The Odyssey dawns again.
What's the fuss about Emily Wilson's recent translation of Odyssey? I suppose that the reader, mon frère, didn't let the typhoon of any political agenda drag him away from the foot of Mount Parnassus, and by supposing so I suppose also that he already acquainted himself with the fact that Wilson is the first first english woman to translate the poem. Maybe, considering the releases, essays, reviews and interviews struting on clean websites, he already knows it too much, that is to say, he reached that point at which to celebrate the nice edition published by Norton gradually becomes the monotonous chatter of those who can only look back to the more-than-sixty translations before and repeat, through all the eternity, the same introductory notes and the same bottom lines, the same factors and statistics, the same laurels and, principally, the same narrative: Emily Wilson as the feminine paragon of the human race, something that in the left-wing jargon looks like a prize for, if at all, finally existing — and not, how curious, and not for doing what she did.
It's not the first time I make those critiques, and unfortunately it won't be the last. In fact I do believe that her translation, set against the others, reveals some facts about the male empire across the centuries. "We should be shocked that the English-speaking world hasn't had a translation by a woman", Wilson said in a lecture gave at Harvard months ago. And many of us can predict where the argument wants to reach: for a woman of, say, nineteen century, sit at a desk, hold on the pen, face the blank sheet, access a higher ground and, once there, evoke the Daughters of Memory in order to transform a sequence of sigmas and alphas and iotas in a robust heroic couplet; this was, to say it generously, unlike to happen. We've got wonderful woman translators in the nineteen century and even earlier: Elizabeth Barrett Browning knewed some great amount of greek, at 27 translating Aeschylus; Marquis of Alorna, an important neoclassical portuguese poet, translated the first book of the Iliad in ottava rima (the first, as long as I know, translation to portuguese); and Anne Dacier, french, eighteen century, not just released her version of the Iliad but also clashed with Houdar de La Motte's previous condensed one.
But is it all, stick out that and then run to the hills? There is a implicit backlash in this kind of praise: when everything you have to say about a woman's work is the fact that the author, according to the black-and-white photo on the back, is somehow a woman against a male background, then you are, as I suggested before, underestimating the importance of her work. When I first knew that the translation was about to come, yes, my reaction was the same, to think that the gender-thing is the utmost feature in this project. However, discussing with a friend (more inflammely than I would liked), I slowly began to meditate the question with a more rational enthusiasm. Ok, 'tis fine, gender matters, but it cannot only matters and it cannot be the only factor. As Wilson by herself has tweeted months ago, we don't praise male translations by saying that, hélas!, they are male translations. So why do it with hers? And, more than that, why should we presume that the gender-thing is the only factor acting here? To recognize multiple barriers is to give concreteness to other kinds of exclusion.
Wilson, interviewed by the Western Canon Podcast, asserted that at least four causes can be appointed for this delay in publishing a translation by a woman. Of course, after all, that nowadays we have womens that perfectly fits in the project: Sarah Ruden, who not just published in 2008 the first english version of the Aeneid by a woman, but also in 2005 translated the Homeric Hymns; Caroline Alexander and her also pioneer version of the Iliad in 2015; or Anne Carson, a skilfull poet who gave to us some years ago a translation of all fragments of Sappho. And what a splendid work, by the way, Carson maded. You can put a book like that in a bag and pass a significant part of your terrestrial journey being revigorated by simple chunks as "mythweaver". The case with Homer, however, is that of facing a gorge. I'm not saying that translate Sappho is easier than Homer, meaning, by "easy", that she doesn't got the moves to sharpen the blade of her lines to a point at which even a well-versed classicist, wielding a Lidell-Scott, can hardly grasp a third of what they are capable off. 'Tis simpler: Homer is a mountain, a depht, a ocean with approximately than 30,000 thousand lines lenght. He's old, archaic, mysterious, plural, he demands of us almost the learning of a new language inside ancient greek, with all the dreadful variations of what was already known and all the huge cluster of words and dialects living together in the space of a single line.
So the first point maded by Wilson is that if you want to translate Homer, you'll need not just skill and courage, but also time. Something that a woman, for example, not always have, specially if she got childrens who needs maternal care or (and I don't know if it's her case) a pile of dishes awaiting in the kitchen. The second point, still regarding womens, is that translating Homer demands a pause on your career or at least an amount of time that could be spent padding tons of boring academic papers with interminable discussions about elision's impacts in tumular inscriptions. The diference is simple: whereas with the second you can evolve in your career, with the first you are basically covering a long run, so even supposing that reaching the finishing line means that you'll gain a space that a classicist never thought he would, still you are taking risks more dangerous to a woman than to a man. When we hear about the difference of wages between the sexes, it's important to understand that it's not a barrier for all jobs; in some of them, in fact, a woman doesn't earn the same as a man, and that's basically 'cause, well, too bad you don't have an Y chromossome to join the club; but in others the difference doesn't occur that way, and a woman can reach the top of her career if and only if she doesn't wish to raise a child and, by that, put her job at risk during gestation.
