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Faithful: Translating the Classics

– Showing initiative, Telemachus insisted, “I refuse to grant these girls a clean death since they poured down shame on me and mother when they lay beside the suitors.

At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope around the rotunda and around the mighty pillar, stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground as doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap. They crash into a net a bitter bad time just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with a noose around their necks to make their death an agony.

They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

Thus tonight’s speaker, Professor Emily Wilson, translates the account of the hanging of the slave girls from Book 22 of The Odyssey.

Her poetic rendering caught between flow and fracture captures both the horror of these lines and the chilling matter-of-factness with which the narration concludes.

In this, as with so many passages of The Odyssey, Professor Wilson’s translation has renewed the ancient epic’s power to shock.

Professor Wilson’s translation is at the same time a vital contribution to the diversification of the classics.

Since the Second World War, more female scholars have been interpreting our ancient texts and providing artistic responses to them. We might think for instance of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad which was motivated by the very passage I just read.

But until recently, the translation of ancient Greek and Latin texts has remained a distinctly masculine affair.

As a consequence, our engagement with classical texts has for the most part been mediated by male voices. And this is especially true in the field of ancient epic.

I’m happy to report that finally, this is changing. We have Sarah Ruden’s translation of The Aeneid from 2009, Caroline Alexander’s of The Iliad from 2016,

and now this astonishing translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaking on the theme of “Faithful: Translating the Classics,” it’s my honor to welcome Professor Emily Wilson.
(audience applauding)
– Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I’m actually going to talk a little bit more about the slave women later in my talk. So because my title was more general than just talking about The Odyssey, I thought I should do my duty by the title and start by talking in general about the whole project of translating ancient literature, especially ancient poetic literature for a modern readership, for people who are actually alive, ’cause of course you can’t actually translate things for people to read who are already dead.
(audience laughing)
I was going to start off by talking about how I think about the impossible task of recreating ancient literature in English for people who are alive. I’ve spent most of my career working on the relationship between ancient and modern literatures, ancient and modern cultures. I see the act of translation as along with scholarly projects, studying the ways that different people throughout history have responded back to antiquity. The act of translation is another way to engage with and help shape or change how the contemporary world understands, receives, and talks back with antiquity. I’ve also done translations of Seneca’s tragedies, of Euripides, of Sophocles, and now working on The Iliad. Each of these projects has felt totally different from the others, so it’s very hard to generalize about translations. Every text has a new set of hermeneutic stylistic challenges.

In every case, though, I felt conscious that I want to bring the ancient texts to life in a new way, to pay attention to poetic and literary form, as well as to characterization, mood, tone, imagery, point of view.

So I always have to emphasize at the start that I know that translation is impossible, and yet I seem to keep on doing it. So what does it mean to do the impossible? How can you do this impossible task in the most responsible possible way? To translate means to convert one text into a totally different text. What is it that’s the same? What kind of equivalence can one have?

Translation theorists such as Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti, echoing a famous German theologian called Friedrich Schleiermacher, have argued that translators in general have an ethical obligation to write in a style that they call foreignizing. It’s what other people might less chargeably call translationese. The argument is that foreignizing is the only proper way to pay due respect to alien cultures, rather than forcing the foreign into the hegemonic anglophone mode.

I think there’s something in this point of view. I think there is a problematic blindness in both British and North American cultures towards questions about translation and towards translated literature, literature that hasn’t originally been composed in English. People tend to read very, very little literature that hasn’t been originally written in English if they’re English speakers. But I don’t think the solution is always to translate every foreign text into an off-puttingly unreadable foreignizing style, which seems like the quickest way to ensure that even fewer people read translations than already do, which is already a teeny tiny proportion of the reading public. There’s also a dominant argument among translation theorists that translators and their readers, should make translation more visible as a process,

rather than perpetuating the fiction that translators provide a transparent window through which the reader gets access to the original, who is writing these words? It’s actually, if it’s my translation, I’m the person writing these words. Maybe I should be honest about that. I agree with the principle of visibility. But I think that what visibility means in practice depends on different practical strategies, depending on the cultural position of the translated text in the target culture.

In the case of modern novels, North American readers are very likely to have an assumption that the best translation is the most fluid, the most invisible translation. If you read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you don’t want to be thinking, this is a great translation. You want to imagine it’s not a translation at all. But if you read a translation of Homer or of Sophocles or of Virgil, you’re likely to have a particular set of presuppositions about what a good translation would sound like.

