, and it was by a translator who works just blocks from our meeting-place: University of Pennsylvania Classics professor Emily Wilson. So we invited her to our second Odyssey discussion, and she agreed to attend, seemingly descending from the skies as if she were Athena.

Emily Wilson
Five years in the making, Wilson’s Odyssey stands unique among modern Homer translations—as well as among all English translations of the poem. Written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, upending the entrenched modern practice of creating a more freeform Homer, Wilson’s is also the world’s first translation of the Odyssey into English by a woman, an astounding anachronism in a time when there are more women than men in the Classics field, as well as far more women book-buyers and readers in general, with women being statistically more educated overall now than men. This Odyssey is a much belated achievement, and in Wilson’s bold hands it slashes through decades and centuries of overgrown brush to create a dramatically fresh and relevant Homer for the Trump/#MeToo era. Eschewing the circumlocutions that English translators have long used to mask much of Homer’s most unsettling elements, Wilson calls a slave a slave (rather than a “thrall” or a “maid”) and makes no attempt to soften the poem’s brutal sexism, classism, and imperialism. Our hero marauds and pillages, happily destroying cities and tearing apart families in his quest for fame and riches, and even in his own hometown his closest friends are merely his property.

Wilson also deliberately leaves in the narrative gaps and inconsistencies that other translators usually try to minimalize or smooth out. Answering the group’s questions about some of the poem’s imperfectly organized power relationships, Wilson stressed how she let the poem stand as close as she could to the original, letting Homer make his own mistakes:


It’s unclear how much you are supposed to interrogate the central fantasy of the poem, that Odysseus is going to be always in exactly the same position in his household, as the father, son, husband, slave-owner, and dominant member of the community on Ithaca…. In real life, things change; fathers get older, sons inherit, relationships change. The poem is in some ways committed to obscuring that fact, but it also reminds us of it. Odysseus, in his “disguise” as a wrinkled, bereft old beggar, looks the way he might in real life, if twenty years have passed; yet Athena, the goddess who steers the plot, insists that his “real” self is immune from time or age. I wanted readers of my translation to be able to see where the gaps are in the narrative, to notice the interesting tensions and contradictions.

Of course, Odysseus is also returning to Ithaca to become the things that he never really got to be before departing for the Trojan War twenty years earlier—he’d been a very young man then, with a newborn son and a still-active father, so he’d never really gotten to be a father, patriarch, or king yet—but Wilson allows us to debate these points ourselves by letting all the text’s confusions stand. Why isn’t Odysseus’s father, Laertes, still the king of Ithaca? And how would the line of succession work if Odysseus’s wife Penelope married one of her suitors? Would that man become king, or would Odysseus’s son Telemachus merely pay a dowry and become king himself? We asked Wilson all these questions, and she told us that her translation leaves these points deliberately unresolved because Homer doesn’t clear them up himself and in fact often implies widely contradictory lines of resolution.

Athena and Owl (detail), Mycenaean
In contrast to this laissez-faire attitude toward the original text’s foibles, Wilson necessarily has to make her own active decisions about how to marshal Homer’s farrago of Greek dialects—which in its Babel Tower of inherited lines and phrases ranges over hundreds of years and miles of ancient Greek culture—into a modern English that holds together as a unified and pleasurable reading experience. Her decision to recast Homer’s dactylic hexameter into blank verse is a bold and fascinating move, because like her choice to leave in all the poem’s archaic textual and moral problems, the form of her translation also stands as both a modern and a fascinatingly old-fashioned statement. Her cadences read as freshly as the latest Internet gossip, allowing readers to devour her seamless song in headily intoxicating gulps, but her deliberate and mesmerizing rhythms constantly remind us that this poem is also pure artifice, reproducing for modern readers a good portion of the formal artistic experience that ancient Greek listeners and readers would have had with the original. Discussing how as a pan-Greek poem Homer’s text would have sounded wholly artificial to every single person it attempted to encompass within its linguistic sphere, Wilson described to us how outlandish and archaic this work would have seemed even the day it was completed:


Imagine that there are some phrases which are Chaucerian English, and then there’s a little bit of Brooklyn English, and then there’s a little bit of Cockney in here, and then a little bit of Irish. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects, from different time periods and different places in the Greek-speaking world. . . People must have got accustomed to this artificial language, which was how poetry sounded.