Another factor that she appointed, not quite however about womanhood, is that the academical life doesn't let you translate Homer. As I said before, write some boring academic papers is more important and count more than passing months around a single Canto. Besides, it's important to understand that you're translating for a wide audience, so you cannot just come to the spotlight with a literal version in your hands. The common reader will like to see that you have the credentials, but he, and to be honest not me and not even you, likes that thing of storing the most fascinanting part of a poem in prefaces, footnotes and bibliographical references. Your task as a translator hired by a great publisher is to recreate the rich aesthetical mixture of the original in a way that your translation will be capable of pass throught reader's hands as if it is the original, so that when a old lady finishes the book, she can move back to embroidery telling to her husband that Homer, oh Homer, what a fellow!
That said, how about something different here? All the bullshit from the previous paragraphs clearly pretends to hit a blow in SJW's house of cards, but it doesn't mean that they in fact do it or that it's relevant to do so. If everything that was raised before isn't to be counted worthy, let me at least ask you to see that Wilson by herself complained against this generic-gender overemphatic treatment of her work, praising, in the opportunity, a review by Eddith Hall in which the literary and scholarly features of the translation are highlighted.
That the gender discussion in fact matters about Wilson's work is something easily grasped by looking to what was said about the episode in which Telemachus kills the woman servants who didn't kept faithful to Odysseus. While almost all past translators have treated them as whores and bitches, Wilson just notes that the greek text uses a simple feminine article to refer to them. In that sense Wilson, interviewed by Wyat Mason in a long read published in NY Times, striked right in the bullseye by saying that to see the servants as whores represents a "misogynistic agenda". Bombastic as it is, she's not of course alleging that her predecessors were a bunch of crooks. Their work was serious and worth of praise — but atesting this doesn't allow us to ignore the crack on the wall after such a crude misreading.
I think that concerning specifically the poetic efficacy of the translation, her contribution transcends the gender-thing. Knowing that english speakers have more than sixty versions at their disposal, a great amount of them pursued the reconstruction of some homeric qualities that can be summed up in what Matthew Arnold, more than a century ago, said about: "plainspoken, fresh, vigorous, and to a certain degree, rapid". What happens with Wilson is in some sense a powerful critique of all those features, assuming, as it is shown in her preface to the edition, that the Odyssey not always works that way and much of what we can admire of the poem doesn't go in that direction. Charlotte Higgins outlined it nicely: "clarity and cleanness are her [Wilson's] watchwords; her epic voice is not one of grandeur or pomposity".
Let's take an example. The first line. Ah, the good'n old first line. So many things to be noted! For example the fact that the poem begins with ἄνδρα, which means man (as opposed to woman) or husband. Or the fact that the speaker evocates the Muse and not the Goddess, as in the Iliad. Or, placed in the summit, how about this — the magic, splendid and baffling word that can warp a bookcase just by the weight of all the thin pages published about: πολύτροπον. The first half, πολύ-, refers to what is plural. The second, -τροπον, talks about ways, turns, manners. Right here in Brazil, with a fair less amount of translations available to us (even though, of course, not despicable — the opposite, I would say, since we've entwined some nice garlands with Homer); right here in Brazil, I was saying, we translated the word using plenty of options, from "astute" (Odorico Mendes, Carlos Alberto Nunes and Frederico Lourenço) to "multifaceted" (Donaldo Schüler), "multiversatile" (Trajano Vieira) and "many-ways" (Christian Werner).
Wilson's one is more astonishing than what you may think at first glance. In fact, "complicated" doesn't looks like a word that a majestic ancient poet would use to refer to his hero, but check this out: it comes from the latin complicare, that is to say, fold (-plicare) together (com-). You can find this archaic sense specially in past poetry. When Edward Young realises that "How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, / How complicate, how wonderful is man!", he's not saying that people out there doesn't please themselves with anything. Two lines laters he'll wonder: "Who centred in our make such strange extremes!" Generally speaking, by "complicate" he's referring to something translatable as πολύτροπον. Shelley also moved on that way: "And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth". Here, of course, the reader will note that in the mind of those poets, albeit the extremities of joy and sadness, "complicate" demands an adjective as bridesmaid: "strange".
Choose "complicated" to πολύτροπον is like putting a flag, says Wilson to Mason. But I think that it represents more. The line used by Wilson to translate Homer's dactyllic hexameter is an iambic pentameter. Not a loose pentameter such as can be seen in, for example, the late Shakespeare, nor that phantom menace which draws on many T. S. Eliot's poems. It's a solid pentameter, something that you can read and feel that a pattern is unfolding on. I wish to concentrate my efforts on the first Canto, so even if you didn't bought the book you can, using Amazon's preview, follow the discussion. Take this one:
“Dear guest, I will be frank with you. My mother
says that I am his son, but I cannot
be sure, since no one knows his own begetting.
It's from the first encounter between Telemachus and Athena, disguised as Mentor. There are some protocolar changes inside it, for example that one at the beginning of the second line, transforming an expected iambus in a trochee. But see: it's perfectly possible to you put the emphasis in "that" instead of "says", bringing the line back on the track. And not just that: even preferring not, the rhytm is explicit, the long sequence of monosyllabes makes their way through and creates a hidden music that stays in our mind even when reading a simple passage like this, without any metaphor, any memorable simile and not even any other drum than that one devised by a short-long-short-long-short-... alternance.