And that can be to do with, in the case of ancient literature, ideas about how ancient epic ought to sound bombastic, it ought to sound archaic, it ought to sound fussy. Maybe it should be unreadable, maybe it’s supposed to be boring. And though all those things might not actually have anything to do with what the real experience of reading Homer is if you’re quite good at reading Homer. Or about what the original might have sounded like in any of the many periods of antiquity in which Homer was being read.

I think in those circumstances, the uncritical adoption of archaizing or foreignizing modes can perpetuate invisibility and uncritical reading,

within classics and among classicists as well. I think there’s a second set of issues which have to do with how badly written translations are not just tolerated, but often highly valued. In that they’re supposed to replicate the experience of the struggling student in intermediate Greek or Latin class, right? So it’s supposed to be painful. You’re not really supposed to understand it. If you create in English which is like that, that’s the good translation. But of course, that whole approach risks raising the vast stylistic differences between different ancient texts. Homeric Greek ancient text is extremely easy. It’s folk poetry, it’s raised in a folk tradition. It’s designed to be, and it is, comprehensible performed out loud. It’s not the kind of poetics where you have to be constantly figuring out, how does that subordinate clause depend on that subordinate clause. It’s very much not like Paradise Lost. It’s not knotted in contorted syntax of the kind you find in Thucydides. So it seemed to me that the ease and direct pleasure of reading Homer was something that a translator should think about trying to replicate, along with many other features. I think in general, we’re accustomed to many very debatable binaries about translation. The idea that it’s either loose or it’s faithful. It’s either poetic or it’s literal. Those binaries rely on the false idea that there’s just one truth that is the truth about the original poem.

There’s also a dominant vision among classics of pedagogy about translation in which translation, quote-unquote translation, is part of how you learn Latin. Which then also encourages this very clunky mode of translation as, this is what it really is, which again, I think is problematic. The real question for any translator isn’t whether to tell the truth or to tell a pretty lie. It’s a much more complex set of daily struggles about which truths to tell, when you know that there are many true facts about the original literary text, not all of which can ever be conveyed by any version in a completely different language in a completely different cultural context.

So all that is kind of abstract. This is a picture to try to show the abstract thing more concretely. This is Heracles choosing between virtue and the seductions of pleasure, and that’s the wrong model for translation according to me. The right model is that it’s more like this. It’s more about creating an accurate portrait, and there are many, many different ways to create the portrait. It can be the same person, the same artist. Even so, there can be many, many different ways to do a good portrait. So now I want just to move on to talk more specifically about my approach to translating The Odyssey. And I figured, because I’ve talked in abstract terms, I thought I should start by just reading a chunk of my translation so you can have a sense of what it’s like. So, I’m going to start by reading to you from the start of Odysseus’s journey home. As you probably all know, The Odyssey doesn’t start at the beginning of the story. It has a very complex inset narrative mode, whereby the first four books are what’s called The Telemachy, the story of Telemachus, where Telemachus goes on this futile little journey around the neighboring islands to meet up with his father’s old war buddies and see if he can find any news about his father’s journey home. He finds out nothing, but maybe he matures in the process, maybe not. And then the story proper begins in Book Five where we get back to Odysseus himself, or we get to Odysseus himself for the first time, and we learn that he’s been– He’s spent the last seven years not suffering shipwrecks, but on a lovely island with a lovely goddess called Calypso, who has promised him immortality. But he has got sick of her and wants to go home. So I want to start by reading to you. This is the start of Odysseus’s journey home, his journey of Nostos, when the god Hermes travels to the goddess Calypso and tells her to release Odysseus and let him go back to his wife. And you can see, I’m wearing my Hermes shoes in honor of it. “At once, he fastened on his feet the sandals of everlasting gold, with which he flies on breath of air across the sea and land.

He seized the wand with which he magics eyes to sleep or wake as he desires. He held it and flew.

The god flashed bright in all his power.

He touched Pieria, then, from the sky, he plunged into the sea and swooped between the waves, just like a seagull catching fish, wetting his wearying wings in tireless brine.

So Hermes scudded through the surging swell.

Then finally, he reached the distant island, stepped from the indigo waters to the shore, and reached the cavern where the goddess lived.

There’s that Calypso with her braided curls.

