I was interested in Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey even before it became news that Christopher Nolan was using it as source text for his Odyssey movie. For whatever reason, controversy over Nolan’s movie has hit a fever pitch on X (twitter) and generally online.
I don’t know enough about ancient Greek to feel like I can make any judgements about a translation, either in favor or against. I felt like a bystander to this debate. So I reached out to someone who knows more than I do.
Jireh Gardo has worked with Marginally Compelling as an editor and worked with me on my book A Misfit Highwire Act, available at Amazon and at many fine dumpster fires nationwide. She is also a scholar of Ancient Greek and, as we were working on my book, I asked her if she could speak to the controversy over Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.
My view of the controversy had been this: conservatives were mad about Wilson’s translation. The complaints, however, are scattered. There are arguments against Wilson for tone, for her progressive comments, there were complaints about word choices, specifically the first line of Wilson’s translation, which is
Tell me about a complicated man.
This line holds a certain moral ambiguity about Odysseus that is not present in most of the other translations. I feel that, if this ambiguity is present in the original text, this is a fair translation. The problem is that I am in no position to speak to this one way or the other. I know nothing about Ancient Greek and cannot form an opinion about something that I cannot personally assess.
In such a conundrum I prefer to lean on experts. But it was extremely difficult to find experts whom I thought I could trust as I studied this question. Everything I read came from people I don’t know and (because I don’t know them) don’t trust and I worried that I would be the ignorant consumer of so much partisan culture war nonsense.
So I asked Jireh if she could give me her thoughts because she knows Ancient Greek and I trust her. So she did.
If you want the full force of it all, listen to (or watch) the podcast. But for those of you who are readers, not listeners, here is the gist of it:
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is being used as an “academic” translation, which means it is intended to be read in classrooms. It is, first and foremost, a bad translation. It misrepresents the core text, adds things that aren’t in the text, removes things that are in the text, and makes basic translation errors such as incorrectly translating “five hundred” as “fifty” and adding characters to the poem who do not exist in the text.
This is drawing from Dr. Richard Whitaker’s paper on Wilson’s translation, which is more footnotes than it is text due to the voluminous translation mistakes Wilson commits and that Dr. Whitaker takes pains to document. Whitaker notes that there are voluminous misrepresentations, but properly focuses on the parts in the text that are flatly mistranslated.
It is strange to gawk at the plain awfulness of this translation while it is praised in higher cultural spaces and is being used to supplant more accurate translations in an academic setting. But even the promoters of Wilson’s translation don’t shy away from her goal:
Wilson’s project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean.
I want to make it as plain as possible: I would be in support of such a project if it helped me understand the source text better. If other translations were truly covering the true Odyssey in a blanket of Christianized nostalgia, I would want to read the version that helps me understand the mindset of Homer and the ancient Greeks better.
But Wilson’s project doesn’t seem to do that. From my conversations with the experts, it is a poor translation in service of an agenda meant to subvert the original text.
Because Jireh is an academic, she has done an enormous amount of research on this translation. Below are her supporting notes.
Quotes from Wilson’s Introduction to The Odyssey
“Loving your wife is anachronistic”
Presumably, Odysseus is inspired by a deep loyalty to his wife, son, father, and the place of his birth, and moved by a deep and constant love for those he left behind. But we must avoid projecting the anachronistic ideas of chivalric romance onto Odysseus, who is not a medieval knight performing valiant deeds for the sake of a beautiful lady. [...] If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso [...] [h]e would have lost forever the possibility of being king of Ithaca, owner of the richest and most dominant household on his island--an estate wealthy with pigs, sheep, goats, fruit, grain, wine, and slaves, with an old father, a young son, and a desirable, much-courted and valuable wife all devoted to him, and all increasing his value in the eyes of his neighbors (p. 60)
Wilson’s negative beliefs about Odysseus
The Odyssey “to some extent glorifies its protagonist and valorizes his claims to dominance [...] this liar, pirate, colonizer, 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.” (p. 66)
Odysseus is “an adulterer, [...] a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, [...] a mass murderer, and a war hero.” (p. 79)
Odysseus is a “lying, self-interested sacker of cities.” (p. 31)
Gardo: I think obviously Odysseus is supposed to be sympathetic to the reader, and that this is what Homer intends. It is true he’s not a modern hero, but he is a hero in the ancient sense, which I think does imply more than just being a warrior (see p. 20 of Wilson’s introduction: “[b]eing a hero […] in archaic Greek suggests a warrior, and does not imply virtue”).
On the presentation of pan-slaveism
The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery, and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave. The analogy with a slave-owning plantation in the antebellum American South is certainly not exact, but it is at least a little closer than the alternative analogies—of a Victorian stately home or a modern nightclub. (p. 89)
Wilson’s saying “complicated” is a neutral adjective (link)
“[S]ome readers seem to think it’s negative. I’m fairly baffled by that. There’s nothing wrong with being complicated! We all are! I am, for sure, and I don’t see it as a bad thing. [...] To me, “complicated” doesn’t suggest either “good guy” or “bad guy”: it’s a promise that this poem doesn’t stoop to those implausible simplifications.”
Wilson missing the point of the Iliad
If the Iliad teaches us anything, it’s [that] getting het up when somebody insults you, that doesn’t have good consequences for anyone. If Achilles had just said, ‘Okay! Agamemnon insulted me! I’m cool! Moving on…’ we wouldn’t have an epic poem with that many massacres.
On Blaming Odysseus For the Deaths of His Crewmates
(analysis written by Jireh Gardo)
On page 70 of her introduction, Wilson writes that “the first lines of the poem invite us to see these deaths in terms of the dead men’s own folly or childish naivete, because they chose to eat the cattle of the sun.” However, “invite” is a mild way to describe what the Greek really contains. If you look at the first ten lines, the Greek has (at least) four different syntactical elements that place the blame on the companions of Odysseus.
The lines are,
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
Firstly, we have the words “αὐτῶν” and “σφετέρῃσιν,” which are both personal pronouns that refer to the companions—“αὐτῶν” is “of them” and “σφέτερος” is “their.” Then there are the words “ἀτασθαλία,” which means “presumptuous sin, recklessness, or wickedness,” and “νήπιοι,” which many translators render as “blind fools.” It’s related to the Latin word “infant,” from “infans,” which means unable to speak.
So the lines say something like, “through their (and definitely their) presumptive foolish wickedness, (those blind/stupid fools) they ate the cattle of Hyperion, the sun God.”
First, for comparison, here is A.T. Murray’s translation:
“[He sought] to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he did not save his comrades, for all his desire, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios Hyperion.”
Wilson’s translation:
He [Odysseus] worked to save his life and go back home. He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died. They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home.
She omits the double emphasis on the personal pronouns that refer to the companions, ignores the word which means “blind fools,” and translates ἀτασθαλία as “mistakes” which is a pretty positive way to spin “presumptuous sin and wickedness.” And finally, she adds the word “failed,” which is not present in the Greek.
It’s one thing to be like, “Some parts of the text say Odysseus’ companions should be blamed for their own demise—but hey, there are other passages that contradict this, so maybe there’s a cognitive dissonance there that the author is presenting that the reader is supposed to sit with.” It’s another thing to create that dissonance yourself.
Some Wilson defenders have claimed that because translation involves interpretive choices, the interpretive work that Wilson does is somehow inevitable. Of course a translator is always going to have to make trade-offs and every decision will have some subjective element to it. However, there’s a difference between saying, “oh, every translation has an interpretation, so let me lean into what I personally think about this story,” versus “every translation will have an interpretation, but I’m going to do my best to understand and communicate the original intent of the author.”