So here we have a differente conception of Homer, a Homer that you can actually read and guess that something is whispered in the ears. It basically works the same way as if a bearded man in a robe at the center of the agora starts to declaim some lines of what's promised to be a short composition. Even when staring a plainspoken passage, we grasp the function of the whole. But how about a diaffanous one? At a certain point of the beginning Athena, after talking to Zeus, puts on her sandals and prepares to descend to Ithaca:
Sounds good. Don't mind about the sense. Just look, at a first glance, to the high number of π's on those lines. To find the sound of π is easy: just pronounce the name of the word, pi. On the first line we have three of them beginning the sentence and supporting the same omicron vowel (o). Other appeareances of bilabial consonants will happen, for example πέ- at the end of the first line and β (beta: pronounce it) and φ (phi: a P followed by an aspiration) in the next. But the magic goes further. Through the ending of second line to the beginning of third there's a long sequences of E sounds: long ones, represented by the eta (the letter that looks like an "n" is, in fact, an long E: η, spoken as in pet), and short ones, represented by the emicron (ε, pronounced like the E in "play"). And after that, inside the third line, a generous amount of diphtongs, ranging from εί to οι. All this knitted togheter in order to give us a sense of rapidness and swiftness. Homer, my friends, Homer at his best.
Let's take a look at what Chapman and Pope respectively did:
This said, her wing'd shoes to her feet she tied,
Formed all of gold, and all eternified,
That on the round earth or the sea sustain'd
Her ravish'd substance swift as gusts of wind.
She said: the sandals of celestial mould,
Fledged with ambrosial plumes, and rich with gold,
Surround her feet: with these sublime she sails
The aerial space, and mounts the winged gales;
O'er earth and ocean wide prepared to soar,
It's not their best and not even the best that can be extracted from the passage — but at least it's decent. In Chapman you have, for example, a fair amount of O's in the first part of the second line: "Formed all of gold". The S crawling all along the previous one isn't bad also, althought somewhat expected in a passage like this: according to the traditional versification's precepts, high frequencies of S in a line suggests something crawling or speeding up. You'll find a lesser version of the same device in the second part of Pope's third line. He not just stretched three lines to four but also created a new one ("O'er earth and ocean...") just in order to rhyme with Athena's next steps: bring up a spear and immediately descend to Ithaca. To say it again, it's not Pope at his best, but at least by reading it we can sniff part of the noble elegant smell that augustan poetry, one century after Chapman, developed. Although few would nowadays rhyme "sustain'd" with "wind", it's an expected outcome to flourish "ravish'd substance" in "plumes" and "these sublime". Centuries later, in the hands of high skilled classicists, we'll have:
She bent to tie her beautiful sandals on,
ambrosial, golden, that carry her over water
or over endless land on the wings of the wind
Speaking so she bound upon her feet the fair sandals,
golden and immortal, that carried her over the water
as over the dry boundless earth abreast of the wind's blast.
Fitzgerald in 61 and Lattimore in 65, respectively. ἀμβρόσια (ambrosial), a neuter plural adjective qualifying πέδιλα the same way καλὰ (beautiful) and χρύσεια (golden) qualifies, can in fact mean immortal and divine. A translator's choice. And both Fitzgerald and Lattimore maded nice ones. To be more specific, here we note that to them the last line is clearly a passage to be treatened with special attention. That explains Fitzgerald's remarkable sonority, not just in "endless land", containing a rhyme between the beginning and ending of the words, but also in "wings of the wind". Lattimore by contrast sets his hexameter to sail head into the wind, specially thanks to the recurrence of E's sounds and to the internal rhyme between "abreast" and "blast". No more long words, no more "beautiful" or "immortal" occupying three houses are accepted here. It got to be swift, and how better to be swift than to include a shortcut spawn'd by an internal rhyme?
That said, Athena fastened on fine sandals:
these — golden, everlasting — carried her
with swift winds over seas and endless lands.
Allen Mandelbaum, one of my favourite translators, in 1990. Something quite close to what Fitzgerald and Lattimore maded, recovering, moreover, the "endless land" solution from the first one. The same can be said about dropping out long words (fastened, everlasting) in order to tie up everything with the sibilant consonant's magic lace.
So Athena vowed
and under her feet she fastened the supple sandals,
ever-glowing gold, that wing her over the waves
and boundless earth with the rush of gusting winds.
Athena spoke, and she bound on her feet
The beautiful sandals, golden, immortal,
That carry her over landscapes and seascape
On a puff of wind. (...)
In one side you can find Fagles (1996) struggling to maintain the grandiose tone of the passage, using basic and wonderful tools such as blocks of alliterations. You can track the two principals ones in the beginning of the second line ("glowing gold" followed by the W, V and E sounds of "wing her over the waves") and in the ending of the third ("rush of gusting"). But this is with Fagles. With Lombardo (2000) things change. Clearly it's not his best solution and it doesn't even shows a glimpse of the creative force that appears elsewhere. At least, and I think that it's the foremost feature here, at least it shows an intention to be clear and blunt, that is to say, he dismantles the compact energy of the original in order to enhance some conversational narrative properties. Wilson took'd the message:
With that, she tied her sandals on her feet,
the marvelous golden sandals that she wears
to travel sea and land, as fast as wind.
