Speak, Goddess

The Odyssey, of course, tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus’ decade-long journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Meanwhile, back at his palace, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus are beset by suitors demanding that Penelope, presumed a widow, marry one of them. After confronting dangerous enemies like the Cyclops, Circe, and Scylla and Charybdis, the hero finally returns to reclaim his household and his wife. A 12,000-line poem with many stylistic idiosyncrasies, composed in a mixture of Greek dialects, the Odyssey is amazingly readable and fresh in almost any translation, especially given that it is at least 2,500 years old.

Green, who published a translation of the Iliad in 2015, writes that turning from that poem of war to the Odyssey is like “the sudden emergence of sunlight after a long grey winter. . . . There is a sense, however evanescent, of freedom in the air.” The men and women of the epic, he believes, “combine a wholly alien background and ethos with all-too-familiar habits that are endearing or alarming according to circumstance.” Green has adopted a restrained approach to translating the poem: “I have made virtually no attempt to dictate the literary terms in which anyone new to the Odyssey should seek to appreciate it as a poem. . . . First-time readers of the Odyssey should be allowed to establish their own personal impression of it before listening to the competing chorus of professionals, who are all too ready to shape their opinions for them.”

Wilson’s description of her intent is almost the opposite: She wishes to understand the text of Homer deeply but then to create “a new and coherent English text” that “operates within an entirely different cultural context” from Homer’s. Her translation will be informed by “fresh, curious, and critical eyes.” She also sees herself as “shining a clear light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that . . . exist in the text.” And she doesn’t seem to like the hero very much: The Odyssey “articulates some important questions about the moral qualities of this liar, pirate, colonizer, deceiver, and thief, who is so often in disguise, absent, or napping, while other people—those he owns, those he leads—suffer and die, and who directly kills so many people.” Contrast that with Green, who speaks of the hero’s “powerful, and praiseworthy, masculinity”: “After very little time our sympathies are completely with Odysseus in his struggle to return to his island home.”

There has been a flood of publicity about Wilson’s translation, along with many deservedly positive reviews, mainly focused on one fact: She is the first woman to have published a translation of the Odyssey into English. (The discovery that other women beat Wilson to the punch with translations of the Odyssey into such languages as Turkish must have caused an annoying hiccup in her publisher’s messaging strategy.) Of course other women have translated Greek and Latin epics into English: Sarah Ruden translated the Aeneid in 2008 and Caroline Alexander translated the Iliad in 2015. Their translations have not received a fraction of the attention that Wilson’s has garnered. Perhaps they did not deploy current progressive jargon as deftly as Wilson, who, for instance, described herself in one interview as “a cis-gendered woman.”

The attractive dust jacket of Wilson’s hardcover suits the feminist marketing scheme. The cover features a well-known, heavily restored Minoan fresco of three women who look ready for a party. (Evelyn Waugh memorably commented about this and other frescoes from Knossos: “It is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”) Green’s equally lovely dust jacket design is a bit more relevant to the contents of the book, consisting of drawings of ancient Greek sailing ships with oars and stylized waves. The voyages of a decidedly male hero are, after all, the subject of the epic, and the first word of the epic is andra, or “man.”

Wilson’s interest in gender issues informs her interpretation of the Odyssey. She asserts in an essay in the New Yorker that “the silencing of female voices, and the dangers of female agency, are central problems in the poem.” Even seemingly admirable female characters, like crafty Penelope, come under her negative scrutiny. She criticizes the “sentimentalized” notion of male writers like Daniel Mendelsohn and the late Robert Fagles that Odysseus and his wife have a truly happy partnership, writing: “Whereas Odysseus has many choices, many identities, many places to go and people to be and to see, Penelope has only one choice, and it is defined exclusively by her marital status: she can wait for Odysseus, or marry someone else.” Wilson’s description of Penelope’s role, like her overall assessment of the epic, seems unduly skewed by modern preoccupations.

The heretofore neglected voice of women and other marginalized characters in the epic is the dominant subject of Wilson’s media interviews, her interesting and prolific tweets, and her introduction to the translation. She does not hesitate to criticize the work of her predecessors. For example, she writes: “I have avoided describing the Cyclops with words such as ‘savage,’ which carry with them the legacy of early modern and modern forms of colonialism.” With somewhat more justification, she notes that earlier translators incorrectly depicted the Sirens as sexy seductresses by talking about their song issuing from their “lips” or “throats” as opposed to their “mouths,” which is the actual word in the Greek. Likewise, she argues that all domestic servants in the poem are actually slaves, and should be consistently named as such. In raising these issues, Wilson heightens readers’ awareness of archaic verbiage and lazy or blinkered thinking in many past translations, which is a valuable service—while also providing a peek into the world of current academic trends.

Which of the two new translations is better? Each book comes well equipped with informative and thoughtful introductions, indexes, maps, glossaries, plot summaries, and notes. Both translators achieve the difficult feat of matching the number of lines in English to the number of lines in the original Greek. Wilson’s lines are shorter, her diction more spare, more modern, and often more inventive and witty. Green conveys the feel of reading an ancient tale without the exaggeratedly archaic language in which some previous translators have indulged, and he is more faithful to the Greek text, word for word.

I use the word “faithful” about Green’s translation with some trepidation, in light of this comment by Wilson: “The gendered metaphor of the ‘faithful’ translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.” Wilson here creates a kind of Catch-22 in which anyone who would disagree with her translation’s accuracy could be accused of patriarchal insensitivity. One shudders to think what she would say if one called her translation “loose.” And yet, in some respects, that would be a good way to describe her version of the epic.