Beside the hearth, the mighty fire was burning. The scent of citrus and the brittle pine suffused the island. Inside, she was singing and weaving with a shuttle made of gold. Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave, a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, and scented cypress. It was full of wings. Birds nested there, but hunted out at sea. The owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks. A ripe and fertile vine hung thick with grapes was stretched to coil around her cave. Four springs spurted with sparkling water as they laced with crisscrossed currents intertwined together. The meadows softly bloomed with celery and violets. He gazed around in wonder and joy as sights to please even a god. Even the deathless god, who once killed Argos, stood still, his heart amazed at all he saw.”

So I picked that passage partly ’cause I think it’s a great passage and I also thought for wintertime, it’s kind of nice to be transported to a world of lush vegetation. And it’s just a sample of what I was trying to do, I hope you could hear. My translation is all in regular iambic pentameter all the way through with quite a lot of alliteration. The original also has a lot of alliteration. I paid as much attention even beyond meter to the sound of words as I could muster. I did a lot of reading out loud as I was working on the translation, both of the original and then of my own drafts and progress. I wanted to honor the clarity of Homer, the quick narrative pace, partly by making sure that my version was the same number of lines as the original, which is very difficult to do. I can talk more about how exactly I did that and how difficult it was. I wanted to convey its precise vivid details in describing the material world. But what I love most about Homer is how even when we’re in a place where of course nobody in the world has ever been to an island like this, it’s totally magical and weird and bizarre, and yet it feels totally convincing, it feels concrete. I wanted also to bring out the different perspectives and characteristics of different characters,

and to make the reader or listener of the passage believe for a moment in the perspective and vision and experience of this god in gold sandals swooping through the waves,

and believe in the impossibly jungly island of Calypso, the goddess of hiding, where even the water is crisscrossed, mixed together, covering itself.

I think a translator of this very ancient poem has to perform an action which in a way is like that of Hermes, taking a message across unfathomable distances of space and time. I had to carry my readers across great distances, and to convey the sense of that journey as something fast, thrilling, and has at least occasional moments of standing still, amazed. Though, it should be some moments of shock, of “I didn’t know it’d be so contemporary,” or “I didn’t know it’d be so strange,” either one. There should be some moments where you stand still like Hermes and think, “Oh, this is kind of weird,” even though most of the time they’re going very fast. So I got into the project of translating The Odyssey because I was asked to consider doing it by a lovely editor at Norton who I knew through working on the Norton Anthology of World Literature. I was excited to be asked because I’ve always loved this poem ever since I was eight years old. This is me in the photo playing Athena in my elementary school play, wearing a tin foil helmet that I made myself. I was very proud of it. So I’ve continued to love the poem in the now 40 years since that time. And of course I’ve been reading it in Greek for some decades. I wasn’t reading it in Greek when I was eight, but I still loved the story. The Odyssey is, for me, it’s beautiful, infinitely rich narrative about questions I think about all the time but in both scholarly intellectual life and in daily life about time, identity, whether we can be the same person after 20 or 40 years, is that me, is that not me? Can we be the same person in a new place or with new people? How to deal with those who aren’t like us. About home, hiding, how to define a community, rage, growing up, grief, imagination, recognition. And as I said, I love how the poem turns to details of everyday life, not just the gold sandals, but the boats, the water, the beds, the tables, the trees, moving through space, into these richly resonant symbols that define human and divine relationships. But of course, loving The Odyssey and being keen to keep on rereading it in Greek and studying it is a totally different thing from thinking it’s worth spending at least five years of my life creating a new English version of this poem, of which there are already almost 70 other translations. Like, why would I bother to do that?

Yeah, so I figured I should try to answer that question, which I think is a reasonable question.

I’d love the process as an ultimate form of close reading and intense form of critical practice. I love the way that creating a translation is an endeavor that allows me to let out my inner poet. My training is partly in English literature, as well as in classics, and I love the way that creating a verse translation allows me to engage with the anglophone poetic tradition, as well as with the tradition of archaic Greek poetry.