Nevertheless quick, the beat of the pentameter is clearly marked here. She cutted, for example, ἀπείρονα (endless, boundless) referring to the land, but instead of reaching a dry effect she settled all the third line with monosyllabes that urges the reader to be quick when facing the passage. The repetition of "sandals" in line two recreates a common effect used by homeric poems and by oral poems in general, but it has also a witty function: by repeating the word, Wilson escapes from punctuating commas in line two, hence compeling us to reach the finish line and with hunger and quickness jump like a tiger to the next one until the comma in the end obliges us to do a last step in the rhytmic dance.
Homer in Wilson's hands works neatly, both in plainspoken and diaffanous passages. But let's move on. Maybe the best way to invite students to inhabit Odyssey's world for some weeks is to convince them that the old-fashion paperback laying in their desk can be read somehow like a romance. With this, of course, you'll make them loose a great amount of the poetic and oral power of it, but at least they'll won't be bored 'til death. However, make clear that by romance we're not suggesting that the plot can be confined to a matter of heroes passing throught great risks and unbelivable dangers just in order to find a honest wife waiting for them in the epilogue. If the most enduring power of the Odyssey nowadays probably resides on this pre-Disney fairy tale effect, by looking closely we can find with no effort the greek text not only well-packed with high-tech poetic devices but also with narrative features worthy of a Booker Prize.
There she found the lordly suitors
sitting on hides — they killed the cows themselves —
and playing checkers. Quick, attentive house slaves
were waiting on them. Some were mixing wine
with water in the bowls, and others brought
the tables out and wiped them off with sponges,
and others carved up heaping plates of meat.
This is the first time we see the suitors. We're looking through Athena's eyes, disguised as Mentor. From the second half of line four to the first half of the next, we encounter a witty sound effect crafted by a long sequence of W's, corresponding, maybe, to the diphtongs and nasal sounds in the original: "ήρυκες δ᾽ αὐτοῖσι καὶ ὀτρηροὶ θεράποντες / οἱ μὲν οἶνον ἔμισγον ἐνὶ κρητῆρσι καὶ ὕδωρ". But I'll won't talk 'bout this. Let's take a closer look at the details of the scene. A great amount of the slaves are busy attending the suitors. The word used to characterize the suitors is ἀγήνωρ, translated by Wilson as "lordly". Honestly? I don't think it's a good choice. It's clear that they are a crowd of rogues, not just because they're squandering Odysseu's legacy but also because they have such a despicable behaviour. They killed, for example, the cows by themselves. By themselves, like if, I don't know, your daughter's boyfriend burps after eating. If the suitors were really expected in the palace, certainly the cows would be killed for them. But it's not the case. They cheer, they shout and play checkers (πεσσοῖσι). They just wanna have fun, overcoming by far that stage at which a shy approach towards Penelope was the only way to push forward. Her delay in accepting one of them as a new husband, when it was almost clear that Odysseus had died and after Penelope's stratagem was revealed; her delay led the suitors to put a stop on the situation. ἀγήνωρ, in that sense, is not just ironical 'cause, well, if these guys are lordly then I'm a hell of a king. There is a grain of truth in the expression, and therefrom Homer imparts ἀγήνωρ's secondary sense, about arrogant and headstrong people.
A girl brought washing water in a jug
of gold, and poured it on their hands and into
a silver bowl, and set a table by them.
This passage comes from when Telemachus sees Athena and invites her to sit apart from the noise. The narrative technique employed here is different from that when the suitors were presented to us. There, the syntactical structure of the greek (using the particles μέν and δέ, "on one side ... on the other") and of the english ("some", "others") conveys the sense of simultaneous events happening all along the scene. Aside it, as Irene J. F. de Jong has noted, we have the fact that while in the suitor's scene we have the servants just preparing the food and the food of course being eaten, in Telemachus and Athena's we have an important addition: things are being served. And that's the crucial point. The suitors just devour. Before we even know that there are plenty of servants attending them, we got the information that they killed the cows for themselves. On the other side the text, telling what was happening with Telemachus and Athena, is prodigal in description, giving to us step-by-step the treatment that the stranger got when invited by the prince. This girl (ἀμφίπολος) broughting water in a jug is just one of them. Before her we'll have for example a venerable housewive (αἰδοίη ταμίη), and every single maid coming and going have her moment and function. Athena, disguised as Mentor, is welcomed in the palace. Homer uses the best of his narrator's qualities to give us the exact feeling of this.
Entering the room,
he sat down on the bed, took off his tunic,
and gave it to the vigilant old woman.
She smoothed it out and folded it, then hung it
up on a hook beside his wooden bed,
and left the room. She used the silver latch
to close the door; the strap pulled tight the bolt.
He slept the night there, wrapped in woolen blankets,
planning the journey told him by Athena.
Now as a last one, the beautiful ending of the first Canto. Flaubert, who when younger spent entire mornings reading Homer instead of studying law, certainly liked the passage. Sitted on a window and inserting huge wafts of smoke between entire passages declaimed to himself, how can be possible to not admire the accuracy of description, the calm silence against a night view of the courtyard, the thick silence made palpable by the exact sound of the silver latch (κορώνῃ ἀργυρέῃ) and of the leathern strap (ἱμάς) tight in the bolt (κλείς), the silence by the torchlight in the dark room of a sad boy? Welcome back, Homer.
