Translating Homer - A Review of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey
Emily Wilson: add her to the catalog of translators.
In 2018, a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released, this one translated by UPenn professor (what else? — you’re not allowed to touch Homer unless you have at least 15 years of formal education and 3 degrees) Emily Watson. Since I have been doing my own amateur translation of the Odyssey during this quarantine, I’ve collected quite a few translations. Much hullabaloo has been made of Watson’s translation because she is the first published female translator of the Odyssey in English. How this matters in any way, I’m not sure; it’s the same mistake Samuel Butler made way back in the early 20th Century when he went on a huge speaking tour trying to convince readers Homer was in fact a female. The problem is that both these theses do not address the text and do not affect the text. Whether Homer was a 200 pound Amazonian from Scythia or ten bards over ten generations coalescing a tradition of oral performances does not affect the Laurentianus text we have in front of us. So, let’s put Watson’s femininity to the side.
But there’s yet another speed bump on the cover, which is a copy of a Minoan fresco found in Knossos from 1500 BC entitled “Ladies of the Minoan Court,” and it depicts three women in profile. Now, I’m not usually one to over-analyze a cover, but when the cover has so little (aside from the vague Bronze-Age connections) to do with the book it binds, it’s hard not to comment. I’ve struggled to think where in the Odyssey three women gather and could think of no example aside from slaves in Odysseus’ household. So today’s political zeitgeist is rearing up big and we haven’t even gotten past the front and back flaps.
Thankfully, these distractions seem to be only the publisher’s and reviewers’. Wilson’s Translator’s Note is very well written, and right off the bat explains to us her purpose: “In planning to translate the poem into English, my first thoughts were of style…. Many modern poets in the Anglo-American tradition write in free verse.” Wilson highlights the fact that in Greek, the poem is written in six-footed lines — dactylic hexameters — which has a very distinct marching rhythm that propels the poem forward at an unstoppable pace. So Wilson’s first decision to to eschew free first and write in unrhymed blank verse in iambic pentameter. We all know this meter from Shakespeare and Chaucer; it’s the same meter as Paradise Lost. Her goal was to have a translation that “could match its stride to Homer’s nimble gallop.” I agree with Wilson: a translation of Homer must be in verse. Wilson attempts a second endeavor, which is to make her translation “modern” and “readable.” Her defense goes something like this: “My use of contemporary language — rather than the English of a generation or two ago — is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.” So, how does Wilson succeed on these two goals? My contention is that she succeeds but doesn’t excel. Her translation is admirable and highly readable, but, I don’t think a Keats will be writing a new praising poem, “On First Looking into Wilson’s Homer.” Her poetry is the poetry of a philologist, not a poet. Let’s look at some examples.
The first verses of Book XI will serve as a good exemplar. First, let’s throw out there Wilson’s translation. For context, Odysseus is relating his crew’s descent into Hades to talk to the prophet Tiresias.
“We reached the sea and first of all we launched,
the ship into the sparkling salty water,
set up the mast and sails, and brought the sheep
on board with us. We were still grieving, weeping,
in floods of tears. But beautiful, dread Circe,
the goddess who can speak in human tongues,
sent us a wind to fill our sails, fair wind
befriending us behind the dark blue prow.”
Now let’s look at the first English translation of Homer, George Chapman’s, which so inspired Keats and others.
“Arriv’d now at our ship, we launch’d, and set
Our mast up, put forth sail, and in did get
Our late-got cattle. Up our sails, we went,
My wayward fellows mourning now th’ event.
A good companion yet, a foreright wind,
Circe (the excellent utt’rer of her mind)
Supplied our murmuring consorts with, that was
Both speed and guide to our adventurous pass.”
Now let’s look at what I think is the best, most poetic translation, which comes from Alexander Pope. Pope didn’t speak a word of Ancient Greek, so he had to translate a Lain translation, but I believe his versification to be truly inspired, and, though it has the same meter as Wilson, he is much more comfortable in verse. He was a poet.
“Now to the shores we bend, a mournful train,
Climb the tall bark, and launch into the main:
At once the mast we rear, at once unbind
The spacious sheet, and stretch it to the wind:
Then pale and pensive stand, with cares oppress’d,
And solemn horror saddens every breast.
A freshening breeze the magic power supplied,
While the wing’d vessel flew along the tide;
Our oars we shipp’d: all day the swelling sails
Full from the guiding pilot catch’d the gales.”
Robert Fagles wrote his translation in the 90s, and his is the work of a true philologist, but still the one that most of us have read and enjoyed. It’s been around long enough to be ingrained in our cultural consciousness. So here’s his free-verse translation.
“Now down we came to the ship at the water’s edge,
we hauled and launched her into the sunlit breakers first,
stepped the mast in the black craft and set our sail
and loaded the sheep aboard, the ram and ewe,
then we ourselves embarked, streaming tears,
our hearts weighed down with anguish.”
Finally, let’s look at a true poet, Ezra Pound, who also never spoke a word of Greek and, as far as I can tell, like Pope, translated a translation. Here’s the First Canto, which is a translation of the same lines. Though by the end of the excerpt in Canto I, he diverges from this literal sort of translation, just like his translation of the Seafarer.
“And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.”
All of this is subjective, but Wilson’s translation, compared to the true poetic translation, suffers from the same stuffy lecture room morbidity as Fagles. Her translation is an academic endeavor and would get an A+ in a high-level Ancient Greek class or a class on meter, but there’s something missing. I do wonder how I would like it if I wasn’t slapped across the face by her publishers with modern politicalizations before I had the chance to read one word of her translation. I also wonder how I would have fared had I not delved too deeply into her Translator’s Note, which eventually digressed into apologizing over Homer’s masculinity, “normalizing the treatment of non-Western people as monsters” (apparently because one-eyed cyclopes who eat men whole are called “savages”), the representation of slaves, sexism and the use of the words “slut” and “whore,” and Penelope’s “strong… muscular hands” (?). Compare this to Pope’s post-script, in which he defended the Odyssey from a popular criticism of the day, which was that the Odyssey lost something compared to the Iliad. Pope says, “The Odyssey is a perpetual source of poetry: the stream is not the less full for being gentle; though it is true (when we speak only with regard to the Sublime) that a river, foaming and thundering in cataracts from rocks and precipices, is what more strikes, amazes, and fills the mind, than the same body of water, flowing afterwards through peaceful vales and agreeable scenes of pasturages.”
Instead of being a fount of inspiration for a new poem (for all translations are new works of art), Wilson made the mistake of many academics and saw the Odyssey as a puzzle to be worked out… how do I render this word or this phrase or this use of the participle as exactly as I can?
If I sort of rip off the cover and forget her Translator’s Note, I do enjoy her translation for what it is, and it will probably replace Fagles as my go-to translation for a quick Homer hit. But, in another three hundred years (Pope finished his translation in about 1725), poets and people searching for the Sublime will still be opening Pope, Chapman, and Pound. In three hundred years, I think the only reason people will open Wilson’s Homer is for sociological reasons, more of a reflection of 2018 USA than a piece of poetry. Her translation will be supplanted by the next “modern” with an agenda, and that is too bad. I will celebrate the day when a man or woman with naught but a bachelor’s degree and a passion produces a wonderful new and original poem based on the Odyssey, just like Christopher Logue did to the Iliad (I might do a part two to this post on Logue’s translation, “War Music,” which I think is sublime).