But, I also wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t felt I could do something different with this particular poem than what was already available in the market. So what motivated me to take it on was primarily first of all, though I had set of thoughts about poetic form. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about the poetic form or the metrical formal challenges. The original poem– I’m sorry. The first lines got cut off in the slide. The original poem is all the way through in an entirely regular meter, which is a function partly of the fact that it’s based on a centuries-long oral poetic tradition. Of course, for oral poetic composition, oral poetic performance, you want a very regular rhythm. So it’s in dactylic hexameter. A dactyl is a finger, long, short, short, lah, la la. And hexameter, so it’s six of those all the way through.
(speaking in foreign language)
It’s six like that all the way through. It doesn’t suddenly change into free verse or pentameter, ’cause the poet feels like it. And yet, most contemporary translations are in free verse or in prose. And so to me that seemed, it’s not that I think free verse is evil, I think free verse can be great, but I felt that there was actually a place for a metrical translation that would echo something of that experience of experiencing long narrative that’s regularly metrical all the way through. And yet would do that in a way that wasn’t trying to rewrite Paradise Lost, which is the English epic that many of us know and love. Because of course, Homeric style is so different from Miltonic style. So if we just look at how the first line is dealt with formerly in several other translations, the first translation in the English language is a great one in rhyming pentameter couplets by the great dramatist, George Chapman. And you can see that he’s very good with alliteration. His interpretation of what polytropos is has to do with wisdom, which it clearly doesn’t mean that. If you know Greek, you might question his interpretation. But he uses rhyming couplets, which one couldn’t actually use in contemporary English. I don’t think I could. The Pope translation is also fantastic of its kind, of its era, and it’s also in rhyming couplets. It also thinks that the first line says something about wisdom.
(audience laughing)
So another possibility, since the original is in hexameters would be to do something like English hexameters. To my knowledge, that’s only been done once in English by Rodney Merrill, whose translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey are in English hexameters.

I think they’re virtuosic and kind of marvelous, but they’re not quite in English, which is partly a function of the meter. A much more popular choice, predictably ’cause it’s much easier, is not to use hexameters, but to use a very long line that if you don’t quite read it out loud and you squint a little bit, it looks like it could be hexameters.
(audience laughing)
So those are popular choices. Much more popular, because of course, again, this mirrors the trends towards free verse in contemporary poetry is to use a non-metrical form, or a formless form.

And you can see also from this slide how I’ve sort of been surprised to realize this going back and looking more closely at other translations, little bits of them, after publishing mine, that even beyond form, there’s quite a lot of similarities between the currently existing translations on the level of word choice. So for instance, we have “the wanderer” in the Fitzgerald translation, we have “the wanderer” in the Lombardo translation. We have “time and again” and then we have “time and again.” So you can sort of see that quite a lot of translators are I think over-influenced by each other. And it made me in retrospect glad that I didn’t, while I was working on this translation, for five years, I didn’t look at the other translations, ’cause I didn’t want to have that kind of, “Am I going to steal that from him? I don’t want to be stealing things.” So what I chose to do is iambic pentameter all the way through, because of course that in a way is the cultural equivalent of dactylic hexameter in archaic Greeks. If you’re going to think about what are their native traditions in anglophone poetry for narrative verse, it’s obviously iambic pentameter. So mine is in iambic pentameter throughout, but not necessarily a pompous kind of iambic pentameter. I’m using the meter of Shakespeare, but not the more polysyllabic kind of Shakespeare. There’s also monosyllabic lines in Shakespeare, and those are the ones that I’m echoing more. I wanted to make sure that my text had not just meter, but also read-aloud-ability. Because of course, given that this is a text based on an oral tradition which throughout antiquity was experienced primarily orally, it seemed to me important to think about how can I make a modern text which will invite readers to read out loud that will also work as an audible audiobook and that will also exist as a performance piece. As I was working, I read out loud to myself, but also to other people to try and see how it read and how it sounded to other people.

The choice to keep the same number of lines as the original, there are many translations, it’s not just true of Homer, that are much longer than the original. There’s always that temptation, you know this word doesn’t have any exact correspondence in my language. It could mean 50 different things. There were 50 different words I could use. So let me just choose three of them and I’ll cover all my bases. And then you end up with a translation that’s half as long again as the original. And of course that loses something as well as gaining something. What you lose is something about pace. So I made the choice at the start that I was going to keep the same number of lines as the original, because the pacing of the original seems to be so important that it’s actually a page turner. You actually want to hear what’s happening in the next scene. You don’t have time to get bored. I felt in general that I wanted to convey something of the musicality, the clarity, the vividness, the emotional psychological depth, the range, the polyvocality, the beauty, and the narrative drive that were essential elements in my own reading of Homer. I also wanted to write as well as I possibly could on the principle that a great poem shouldn’t be turned, if possible, into a terrible one. An issue that arises for any translator of Homer is what to do about repetition and formulae.

