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Odysseus Wilson himself is, by turns, heroic, cunning, cruel, conniving, maudlin, and always moody—in a word, complex. Such sympathy would naturally offend the sensibilities of those who regard Homer (and Odysseus himself) as the basis for that amorphous idea of “Western civilisation,” which might seem like little more than a myth supporting white, patriarchal, Eurocentric supremacy. Some other scholars have had more substantive criticisms of Wilson’s work.
Richard Whittaker, a classics teacher at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, wrote A answer Translated by Wilson. (He also sent a list of unsolicited corrections to Wilson’s publisher.) In his critique, Whittaker distinguishes between “academic” and “creative” translations: those that attempt to faithfully capture the original text and present it to readers for the first time and those that take the liberty of reimagining that text. “I disagree with Emily Wilson’s opinion Odyssey“It attempts to be a creative translation that reframes and critiques Homeric values and characters, while flattening the complexity of the epic in unacceptable ways,” Whittaker tells WIRED. The translator makes no effort to overcome her obvious and personal, but outdated, biases.
Whittaker considers Wilson’s characterizations of women and slaves in particular to be “wrong”, offering a modern corrective to the portrayal of these characters. He believes that academic translators have a duty “to try to represent the value systems they find in the ancient text as faithfully and accurately as possible.”
For her part, Wilson says she has gone to great lengths to achieve precisely this kind of sincerity. She was determined that her translation should match Homer’s original in terms of lines (12,109 to be exact), and that it should convey not only the text but also the rhythm. Where Homer’s Odyssey was composed (and performed) in a classical meter called hexameter, Wilson transferred it to iambic pentameter, the most common meter in English poetry and Shakespearean drama. Hard work for someone supposedly committed to tainting Homer. “I was intent on both of those things,” she says. “It was a heavy lift.”
On the other hand, Wilson’s translation might seem like a kind of anti-masculinist feminist development on Homer. In another case, it is a corrective to centuries of translations that come laden with their own biases (cultural and personal), and creative literary flourishes that have little to do with the source material. In her next collection of articles, Crossing the Dark Sea of Wine: Journeys Through Ancient LiteratureWilson addresses the issue of her own translation, and the problem of translation in general. She writes: “The grafting of contemporary values onto ancient texts is often done unconsciously. It is very rare for a translator to intentionally distort the original text he is translating. It can be difficult for us to see the cultural assumptions of our time like a bird sees air, or a fish sees water.”
For all their rants about loyalty, the assumptions that some fans, historians, and billionaire rocket builders bring to… Odyssey They tend to betray their now narrow understanding of the works they claim to hold so dear. Likewise, calling Odysseus “complicated,” or casting a black actress as Helen of Troy, provokes outrage not because it is ahistorical—neither Homer’s hero nor Helen were actual historical figures—but because it upsets modern, conservative assumptions about male heroism and female beauty. Undermining the assumptions of the founding myth of Western literature (and Western civilization), the whole enterprise may soon seem completely lost.