It's not the first time I make those critiques, and unfortunately it won't be the last. In fact I do believe that her translation, set against the others, reveals some facts about the male empire across the centuries. "We should be shocked that the English-speaking world hasn't had a translation by a woman", Wilson said in a lecture gave at Harvard months ago. And many of us can predict where the argument wants to reach: for a woman of, say, nineteen century, sit at a desk, hold on the pen, face the blank sheet, access a higher ground and, once there, evoke the Daughters of Memory in order to transform a sequence of sigmas and alphas and iotas in a robust heroic couplet; this was, to say it generously, unlike to happen. We've got wonderful woman translators in the nineteen century and even earlier: Elizabeth Barrett Browning knewed some great amount of greek, at 27 translating Aeschylus; Marquis of Alorna, an important neoclassical portuguese poet, translated the first book of the Iliad in ottava rima (the first, as long as I know, translation to portuguese); and Anne Dacier, french, eighteen century, not just released her version of the Iliad but also clashed with Houdar de La Motte's previous condensed one.
But is it all, stick out that and then run to the hills? There is a implicit backlash in this kind of praise: when everything you have to say about a woman's work is the fact that the author, according to the black-and-white photo on the back, is somehow a woman against a male background, then you are, as I suggested before, underestimating the importance of her work. When I first knew that the translation was about to come, yes, my reaction was the same, to think that the gender-thing is the utmost feature in this project. However, discussing with a friend (more inflammely than I would liked), I slowly began to meditate the question with a more rational enthusiasm. Ok, 'tis fine, gender matters, but it cannot only matters and it cannot be the only factor. As Wilson by herself has tweeted months ago, we don't praise male translations by saying that, hélas!, they are male translations. So why do it with hers? And, more than that, why should we presume that the gender-thing is the only factor acting here? To recognize multiple barriers is to give concreteness to other kinds of exclusion.
Wilson, interviewed by the Western Canon Podcast, asserted that at least four causes can be appointed for this delay in publishing a translation by a woman. Of course, after all, that nowadays we have womens that perfectly fits in the project: Sarah Ruden, who not just published in 2008 the first english version of the Aeneid by a woman, but also in 2005 translated the Homeric Hymns; Caroline Alexander and her also pioneer version of the Iliad in 2015; or Anne Carson, a skilfull poet who gave to us some years ago a translation of all fragments of Sappho. And what a splendid work, by the way, Carson maded. You can put a book like that in a bag and pass a significant part of your terrestrial journey being revigorated by simple chunks as "mythweaver". The case with Homer, however, is that of facing a gorge. I'm not saying that translate Sappho is easier than Homer, meaning, by "easy", that she doesn't got the moves to sharpen the blade of her lines to a point at which even a well-versed classicist, wielding a Lidell-Scott, can hardly grasp a third of what they are capable off. 'Tis simpler: Homer is a mountain, a depht, a ocean with approximately than 30,000 thousand lines lenght. He's old, archaic, mysterious, plural, he demands of us almost the learning of a new language inside ancient greek, with all the dreadful variations of what was already known and all the huge cluster of words and dialects living together in the space of a single line.
So the first point maded by Wilson is that if you want to translate Homer, you'll need not just skill and courage, but also time. Something that a woman, for example, not always have, specially if she got childrens who needs maternal care or (and I don't know if it's her case) a pile of dishes awaiting in the kitchen. The second point, still regarding womens, is that translating Homer demands a pause on your career or at least an amount of time that could be spent padding tons of boring academic papers with interminable discussions about elision's impacts in tumular inscriptions. The diference is simple: whereas with the second you can evolve in your career, with the first you are basically covering a long run, so even supposing that reaching the finishing line means that you'll gain a space that a classicist never thought he would, still you are taking risks more dangerous to a woman than to a man. When we hear about the difference of wages between the sexes, it's important to understand that it's not a barrier for all jobs; in some of them, in fact, a woman doesn't earn the same as a man, and that's basically 'cause, well, too bad you don't have an Y chromossome to join the club; but in others the difference doesn't occur that way, and a woman can reach the top of her career if and only if she doesn't wish to raise a child and, by that, put her job at risk during gestation.
Another factor that she appointed, not quite however about womanhood, is that the academical life doesn't let you translate Homer. As I said before, write some boring academic papers is more important and count more than passing months around a single Canto. Besides, it's important to understand that you're translating for a wide audience, so you cannot just come to the spotlight with a literal version in your hands. The common reader will like to see that you have the credentials, but he, and to be honest not me and not even you, likes that thing of storing the most fascinanting part of a poem in prefaces, footnotes and bibliographical references. Your task as a translator hired by a great publisher is to recreate the rich aesthetical mixture of the original in a way that your translation will be capable of pass throught reader's hands as if it is the original, so that when a old lady finishes the book, she can move back to embroidery telling to her husband that Homer, oh Homer, what a fellow!
