Book Review - The Odyssey, translation by Emily Wilson

[felicitygs]

[book on goodreads]

Where to even start with this one?

Let's start with why I even heard of this translation: it is the first published translation by a woman of The Odyssey. Why did I actually want to read it? Well, a good start is how she discusses her translation choices:

“What gets us to ‘complicated,’ ” Wilson said, returning to her translation of polytropos, “is both that I think it has some hint of the original ambivalence and ambiguity, such that it’s both ‘Why is he complicated?’ ‘What experiences have formed him?’ which is a very modern kind of question — and hints at ‘There might be a problem with him.’ I wanted to make it a markedly modern term in a way that ‘much turning’ obviously doesn’t feel modern or like English. I wanted it to feel like an idiomatic thing that you might say about somebody: that he is complicated.”

or what about (from the same interview):

But Wilson, in her introduction, reminds us that these palace women — “maidservants” has often been put forward as a “correct” translation of the Greek δμωαι, dmoai, which Wilson calls “an entirely misleading and also not at all literal translation,” the root of the Greek meaning “to overpower, to tame, to subdue” — weren’t free. Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. Young female slaves in a palace would have had little agency to resist the demands of powerful men. Where Fagles wrote “whores” and “the likes of them” — and Lattimore “the creatures” — the original Greek, Wilson explained, is just a feminine definite article meaning “female ones.” To call them “whores” and “creatures” reflects, for Wilson, “a misogynistic agenda”: their translators’ interpretation of how these females would be defined.

But then there were the samples I kept seeing, again and again, of how clean and crisp and lovely her choices were, a poetry that had a rhythm and feel and down to earth joy to them that so many of the versions I'd had to read in high school and university lacked. From the same interview, we have this:

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.

Or perhaps, one of my favourite turns from the entire poem, which I ended up having to go back to just to make sure I saved it:

But when eh was all clean and richly oiled,
dressed in the clothes the young unmarried girl
had given him, Athena made him look
bigger and sturdier, and made his hair
grow curling tendrils like a hyacinth.

So, when the book was making the rounds in the press, I kept it open in a tab, so one day I'd remember to buy a copy to read, and then, eventually, I did.

And what a lovely choice that turned out to be.

It is vital to read Wilson's commentary at the start; it's a join to page through her notes at the end of the work, on various translation choices. She knows so much, and I could read a thousand more pages of her setting this poem within its context. A good preface for these older literary classics is worth far more than its weight in gold (especially considering I read it on a Kindle, where it has no weight at all!), and this one is a delight for helping explore the culture that The Odyssey is a part of.

With all of that in mind, and a genuinely pleasing poetry to read, I finished this text feeling as if I actually, for once, enjoyed this poem in a way that had been entirely blocked off to me. The context helped so much, and made it that much easier to pick out themes throughout the work.

For so much of this work, it grapples with what makes hospitality--how guests should be treated, how guests should act, how they should not be treated, how they should not act. So often, we see Odysseus violate these rules just as much as his home is violated, and no where more obviously than with the Cyclops, perhaps one of the most gruesome sections of the poem.

There's another thing--the violence in this work is deeply, shockingly visceral. Without it being obfuscated behind flowery words, it practically leaps off the page. There were several sections where I had to take a break just to give a hearty "Odysseus chill" on Twitter. I think it speaks to Wilson's craft she was able to take these old bits of Greek and recapture that feeling in English across so many hundreds of years.

But, of course, it's not just the violence that is starkly described--there is beauty too, like how she describes Odysseus' hair, in the dawn, in Circe's home. I cannot overstate just how enjoyable it is to read this, and at home, I'd often read aloud several verses, just to feel how well it fit within my mouth, and fall a little more fully into it.

I think she handled the repetition that would have been necessary for an aural audience to a reading audience quite well; certain turns of phrase show up again and again, like touchstones, but often they are tweaked just a bit. In her forward, she mentions mining the meanings of these words, changing little bits here and there to make it so it would not read as if it was the same thing, over and over again.

Honestly, if you've ever wanted to read The Odyssey and struggled, I cannot recommend this translation more highly. I wish so much it had been what we had available to us when I had to read it! It's a pleasure to read, and I'm sure I could write a couple thousand more words about it, but this is a review, not an analysis.

five out of five, and I look forward to exploring more of what Wilson has translated/written and will translate/write in the future.