Few modern translators attempt to cast Homer into a line-by-line mirror of the original, instead letting their verses spill over onto each other and spread out as they endeavor to capture the full scope of each line’s and book’s meanings. Robert Fagles’s acclaimed translation exemplifies this freeform/free-verse expansiveness, creating a prosy but very useful and enjoyable edition that captures much of Homer’s resonances within its brimming-over verses. Before Wilson’s version, the only line-by-line translation I’d read was by Richmond Lattimore—another poet-scholar who worked and taught just a few miles from where I live now—but his version doesn’t stick to any kind of regular meter. Compared to the approximately eighteen syllables of Homer’s dactylic hexameter (which includes leeway for occasional spondaic substitutions), Lattimore usually sticks to a mere fourteen syllables, and so despite giving himself great freedom with the rhythm, he necessarily has to condense Homer’s sense into a consistently tighter line each time. Taking this approach to an even further extreme, Wilson’s iambic pentameter telescopes this already dense condensation into a pithy ten syllables per line, making her identical number of lines about 5/7ths the length of Lattimore’s syllable-count, and about 5/9ths the length of Homer’s, but as with every other aspect of her translation, Wilson’s meter is a slashing knife that clears the area of many of her readers’ preconceived notions and expectations. Not everyone will approve of this highly pointed version of Homer, but the readers in our group—many of whom had read several other versions before, including the original Greek—were unanimously enthralled by her poetry’s intense economy.

Odysseus and the Sirens (detail)
Carthaginian mosaic, 260 CE
Another big departure in this translation is how Wilson eschews most of Homer’s ubiquitous metrical repetitions (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “the wine-dark sea,” “wily Odysseus,” etc.), instead creating a fresh and varied look at each epithet and cliche each time it comes up, which allows the reader to experience a different shade of it each time—shades that are all accounted for in the original but that get lost when a translator picks just one color and sticks with it for the entire poem. “Everyone knows Homer repeats,” Wilson told us as she explained her license with Homer’s deep-rooted rhythms:


Each of the epithets means multiple different things, and I translate them one way here and a different way somewhere else…. I think there’s a fake authenticity evoked by translators who say to themselves, “I’m going to just do it like this, because that’s what the dictionary says,” or who try to replicate Homeric repetition by a rigid repetitiveness of their own. You can still tell that it’s a repetitive text in my translation, and that’s still central to the experience of reading the Odyssey.

In addition to their function as conveniently snug metrical plug-ins, Homer’s repetitions served as a way of remembering, and of stressing to the readers and listeners of a much less literate epoch than ours what was important to remember. Repetitions in our era often serve a diametrically different purpose, both artistically and rhetorically, and Wilson made some of her most compelling points about the thrust of her new translation as she teased out its aggressive stress on fresh verbal expression: “I want to feel that you can feel every word,” she told us, in part addressing the poetic demands of her exceptionally keen and modern ear, which refuses to bore her readers with rote recitation, but her approach also strives to keep her readers awake and engaged in how it frames the things that it actually says:


If somebody says for the gazillionth time, “Crooked Hillary,” you’re not pausing and thinking, “What exactly does he mean by that? Let me go check some facts.” No, the purpose of repetition in that instance is, “Let me not check any facts. Let me glaze over.”

Judgement of Paris (after Rubens), by Eleanor Antin,
from the Helen’s Odyssey series, 2007
As the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, Wilson refuses to glaze over the elements of Odysseus and his world that earlier translators have either tacitly given a pass to or deliberately manipulated into self-perpetuating misnomers. Many translators fallaciously have Helen accuse herself of being a “slut,” while Wilson points out that Homer has her use the word “Dog-eyed,” a term that’s generally used to describe powerful female deities, such as the Furies, who “hound” people in the same way that Helen can. Not everyone will like Wilson’s stress on original expression, because it doesn’t reproduce Homer’s relentless refrains, a decision that elides a major part of his songs’ hypnotic songiness—a musical effect that’s now largely lost anyway, as a modern reading public won’t be hearing the poem performed with musical accompaniment—but no serious contemporary reader will miss the sedimentary accretions that centuries of male translators have spuriously built up around their own biases.