The original is a very repetitive poem, which again is a function of orality, oral-conscious, value repetition. The repeated thing is what matters, what we want to pass down to our great-great-great-great grandchildren. So, we repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. In a literal culture like ours, repetition is not valued in the same way, and it doesn’t have the same kind of meanings. If I repeat over and over and over, you either think I’m a lazy writer and I’m just spitting out clichs to fill out the line, boring, and if I’ve got to read this for class tomorrow, I’m going to do a lot of skipping. Or else you might think, repeating, repeating, repeating, she’s Gertrude Stein, she’s Gertrude Stein, she’s Gertrude Stein.
(audience laughing)
And again, that’s not the right meaning for repetition. And obviously that meaning for repetition wasn’t available in archaic Greece. So I wanted to, was to shake up the ways that repetition happens in this poem. I use some exact repetition, so I have “wine-dark sea, wine-dark sea, wine-dark sea.” I wanted to have the reader have a sense that there are stable repeated components in this language in this imagined world. But I also didn’t want to repeat quite as much as the original does because I felt after going through multiple different drafts and experimenting with different ways, that I needed in order to make it feel alive for a literate English reader to create some variation within repeated tropes. So for instance, “rosy-fingered” Dawn. Everybody knows about rosy-fingered Dawn from The Odyssey. It’s a very important line in The Odyssey, because of course this is a poem which is all about time. It matters that this is a line which gets repeated. What happens when it dawns? It’s a new day, is it the same day, is it a different day? We constantly have the goddess up in the sky asking us that question by her touch.

So I love the metaphors of “rosy-fingered Dawn.” I wanted that metaphor not to feel dead on the page, which I felt, as I experimented with it, I felt it started to feel dead after three or four times in exact repetition. So then I decide I’m just going to do it differently every single time. So I did that, I kept Dawn, as always a goddess in my translation, always early or newborn. Always has fingers or touching, always blooming or with roses or with flowers, but then I mixed up the way the elements fit together to make sure the metaphor never feels dead.

The issue of verse form is related to larger questions about style. I was aiming for a readable, clear register, avoiding archaisms, foreignisms, and high rhetoric as much as possible to bring out some of what I see as essential elements in the feel of the original, the simplicity, the clarity, the speed. I know that some readers have wanted to label my translation style as modernizing or domesticizing or colloquial. But I think that’s not quite the whole thing, even beyond the fact that most of us don’t speak iambic pentameter all the time.
(audience laughing)
My own language is also fairly artful and artificial. So for instance I don’t use any doesn’ts or don’t or can’ts ’cause I want there to be not necessarily a lot of vocabulary words, but some sense that this language is like speech, but it’s actually not quite the same as real speech.

So I used some words which I hope are surprising, either surprising in the direction of, “This is more colloquial than I thought the rest of it was,” or surprising in some other way. I wanted there to be some moments when the reader might feel, “Whoa, weird word choice there.” Partly because, not just to keep the reader on her toes, but specifically to reflect something about the linguistic diversity of the original. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects from different parts of the Greek-speaking world, from different eras, that again is part of the oral tradition. It’s a language that nobody ever actually spoke. It would’ve been fun to try and replicate that, that linguistic collage quality, by using a mix of Cockney, Chaucerian, Glaswegian, California English, put it all together and it would be a wonderful Joycean experiment, and nobody would’ve read it. But it would also have meant giving up on every other possible goal. I would then have had to give up on. Is anybody going to care about the story? No, they certainly wouldn’t have done. So I, instead of trying to fully replicate Homer’s linguistic range, which would also, to imitate a real tradition by making up a fake tradition also seems inauthentic. So instead I used a number of words which I hope are slightly surprising as a nod to the linguistic diversity of Homer without fully trying to replicate it.