That said, how about something different here? All the bullshit from the previous paragraphs clearly pretends to hit a blow in SJW's house of cards, but it doesn't mean that they in fact do it or that it's relevant to do so. If everything that was raised before isn't to be counted worthy, let me at least ask you to see that Wilson by herself complained against this generic-gender overemphatic treatment of her work, praising, in the opportunity, a review by Eddith Hall in which the literary and scholarly features of the translation are highlighted.
That the gender discussion in fact matters about Wilson's work is something easily grasped by looking to what was said about the episode in which Telemachus kills the woman servants who didn't kept faithful to Odysseus. While almost all past translators have treated them as whores and bitches, Wilson just notes that the greek text uses a simple feminine article to refer to them. In that sense Wilson, interviewed by Wyat Mason in a long read published in NY Times, striked right in the bullseye by saying that to see the servants as whores represents a "misogynistic agenda". Bombastic as it is, she's not of course alleging that her predecessors were a bunch of crooks. Their work was serious and worth of praise — but atesting this doesn't allow us to ignore the crack on the wall after such a crude misreading.
I think that concerning specifically the poetic efficacy of the translation, her contribution transcends the gender-thing. Knowing that english speakers have more than sixty versions at their disposal, a great amount of them pursued the reconstruction of some homeric qualities that can be summed up in what Matthew Arnold, more than a century ago, said about: "plainspoken, fresh, vigorous, and to a certain degree, rapid". What happens with Wilson is in some sense a powerful critique of all those features, assuming, as it is shown in her preface to the edition, that the Odyssey not always works that way and much of what we can admire of the poem doesn't go in that direction. Charlotte Higgins outlined it nicely: "clarity and cleanness are her [Wilson's] watchwords; her epic voice is not one of grandeur or pomposity".
Let's take an example. The first line. Ah, the good'n old first line. So many things to be noted! For example the fact that the poem begins with ἄνδρα, which means man (as opposed to woman) or husband. Or the fact that the speaker evocates the Muse and not the Goddess, as in the Iliad. Or, placed in the summit, how about this — the magic, splendid and baffling word that can warp a bookcase just by the weight of all the thin pages published about: πολύτροπον. The first half, πολύ-, refers to what is plural. The second, -τροπον, talks about ways, turns, manners. Right here in Brazil, with a fair less amount of translations available to us (even though, of course, not despicable — the opposite, I would say, since we've entwined some nice garlands with Homer); right here in Brazil, I was saying, we translated the word using plenty of options, from "astute" (Odorico Mendes, Carlos Alberto Nunes and Frederico Lourenço) to "multifaceted" (Donaldo Schüler), "multiversatile" (Trajano Vieira) and "many-ways" (Christian Werner).
Wilson's one is more astonishing than what you may think at first glance. In fact, "complicated" doesn't looks like a word that a majestic ancient poet would use to refer to his hero, but check this out: it comes from the latin complicare, that is to say, fold (-plicare) together (com-). You can find this archaic sense specially in past poetry. When Edward Young realises that "How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, / How complicate, how wonderful is man!", he's not saying that people out there doesn't please themselves with anything. Two lines laters he'll wonder: "Who centred in our make such strange extremes!" Generally speaking, by "complicate" he's referring to something translatable as πολύτροπον. Shelley also moved on that way: "And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth". Here, of course, the reader will note that in the mind of those poets, albeit the extremities of joy and sadness, "complicate" demands an adjective as bridesmaid: "strange".
Choose "complicated" to πολύτροπον is like putting a flag, says Wilson to Mason. But I think that it represents more. The line used by Wilson to translate Homer's dactyllic hexameter is an iambic pentameter. Not a loose pentameter such as can be seen in, for example, the late Shakespeare, nor that phantom menace which draws on many T. S. Eliot's poems. It's a solid pentameter, something that you can read and feel that a pattern is unfolding on. I wish to concentrate my efforts on the first Canto, so even if you didn't bought the book you can, using Amazon's preview, follow the discussion. Take this one:
“Dear guest, I will be frank with you. My mother
says that I am his son, but I cannot
be sure, since no one knows his own begetting.
It's from the first encounter between Telemachus and Athena, disguised as Mentor. There are some protocolar changes inside it, for example that one at the beginning of the second line, transforming an expected iambus in a trochee. But see: it's perfectly possible to you put the emphasis in "that" instead of "says", bringing the line back on the track. And not just that: even preferring not, the rhytm is explicit, the long sequence of monosyllabes makes their way through and creates a hidden music that stays in our mind even when reading a simple passage like this, without any metaphor, any memorable simile and not even any other drum than that one devised by a short-long-short-long-short-... alternance.