There is more than one way to be faithful to the text. When the poem alludes to the meaning of the hero’s name, deriving from the verb root oduss-, which denotes the infliction of anger and pain, Green does not attempt to replicate the wordplay. Instead he inserts footnotes, two of them annoyingly directing the reader to a substantive footnote in Book 19 in which he provides scholarly information about Greek verb tenses. Contrast this approach with Wilson’s. In two passages, she makes use of the similar sounds of “dis-” and “Odysseus”: “So why do you dismiss Odysseus?” “I am disliked by many. . . . So name the child ‘Odysseus.’ “ In another passage, she writes, with amusingly self-referential wit, “Poor man! Why does enraged Poseidon / create an odyssey of pain for you?”

An important distinction between the two translators—one that in my view disqualifies Wilson from being the next champion—is their disparate treatment of the heart and soul of the poetic style of the epic, the epithets or formulaic adjectives that fill metrical slots and bond with specific nouns throughout the poem, such as “wine-dark sea” and “gray-eyed Athena.” Green reproduces the epithets and long­er formulaic phrases fairly accurately: “A reader or listener very soon acclimatizes to these and comes to appreciate the subtly ironic way in which they are often employed.”

Wilson takes the opposite approach. She chooses to omit or vary these Homeric epithets according to her own poetic judgment, declaring the variation more appealing to modern readers. And so whereas Green consistently translates Homer’s famous formulaic line about dawn quite literally—”When Dawn appeared, early risen and rosy-fingered”—Wilson avoids this repetition. Instead, she composes a set of variations: “When Dawn appeared, her fingers bright with flowers”; “Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses”; “Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming”; “When early Dawn revealed her rose-red hands”; “When newborn Dawn appeared with hands of flowers.” These are attractive images and well-composed lines, but they are not what the Greek says. Wilson’s conceit that she is a better poet than the Homeric tradition deprives readers of the opportunity to confront the oddities as well as the beauties of the text on their own and experience it as millennia of listeners and readers have done.

Epithets and formulas are a feature of Homeric epic, not a bug. The routine activities of a wealthy household, even one in distress, proceed rhythmically in Homer. Tables are brought out and cleaned, animals are slaughtered, hands are washed, bread is served, wine is poured—and the repeated language reflects that ritual. A formulaic verse describes the completion of a meal, a line that Green translates almost every time as: “But when they had satisfied their desire for food and drink . . .” Wilson, in contrast, translates the line at least 10 different ways, from “till they could eat no more” to the even more blunt “When they had had enough . . .” Green’s decision to preserve the Homeric repetition helps to set in relief those many times in the epic where meals are decidedly not regular, such as the pitiful scenes in which men themselves are eaten.

In Homeric poetry, even humble kitchen utensils have epithets. While the suitors at the palace loll on oxhides in the opening scene, serv­ants are swabbing the tables with polutretoi spongoi—“porous sponges” in Green’s translation, each time they are mentioned. These sponges will have a sad new purpose at the climax of the epic when the fate of the formerly nonchalant suitors has been sealed. Little do the intruders know, as the dining tables are sponged in Book 20, that it will be their final meal. After the suitors’ violent deaths in Book 22, the “porous sponges” come out again as the slave girls, themselves about to die, are forced to mop up the blood.

Wilson, on the other hand, omits the adjective polutretoi when it first appears, in Book 1. In Book 22, she translates the same phrase first as “sponges fine as honeycomb” and then as “wet absorbent sponges.” From the high-flown to the aisles of Walmart in just a few lines, with no justification from the text. And in so doing, Wilson has made it a bit harder for the Greekless reader to grasp the poetic architecture of the epic.

To Wilson the especially brutal execution of the slave girls following the killing of the suitors has not received enough attention, and she has roundly criticized previous translators who have not shown sufficient outrage or who seem to place blame on the slave girls. Looking at the SparkNotes discussion of the scene, she has tweeted: “Rape culture is deeply intertwined with how this scene is read, and how it’s taught to impressionable teenagers.” Green, in this instance, perhaps proves Wilson’s point by his apparent indifference to the scene’s horrors. Instead, he makes the strange decision to annotate the execution of the slave girls with a scholarly footnote questioning the strength of the rope that would have been required to hang a dozen people at once.

Wilson’s somewhat iconoclastic approach to translating does find justification from within the poem itself. The epic poet knows that old tales must be made new for each audience. And therefore Homer’s narrator begins by beseeching the Muse as follows (my translation): “About these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak also to us.” Wilson’s imaginative alchemy transforms the words into these splendid lines: “Now, goddess, child of Zeus, / tell the old story for our modern times.” On the other hand, Wilson’s insistence on unsilencing the female voice has led her to slight the deeds of men. When at a banquet the Muse inspires the bard Demodocus to sing about the Trojan Horse, she translates: “The Muse / prompted the bard to sing of famous actions.” But what the text really says is what Green writes: “The Muse stirred the minstrel to sing of the famous deeds of men.” Men. Andron, the plural form of the word that begins the epic.

Despite Wilson’s unrelenting political correctness, I like her translation. It has a bracing, dry feel with its short sentences and modern diction. It is already drawing a new crowd of readers to the text, a text that is strong enough to withstand any amount of interpretation or overinterpretation. Green’s intelligent translation is also a superb choice. In the end, readers would do well to listen to his seasoned counsel: Read the poem more than once and establish your own view of it. “If the experience leads you to learn Greek and tackle the original, so much the better. You won’t regret it.”

Susan Kristol has a doctorate in classical philology.