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EMily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey in 2017 and the Iliad in 2023 are now English-language translations, praised for their brevity and ease. His favorite is Homer he started at the age of eight, when his primary school made a production of the Odyssey, with him in the role of Athena, and the joy did not end. You can question the choices he makes in his translations (he questions himself), but you can’t doubt the months and years he’s been finding “bad” inconsistencies.
His new book is a collection of stories about the challenges of translation and the fun and insights that can be found in reading the classics. He is fascinated by how the old world meets the modern. Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus and Aristophanes are here but there are also Spike Lee, Erica Jong, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves (the last link of intellectual workers in Roman comedy) and Boris Johnson (“a drunkard incompetent” who somehow passed as an intellectual “on the basis of his famous Greek art). The rich white men in Silicon Valley also see, to associate with Stoicism (not to be confused with stoicism) in “water form”. Continuity between then and now is accumulating: war, brutality and political turmoil. But there is also an important difference and he criticizes those who look back at the past as “the mirror in which we always find ourselves”, even when we are not there.
With Sappho the difficulty is that very few poems have survived: reconstructing her work “is like trying to understand a Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw”. Wilson often admired Anne Carson’s version of Sappho, as a “painting on a page”, where he found the character to be unmoved and devoid of same-sex passions. The island of Lesbos was one associated with blowjobs – the word lesbiazein means to fellate – but it is through Sappho that homosexuality is understood. Women make him a picture, clearly. But Wilson doesn’t buy the idea that male poets – Baudelaire, Tennyson, Swinburne – “always rape Sappho metaphorically, while female poets sing to her”. Although all of Sappho’s poems, they “emphasize the isolation of the individual” and show us “what it means to be detached and isolated”.
Wilson describes himself, jokingly, as a pedestrian, and when translators don’t come to write or critics miss the point he has strong, not to say cruel, opinions. Funny, boring, kind, musical, long-winded, cruel, vain: the definition of the opposite of accumulation. Robert Browning’s unidiomatic version of Agamemnon is described as “harder to understand than the Greek”. Edith Hamilton, a retired teacher who promoted higher education in the US, was found guilty of racism when she “recreated ancient Greece in the image of the famous United States” and ignored the abolition of freedom and slavery. Even the brilliant Peter Green finds himself “incredibly difficult” at times. As for the “armchair classicists” who live on television and in the press, he finds them guilty of keeping the gates of blasphemy.
Keeping the gates is not Wilson’s style. He wants to kill the Latin and Greek community as a “qualification to help one become a gentleman and not belong”. Hence the love with which he writes of Christopher Logue’s poem Homer in his War Music. Logue, as he says, came from a humble background, was court-martialed, imprisoned for theft, and never went to university. He was not Greek, either. But “larceny” is a “stupendous heist” although perhaps, his version of the Iliad is “a cause for celebration”: his jazzy music and magical love of detail remove discrimination as an ancient culture. Not that he is uncritical: his modern metaphors (bloody “like car washers”, war-laden men “like buyers”) sometimes go too far, and they don’t bring Helen of Troy to life. However, he is not one of the misogynists, discussed in another chapter, who slut-shamed Helen.
One of Wilson’s short-lived departures from classical scholarship was sparked by the controversy over Han Kang’s book Vegetarian, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize; The English version, written by Deborah Smith, was criticized as being unfaithful to the original. This line raises questions about what constitutes a good translation. On the one hand are the experts, who think that the test is how easy a book is in another language; for them, the interpreter must be invisible. For their enemies, foreigners, this is a “false form of homogeneity”; translation should show the wonder of the original language and culture, not hide it. Translation experts criticize the preservation of foreign texts as inappropriate and liken it to apathy.
Wilson sits in the middle. He said: “Creating an easy-to-read translation does not imply a desire to imitate or ‘hijack’ a foreign Bible,” he says. But they also don’t want the shock and surprise of foreign words to be replaced. The difficulties and challenges of the beginning should always be understood, he believes. This also applies to the form of verse: in homage to Homer’s hexameter, his version of the Odyssey uses iambic pentameter instead of prose.
In a much longer essay here he examines how to best interpret the Odyssey (although there is no “best”), comparing the text to its predecessors. For example, how to interpret the time when the Sirens told Odysseus to stop his journey and listen to their music? In modern thought, the Sirens dress as mermaids, and it is because of their sexual power that Odysseus ties himself to a tree to withstand their allure. But Homer’s Sirens are not adulterous; They “intuitively tempt” birds—women whose seduction is a promise of knowledge, not sex. Instead of referring to their “lips”, as many translators do, Wilson refers to their “lips”, which are not kissable but dangerous.
Most interesting is his choice of words to describe Odysseus in the first line of the poem. In Homer he polytropos which in modern English translations are variously translated as “that wise man”, “that man skilled in every way”, “the crooked man” and “the cunning hero”. Wilson has no patience with this except to complain of verbosity: it is a matter of pride that his version of the Odyssey is no more than Homer’s. His choice of description is “difficult”, which he admits can be understood and what I hear in my ears reminds me of the psychology of fear. He has it until he almost gives it up after encountering the words “He’s a tough guy” in Isaac Hayes’ theme song for the movie Shaft. But in the end, he stuck it out and spends 10 pages explaining his decision.
As he says, when you translate there is no unanswerable, correct answer and in the next 20 years, as long as the world is not moving now, he hopes that the younger generation will bring their own ideas. To help them, he offers a manifesto with 20 commandments. “If the original makes you laugh, cry, feel joy, shudder, feel wonder, boredom, fascination,” he says, “then the translation should try to do that.” It is a lifetime’s work but worth it. “Try to rethink everything. Give something a try. It’s good to try… Don’t give up too soon. There’s always another way to say it.”