So I spoke a few minutes ago about how I see the binaries the translators face, not of the challenges the translators face, not in terms of, are you going to lie or tell the truth, but in terms of which of the many possible truths are you going to tell most clearly? Because with a limited number of words, creating a single text, you can’t say everything. You can’t make the portrait be every aspect of the person. So one of the most important truths I wanted to tell about The Odyssey was about the complexity and polyvocality of the original poem. I was to use relatively simple language, but through doing that, to bring out that it’s ethically, psychologically, in human terms much more complex than I think many translators let you believe, that you understand. I’ve seen from teaching the poem that there’s a tendency to assume that it’s a sort of old-school comic book superhero story by the unpolemically heroic male Western hero, implicitly proto-white who is good, because he crushes bad guys, monsters, foreigners, and witchy women and understands the value of hospitality which apparently was important for the ancient Greeks– You write that down in the exam, you get the “A.” Story has a happy ending because the good guy gets back with the objectified wife and regains all his wealth and all his slaves, a nice celebration of family values, consumerism, patriarchy, war, superiority of normal male white people over foreigners and girls.
(audience laughing)
And I think that many people who obviously don’t say it in quite those terms, but many people do have the idea that’s what The Odyssey is. I said I was emphasizing at the start that I really liked The Odyssey. I wouldn’t like it if that was the only thing it was doing. So I wanted to create a translation which would make that reading quite difficult, as I think in fact, the original poem makes that reading quite difficult. I wanted to bring out how this is a poem which has in a way a very simple story, and two very simple central concepts, but it makes that simple story as difficult as possible and it makes those two central simple concepts also as difficult as possible. I wanted to create a truthfully complex recreation of what I think is genuinely a complex text. So the two central Greek concepts are nostos, the word from which we get nostalgia, the pain of not being at home. So Nostos is a poem about the homecoming. It’s a story of homecoming. So it’s a poem which is about defining what home is. What does it mean to come home? Odysseus comes home geographically halfway through the poem, so coming back to the place where you used to live, that’s clearly not enough. What else does homecoming mean beyond a particular place? It means something about relationships. Does it mean killing all the people who’ve come into your house? Maybe it means that. Maybe homecoming is also an essentially exclusive thing because the poem is also emphasizing how out of the many people who left Ithaca with Odysseus, only one gets back. In the first 10 lines, we learn this is about one man’s successful homecoming and also the multiple men’s unsuccessful homecoming, all those people who are dead. So I think that in itself, I mean even just that brief sketch gives you some notion of how this is a poem which is engaged with interrogating notions of home and community and creating really challenging questions which I think are still challenging for us today about what does it mean to create a home? How is our home tied up with our identity? How is our home tied up with who we welcome into our home and who we exclude from our homes? So this is related to the second central concept which is xenia, the idealized relationship between strangers, hosts, and guests. In the code of xenia, people have a deep obligation to take care of strangers in need. In giving and receiving hospitality, families form lasting friendships across great distances of space and time. It’s in many ways an aspiring ideal, especially in times of xenophobia and hostility to immigrants. But the poem is also showing us how exclusive the code is. It only applies to elite men, not women. And the story of Helen of Troy shows us what happens if a woman tries to leave her home. It also shows us in multiple different ways, mapping out how exactly can xenia go wrong. What are the wrong ways to be a host? What are the wrong ways to be a guest? What’s the ideal and also how exactly is it being a good host to kill those who invade your home? Maybe not, maybe it is, who knows?
(audience laughs)
I think the original poem is compelling because of the nuance and complicatedness of its presentation of its own values and ideals.

I also love it for the diversity of perspectives that it has. One concrete example of the way that I think this poem is about multiple different perspectives, including people of different classes, as well as people of different genders, people of different cultures, and how each of them thinks about this story differently. But some of that complexity can get erased in translation. A concrete example is that I used the word “slave” for words that are commonly rendered by servants or maids or housekeepers, in other translations, including those that have come out after mine which I find kind of surprising, but there it is. I think it’s partly to do with a systematic blindness that exists among scholars as well as among students and general readers about simplifying the society of Homer. We don’t want Odysseus to be a slave owner because we don’t want to think of him as a bad guy. So, he can’t be a slave owner, so we call him something else, which I think is a little bit problematic as an approach to grappling with a complex narrative.

So I’m just going to read my beginnings just so that you can sort of see a glimpse of how homecoming is important in this narrative, and you can see it even from the beginning. “Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men 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. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times.”

So, and I know I could kind of talk for several hours about just that passage which I’m not going to do. We can talk about it later if you want. But in general, I was interested in bringing out the expansive, imaginative, and ethical vision of this poem. It allows us to feel not just for a man, albeit an important and complicated man, Odysseus himself, but also to feel for and understand all those he abandons, mutilates, kills, lets die, or marries, all those who have different kinds of journeys home or none.