In forcing us to see and hear Homer afresh, Wilson conversely accentuates many of Homer’s own biases, and without at all detracting from his artistry’s thrilling grandeur or making us childishly resent his overwhelming poetic achievement, she allows her readers to interrogate the text much more clearly, because we can see and hear it so much more clearly now. Rather than trying to get us to accept Odysseus’s impious cruelties without question, and rather than assuming that we’re all signed on for the archaic assumptions of Homer’s warlord state, Wilson confronts her readers with a world that’s starkly unsavory and unfair:


It’s important to make sure that the poem’s double standards are visible, just as they are in the original. One set of double standards has to do with poor people, beggars, outlaws. We think that if they’re elite people or gods in disguise, they’re great, and we should be super nice to them, and if they’re real beggars… then we should beat them to a bloody pulp and humiliate them.

Charybdis, aka Vagina Dentata,
which is also the name of my favorite album
by the Police, artist unknown
Pointing out how many of the poem’s repeating tropes and images are deeply misogynist, Wilson told us, “I think there is also a focus on ‘How are women’s mouths dangerous?’” Addressing the Sirens, who lure seamen to their death with their voices, and Scylla, who devours passersby with her six heads, and Charybdis, a devouring whirlpool who’s all mouth, Wilson draws attention to the poem’s portrayal of the seductive and destructive power of feminine orifices. She also notes how at the end Telemachus slaughters the slave women who’d ostensibly betrayed their master by sleeping with Penelope’s suitors: He draws a rope around all their necks and hangs them as a group, silencing them in the most immediate and final sense. Nodding to Homer’s grotesquely clever artistry, Wilson also points out how this is part of his way of “tying up” the narrative’s loose ends.

A poster for a production of
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, 2012
Another of Wilson’s Herculean feats with this new edition is that she wrote all of its nearly one hundred pages of introductory material, added twenty-five pages of illuminating endnotes, compiled an erudite and handy glossary of every proper name found in the book, and consulted with a cartographer who contributed maps of Homer’s fantastical geography, essentially ushering this entire project into existence under her own aegis. It’s a staggering accomplishment, and each facet of it is superlative. Few verse translators should ever be trusted to write their own extra-textual material, because they’re either not scholarly enough, are too scholarly, are not good at organizing their ideas, or are simply not good prose writers. The go-to English-language team for the past few decades has been Robert Fagles’s lucid verse translations highlighted by Bernard Knox’s luminous prose, but Wilson’s voice and approach dazzle from page one of her introduction, making it seem difficult to believe that she could maintain such a momentum in the actual translation itself, which is in fact even more captivating.

Wilson’s combination of translation and extra-textual material opens such a window into the original text and reveals so many of the nuts and bolts of her creative and intellectual processes in transforming it into English that it allows even lay readers to come up with their own alternate solutions. She explains in her notes that Odysseus’s name derives from the word odussomai, which means “to be angry at [somebody]” or “to hate,” so why not refer to him as “odious” one of the four times that she notes Homer punning on his name? Likewise, when Odysseus is trying to pull himself out of the sea and onto the beach at Phaeacia, a wave washes over him and pulls him back, and Wilson notes that the verb for “covered” is kalypsen, a pun on Calypso, whom Odysseus has just escaped. Wilson translates the line as “A mighty wave rolled over him again,” but why not use the word “eclipsed,” to pun on Calypso’s name in English? As with all of the large-scale aspects of this edition of the Odyssey, not everyone will approve of every single one of Wilson’s word choices, but such is her illuminating power that she allows even us amateurs to see what she did and why, and to feel such a rich impression of what Homer intended us to feel.

Odysseus and Calypso, Max Beckmann, 1943
Because no translation could ever encompass all the contents and valences and effects of Homer’s vast and vastly alien poetic universe, there could never be a translation that could mirror all of his songs’ realms of gold, or that could fully satisfy every individual reader or scholar, or that could be in any way definitive or lasting, because translations are entirely ephemeral, as all things are, but Wilson has captured so much of him and us in her edition that it will likely make her the new go-to Homer translator of our time as she eclipses all of her gasping predecessors in her wavely surge. Both a Hercules and an Athena, Wilson left our book club overwhelmed and enlightened and eager for more. Feeling our enthusiasm—a word that in the original Greek means “possessed or inspired by a god”—she teased us at the end of the meeting by confirming that she’s now diving into the Iliad to complete the full Homeric picture. All we can say is, “Please come back and sing us another one.”


—David Wiley