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Wilson’s Odysseus himself is, by turns, heroic, cunning, cruel, conniving, maudlin, and ever-blubbering—in a word, complicated. Such sympathies naturally offended the sensibilities of those who hold Homer (and Odysseus himself) as foundational to that amorphous notion of “Western civilization,” which can seem like little more than myth sustaining white, patriarchal, Eurocentric supremacy. Some other scholars had more substantive critiques of Wilson’s work.
Richard Whitaker, a classicist teaching at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, penned a response to Wilson’s translation. (He also sent a list of unsolicited corrections to Wilson’s publisher.) In his critique, Whitaker distinguishes between “academic” and “creative” translations: those which attempt to faithfully capture the original text and present it to first-time readers and those that take liberties reimagining that text. “I object to Emily Wilson’s Odyssey,” Whitaker tells WIRED. “It attempts to be a creative translation that reworks and critiques Homeric values and characters, while flattening out the complexity of the epic in unacceptable ways. And the translator makes no effort to overcome her obvious, and personal, but anachronistic, biases.”
Whitaker regards Wilson’s characterizations of women and slaves as especially “wrongheaded,” offering a modern corrective to the depictions of these characters. He believes that academic translators have a duty to “try to represent as faithfully and accurately as possible the value systems they find in the ancient text.”
For her part, Wilson says she took tremendous pains to achieve precisely that sort of faithfulness. She was determined for her translation to match Homer’s original in terms of lines (12,109 exactly), and for conveying not just the text but the rhythm. Where Homer’s epic was composed (and performed) in a classical meter called dactylic hexameter, Wilson transposed that into iambic pentameter, the most common meter of English poetry and Shakespearean drama. Painstaking work, for someone supposedly committed to befouling Homer. “I was hell-bent on both of those things,” she says. “It was a heavy lift.”
Viewed one way, Wilson’s translation may seem like some kind of woke, feminist, anti-macho twist on Homer. In another, it is a correction to centuries of translations that come laden with their own biases (both cultural and personal), and creative, literary flourishes that have little to do with the source material. In her forthcoming collection of essays, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, Wilson takes up the question of her own translation, and the problem of translation more generally. “Grafting contemporary values onto ancient texts is,” she writes, “often done unconsciously. It is very rare for a translator deliberately to set out to distort the original she or he is translating. It can be difficult for us to see cultural assumptions of our own time as for a bird to see air, or a fish water.”
For all their squealing about fealty, the assumptions that some fans, armchair historians, and trillionaire rocketeers bring to The Odyssey tend to betray their now narrow understanding of the works they claim to hold so dear. Likewise, describing Odysseus as “complicated,” or casting a Black actress as Helen of Troy, raise hackles not because it is ahistorical—neither Homer’s hero nor Helen were actual historical figures—but because it disturbs modern, conservative assumptions about male heroism and female beauty. Undermine the presumptions of Western literature (and Western civilization’s) foundational myth, and soon the whole project might seem totally forfeit.