So here we have a differente conception of Homer, a Homer that you can actually read and guess that something is whispered in the ears. It basically works the same way as if a bearded man in a robe at the center of the agora starts to declaim some lines of what's promised to be a short composition. Even when staring a plainspoken passage, we grasp the function of the whole. But how about a diaffanous one? At a certain point of the beginning Athena, after talking to Zeus, puts on her sandals and prepares to descend to Ithaca:
ὣς εἰποῦσ᾽ ὑπὸ ποσσὶν ἐδήσατο καλὰ πέδιλα,
ἀμβρόσια χρύσεια, τά μιν φέρον ἠμὲν ἐφ᾽ ὑγρὴν
ἠδ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν ἅμα πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο:
ἀμβρόσια χρύσεια, τά μιν φέρον ἠμὲν ἐφ᾽ ὑγρὴν
ἠδ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν ἅμα πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο:
Sounds good. Don't mind about the sense. Just look, at a first glance, to the high number of π's on those lines. To find the sound of π is easy: just pronounce the name of the word, pi. On the first line we have three of them beginning the sentence and supporting the same omicron vowel (o). Other appeareances of bilabial consonants will happen, for example πέ- at the end of the first line and β (beta: pronounce it) and φ (phi: a P followed by an aspiration) in the next. But the magic goes further. Through the ending of second line to the beginning of third there's a long sequences of E sounds: long ones, represented by the eta (the letter that looks like an "n" is, in fact, an long E: η, spoken as in pet), and short ones, represented by the emicron (ε, pronounced like the E in "play"). And after that, inside the third line, a generous amount of diphtongs, ranging from εί to οι. All this knitted togheter in order to give us a sense of rapidness and swiftness. Homer, my friends, Homer at his best.
Let's take a look at what Chapman and Pope respectively did:
This said, her wing'd shoes to her feet she tied,
Formed all of gold, and all eternified,
That on the round earth or the sea sustain'd
Her ravish'd substance swift as gusts of wind.
She said: the sandals of celestial mould,
Fledged with ambrosial plumes, and rich with gold,
Surround her feet: with these sublime she sails
The aerial space, and mounts the winged gales;
O'er earth and ocean wide prepared to soar,
It's not their best and not even the best that can be extracted from the passage — but at least it's decent. In Chapman you have, for example, a fair amount of O's in the first part of the second line: "Formed all of gold". The S crawling all along the previous one isn't bad also, althought somewhat expected in a passage like this: according to the traditional versification's precepts, high frequencies of S in a line suggests something crawling or speeding up. You'll find a lesser version of the same device in the second part of Pope's third line. He not just stretched three lines to four but also created a new one ("O'er earth and ocean...") just in order to rhyme with Athena's next steps: bring up a spear and immediately descend to Ithaca. To say it again, it's not Pope at his best, but at least by reading it we can sniff part of the noble elegant smell that augustan poetry, one century after Chapman, developed. Although few would nowadays rhyme "sustain'd" with "wind", it's an expected outcome to flourish "ravish'd substance" in "plumes" and "these sublime". Centuries later, in the hands of high skilled classicists, we'll have:
She bent to tie her beautiful sandals on,
ambrosial, golden, that carry her over water
or over endless land on the wings of the wind
Speaking so she bound upon her feet the fair sandals,
golden and immortal, that carried her over the water
as over the dry boundless earth abreast of the wind's blast.
Fitzgerald in 61 and Lattimore in 65, respectively. ἀμβρόσια (ambrosial), a neuter plural adjective qualifying πέδιλα the same way καλὰ (beautiful) and χρύσεια (golden) qualifies, can in fact mean immortal and divine. A translator's choice. And both Fitzgerald and Lattimore maded nice ones. To be more specific, here we note that to them the last line is clearly a passage to be treatened with special attention. That explains Fitzgerald's remarkable sonority, not just in "endless land", containing a rhyme between the beginning and ending of the words, but also in "wings of the wind". Lattimore by contrast sets his hexameter to sail head into the wind, specially thanks to the recurrence of E's sounds and to the internal rhyme between "abreast" and "blast". No more long words, no more "beautiful" or "immortal" occupying three houses are accepted here. It got to be swift, and how better to be swift than to include a shortcut spawn'd by an internal rhyme?
That said, Athena fastened on fine sandals:
these — golden, everlasting — carried her
with swift winds over seas and endless lands.
Allen Mandelbaum, one of my favourite translators, in 1990. Something quite close to what Fitzgerald and Lattimore maded, recovering, moreover, the "endless land" solution from the first one. The same can be said about dropping out long words (fastened, everlasting) in order to tie up everything with the sibilant consonant's magic lace.
So Athena vowed
and under her feet she fastened the supple sandals,
ever-glowing gold, that wing her over the waves
and boundless earth with the rush of gusting winds.
Athena spoke, and she bound on her feet
The beautiful sandals, golden, immortal,
That carry her over landscapes and seascape
On a puff of wind. (...)
In one side you can find Fagles (1996) struggling to maintain the grandiose tone of the passage, using basic and wonderful tools such as blocks of alliterations. You can track the two principals ones in the beginning of the second line ("glowing gold" followed by the W, V and E sounds of "wing her over the waves") and in the ending of the third ("rush of gusting"). But this is with Fagles. With Lombardo (2000) things change. Clearly it's not his best solution and it doesn't even shows a glimpse of the creative force that appears elsewhere. At least, and I think that it's the foremost feature here, at least it shows an intention to be clear and blunt, that is to say, he dismantles the compact energy of the original in order to enhance some conversational narrative properties. Wilson took'd the message:
With that, she tied her sandals on her feet,
the marvelous golden sandals that she wears
to travel sea and land, as fast as wind.
