{"id":405492,"date":"2018-04-16T15:21:36","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T19:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=405492"},"modified":"2018-09-13T15:29:52","modified_gmt":"2018-09-13T19:29:52","slug":"odyssey-by-homer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/04\/16\/odyssey-by-homer\/","title":{"rendered":"“Odyssey” by Homer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/u><\/em><\/p>\n

The Odyssey\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Homer<\/strong>
\nTranslated from the Greek by Emily Wilson<\/strong>
\n592 pgs. | hc | 9780393089059 | $39.95<\/strong>
\nW. W. Norton<\/a><\/strong>
\nReviewed by Peter Constantine<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Now goddess, child of Zeus,<\/strong>
\ntell the old story for our modern times.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Odyssey<\/em>, Book I, lines 9 – 10. Emily Wilson)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In literary translation of works from other eras, there are always two basic tasks that a translator needs to achieve: translating from the writer\u2019s language into a target language, the language of the reader, and also translating from the writer\u2019s era and culture to the era and culture of the contemporary reader. In her newest translation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>, Emily Wilson has turned the Greek dactylic hexameter into iambic pentameter, a remarkable feat and a well-considered strategy. Her choice of iambic pentameter as the basis for a twenty-first-century translation gives us a traditional meter familiar to us from narrative verse. \u00a0Matthew Arnold famously pointed to four characteristics that are vital to a good translation of Homer: plainness, directness, rapidity, and nobleness. Wilson\u2019s iambic translation recreates the rapidity of the original and gives the lines an epic nobleness, but one not too alien to the modern reader. Homer\u2019s dactylic hexameters sound unusual and unnatural in English, a forced meter, as we see in H. B. Cotterill’s 1911 translation. Here are Cotterill’s lines from Book XXII when Odysseus and his son Telemachus slay Penelope\u2019s suitors:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Weltering there in the dust and in blood lay all of the suitors.<\/p>\n

Fallen in many and many a heap, like fishes that boatmen<\/p>\n

Drag in a strong-meshed net from the grey-green depths of the ocean<\/p>\n

On to the beach of a hollow recess in the shore, and they lie there<\/p>\n

Heaped on the sand, all gasping in vain for the salt sea water,<\/p>\n

While by the heat of the sun drawn forth is the life from their bodies.<\/p>\n

Thus were lying in heaps, piled one on the other, the suitors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same lines translated by Emily Wilson:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He saw them fallen, all of them, so many,<\/p>\n

lying in blood and dust, like fish hauled up<\/p>\n

out of the dark-grey sea in fine-mesh nets;<\/p>\n

tipped out upon the curving beach’s sand,<\/p>\n

they gasp for water from the salty sea.<\/p>\n

So lay the suitors, heaped across each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

As Wilson writes in her introduction, \u201cHomer’s music is quite different from mine, but my translation sings to its own regular and distinctive beat.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Odyssey<\/em> has traditionally been seen as something of a continuation, or \u201cPart B,\u201d of the Iliad<\/em>. While the surviving Greek heroes of the Iliad<\/em> return to their city states from the ten-year war without lengthy detours or wanderings, Odysseus\u2019s journey back to Ithaca takes a decade. The Iliad<\/em>\u2019s action is linear and takes place over a few weeks on the plains before Troy, while the Odyssey<\/em>\u2019s narrative is fascinatingly rich and unpredictable, reversing and moving forward in time and place as Odysseus travels\u2014physically or in his recounted memories\u2014through a real and supernatural bronze-age world. One of the remarkable qualities of Wilson\u2019s translation is to bring the epic\u2019s extraordinary diversity to the fore, making also the everyday moments of this ancient world accessible to us with all its cultural and ethnographic elements.<\/p>\n

Odysseus’ father was alone,<\/p>\n

inside the well-built orchard, digging earth<\/p>\n

to make it level round a tree. He wore<\/p>\n

a dirty ragged tunic, and his leggings<\/p>\n

had leather patches to protect from scratches.<\/p>\n

He wore thick gloves because of thorns, and had<\/p>\n

a cap of goatskin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Subtle, well-translated details bring the alien culture of the Odyssey<\/em> to life. We see slaves pouring water on the hands of Penelope\u2019s suitors before the banquet, \u201chouse girls\u201d bringing in baskets of bread, \u201chouse boys\u201d filling wine bowls. In her introduction, Wilson points out that in her choice of slavery-related vocabulary, she has drawn an analogy with a slave-owning plantation in the ante-bellum American South, and that the analogy \u201cis certainly not exact, but it is at least a little closer than the alternative analogies\u2014of a Victorian stately home or a modern nightclub.\u201d There are many small moments of everyday life: we see a swineherd cutting strips of ox-hide to make himself sandals\u2014in his yard there are \u201ctwelve sties all next to one another, \/ for breeding sows, with fifty in each one.\u201d There is Penelope\u2019s chair that is \u201cinlaid with whorls of ivory \/ and silver, crafted by Icmalius, \/ who had attached a footstool, all in one. \/ A great big fleece was laid across the chair.\u201d There is Odysseus\u2019 storeroom, \u201cwide and high-roofed, piled high with gold and bronze \/ and clothes in chests and fragrant olive oil.\u201d We see Helen telling her girls to spread \u201cbeds on the porch and pile on them fine rugs \/ of purple, and lay blankets over them, \/ with woolly covers on the very top.\u201d We see Odysseus at work building a seaworthy raft:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Calypso brought a gimlet and he drilled<\/p>\n

through every plank and fitted them together,<\/p>\n

fixing it firm with pegs and fastenings.<\/p>\n

As wide as when a man who knows his trade<\/p>\n

marks out the curving hull to fit a ship,<\/p>\n

so wide Odysseus measured out his raft.<\/p>\n

He notched the side decks to the close-set frame<\/p>\n

and fixed long planks along the ribs to finish.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A stylistic element of Wilson\u2019s translation that I find particularly interesting is her approach to the formulaic elements of the Odyssey<\/em>, especially the repeated epithets, such as those usually translated as \u201crosy-fingered dawn,\u201d and \u201cmuch-enduring, goodly Odysseus.\u201d Translators have throughout the centuries chosen to keep the epithets intact. For instance, A.T. Murray in his influential 1919 translation (used by the online Perseus Digital Library) translates \u201c\u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03cd\u03c4\u03bb\u03b1\u03c2 \u03b4\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f48\u03b4\u03c5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2\u201d every time it appears in the Odyssey<\/em>, as \u201cmuch-enduring, goodly Odysseus.\u201d (Murray\u2019s use of \u201cgoodly\u201d is probably a deliberate malapropism, since \u03b4\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 means \u201cgodly,\u201d or \u201cheavenly,\u201d an adjective for Odysseus that Murray might have found problematic.) Most translators throughout the centuries have chosen to keep the epithets in their translations wherever they appear in the original. (One marked divergence is Stephen Mitchell\u2019s 2013 Odyssey<\/em>, in which he leaves out many of the epithets.) In her fine and deep-reaching seventy-nine-page introduction Wilson discusses the importance of the Homeric epithets, whose task is to \u201csuggest that things have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things will happen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers, always early.\u201d Her approach to the repeated epithets is to expand their meanings, using them to add a wider range of description. The thirty-three occurrences of the epithet \u201c\u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03cd\u03c4\u03bb\u03b1\u03c2 \u03b4\u1fd6\u03bf\u03c2 \u1f48\u03b4\u03c5\u03c3\u03c3\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2,\u201d for instance, appear in Wilson in guises such as:<\/p>\n