Nevertheless quick, the beat of the pentameter is clearly marked here. She cutted, for example, ἀπείρονα (endless, boundless) referring to the land, but instead of reaching a dry effect she settled all the third line with monosyllabes that urges the reader to be quick when facing the passage. The repetition of "sandals" in line two recreates a common effect used by homeric poems and by oral poems in general, but it has also a witty function: by repeating the word, Wilson escapes from punctuating commas in line two, hence compeling us to reach the finish line and with hunger and quickness jump like a tiger to the next one until the comma in the end obliges us to do a last step in the rhytmic dance.
Homer in Wilson's hands works neatly, both in plainspoken and diaffanous passages. But let's move on. Maybe the best way to invite students to inhabit Odyssey's world for some weeks is to convince them that the old-fashion paperback laying in their desk can be read somehow like a romance. With this, of course, you'll make them loose a great amount of the poetic and oral power of it, but at least they'll won't be bored 'til death. However, make clear that by romance we're not suggesting that the plot can be confined to a matter of heroes passing throught great risks and unbelivable dangers just in order to find a honest wife waiting for them in the epilogue. If the most enduring power of the Odyssey nowadays probably resides on this pre-Disney fairy tale effect, by looking closely we can find with no effort the greek text not only well-packed with high-tech poetic devices but also with narrative features worthy of a Booker Prize.
There she found the lordly suitors
sitting on hides — they killed the cows themselves —
and playing checkers. Quick, attentive house slaves
were waiting on them. Some were mixing wine
with water in the bowls, and others brought
the tables out and wiped them off with sponges,
and others carved up heaping plates of meat.
This is the first time we see the suitors. We're looking through Athena's eyes, disguised as Mentor. From the second half of line four to the first half of the next, we encounter a witty sound effect crafted by a long sequence of W's, corresponding, maybe, to the diphtongs and nasal sounds in the original: "ήρυκες δ᾽ αὐτοῖσι καὶ ὀτρηροὶ θεράποντες / οἱ μὲν οἶνον ἔμισγον ἐνὶ κρητῆρσι καὶ ὕδωρ". But I'll won't talk 'bout this. Let's take a closer look at the details of the scene. A great amount of the slaves are busy attending the suitors. The word used to characterize the suitors is ἀγήνωρ, translated by Wilson as "lordly". Honestly? I don't think it's a good choice. It's clear that they are a crowd of rogues, not just because they're squandering Odysseu's legacy but also because they have such a despicable behaviour. They killed, for example, the cows by themselves. By themselves, like if, I don't know, your daughter's boyfriend burps after eating. If the suitors were really expected in the palace, certainly the cows would be killed for them. But it's not the case. They cheer, they shout and play checkers (πεσσοῖσι). They just wanna have fun, overcoming by far that stage at which a shy approach towards Penelope was the only way to push forward. Her delay in accepting one of them as a new husband, when it was almost clear that Odysseus had died and after Penelope's stratagem was revealed; her delay led the suitors to put a stop on the situation. ἀγήνωρ, in that sense, is not just ironical 'cause, well, if these guys are lordly then I'm a hell of a king. There is a grain of truth in the expression, and therefrom Homer imparts ἀγήνωρ's secondary sense, about arrogant and headstrong people.
A girl brought washing water in a jug
of gold, and poured it on their hands and into
a silver bowl, and set a table by them.
This passage comes from when Telemachus sees Athena and invites her to sit apart from the noise. The narrative technique employed here is different from that when the suitors were presented to us. There, the syntactical structure of the greek (using the particles μέν and δέ, "on one side ... on the other") and of the english ("some", "others") conveys the sense of simultaneous events happening all along the scene. Aside it, as Irene J. F. de Jong has noted, we have the fact that while in the suitor's scene we have the servants just preparing the food and the food of course being eaten, in Telemachus and Athena's we have an important addition: things are being served. And that's the crucial point. The suitors just devour. Before we even know that there are plenty of servants attending them, we got the information that they killed the cows for themselves. On the other side the text, telling what was happening with Telemachus and Athena, is prodigal in description, giving to us step-by-step the treatment that the stranger got when invited by the prince. This girl (ἀμφίπολος) broughting water in a jug is just one of them. Before her we'll have for example a venerable housewive (αἰδοίη ταμίη), and every single maid coming and going have her moment and function. Athena, disguised as Mentor, is welcomed in the palace. Homer uses the best of his narrator's qualities to give us the exact feeling of this.
Entering the room,
he sat down on the bed, took off his tunic,
and gave it to the vigilant old woman.
She smoothed it out and folded it, then hung it
up on a hook beside his wooden bed,
and left the room. She used the silver latch
to close the door; the strap pulled tight the bolt.
He slept the night there, wrapped in woolen blankets,
planning the journey told him by Athena.
Now as a last one, the beautiful ending of the first Canto. Flaubert, who when younger spent entire mornings reading Homer instead of studying law, certainly liked the passage. Sitted on a window and inserting huge wafts of smoke between entire passages declaimed to himself, how can be possible to not admire the accuracy of description, the calm silence against a night view of the courtyard, the thick silence made palpable by the exact sound of the silver latch (κορώνῃ ἀργυρέῃ) and of the leathern strap (ἱμάς) tight in the bolt (κλείς), the silence by the torchlight in the dark room of a sad boy? Welcome back, Homer.