Since I’ve published my translation in November 2017, I told you I didn’t look at others while I was working on mine ’cause I didn’t want to destroy my process, but I have done some close looking at others, little bits of others since publishing that ’cause of course, it’s fascinating. I always learn different things. And things that I hadn’t realized might be different about mine turned out to be. So for instance, I read you the passage about Calypso. It’s been surprising to me to see how in many English translations, Calypso is presented much more like a historical nymphomaniac. I think the world nymph is a false friend that misleads English translators where they think, nymph, I know what that means and it doesn’t mean good things about her. Whereas in the original text, of course, she’s presented as a dignified, powerful goddess who’s extraordinarily emotionally intelligent and she has this righteous anger against gender double standards which I don’t see any reason to think the narrator doesn’t respect.

Similarly, I’ve been surprised to see how many modern English translators make Polyphemus, the Cyclopes, into quote-unquote a monster, or quote-unquote a savage, which I think is engaging with modern love and archaic Greek colonial prejudice against native people. It’s not that the Greek text doesn’t make him accountable. Of course, he’s scary. Of course, he munches up men to eat for dinner, but it also defines him definitely as a human being, an anthropos, and it allows for some degree of sympathy for the person whose home is invaded. Home matters in this poem. So then I’m going to talk in more detail about the hanging of the slave women passage. So this is the passage, and I apologize for spoilers. I’m actually going to tell you a little bit of the story of The Odyssey, so I’ve already probably spoiled it for you.
(audience laughs)
Odysseus does get home to Ithaca and he’s in disguise as a homeless old beggar. In disguise, in disguise, in disguise, he reveals himself gradually one by one to trusted members of his household, not including his wife. He does then along with his son Telemachus and two slaves slaughter all the suitors who’ve been harassing his wife, Penelope for the last few years. And then he delegates the final set of killings to his son, Telemachus who up ’til this point has seemed kind of a dopey man-child, not quite grown up. But then, kind of surprisingly, he takes some kind of initiative. We’ve already seen twice in the poem that Telemachus likes the process of shutting women up, that he shuts up Penelope twice, insists that she has to be silent, go upstairs. He doesn’t have any capacity to exert himself among the world of men. When we see him at the council trying to talk to the men of Ithaca, he burst into tears, it doesn’t go well, but when he’s talking to women, he feels much more confident about silencing them. So when he’s given this important responsibility of killing the slaves who’ve been, Odysseus says earlier in Book 22, “raped by the suitors,” Odysseus tells Telemachus to take the women outside and hack them to death with long swords. Telemachus disobeys his father’s instructions by choosing a different murder weapon. Instead, he chooses to hang them.

So, it’s totally a very disturbing passage however you read it.

What surprises me about looking at other translations, but then also interests me, is just to realize how on my reading, there were multiple different perspectives, multiple different points of view within the Greek text. I think the narrative’s point of view is not the same as the murderer’s point of view, and also not the same as the victim’s point of view. And then the text actually gives us all three of those. When I look at other translations, it seems to me that there’s a focalizing of the narrative through the murderer’s perspective such that it seems more as if this act of gendered violence is okay and we’re supposed to feel okay about it. And there are different on some level fairly subtle choices, and also in some cases, less subtle choices the translators make about the ways that you shape the narrative through one point of view or another. So I’m giving– This is the Greek text which I’m giving you for those who read any of it, just the underlined words are underlined so that you can notice there was no term of abuse when Telemachus explains why is he going to kill these women. He doesn’t use a world like– He doesn’t even say they’re bad women. He describes them with a relative clause, the women who have spent the night besides the suitors. So translators have choices about how to frame this narrative, and Telemachus is always described as having some kind of cognitive capacity. He’s pepnumenos. He’s always pepnumenos. It’s not clear whether it’s a positive or a negative kind of positive cognitive capacity. It might just suggest, he’s thought about something, has he thought well about it? Maybe it was a terrible idea, but it could be neutral or it could be one way or another. Most translators that I’ve looked at suggest by the way they choose to translate that word that he’s thought about it and that means that’s a good idea. Whatever he’s about to do, it’s good. He’s sagacious, he’s stern, he’s authoritative.

There are also choices that different translators make about what does he say, and many translators add in terms of abuse. I haven’t given you the Pope translation which also does similar things, so I think there are several others which do similar things. These translators apparently think what Telemachus says about before committing these murders is too mild, so we’ve got to add in some more terms of abuse. So Lattimore has them called these creatures. The Fitzgerald translation has them called, “I wouldn’t give the clean death of a beast “to trulls, you sluts!” The Fagles translations has “sluts, suitors’ whores.” The Lombardo one has “suitors’ sluts,” and so on. And then the Green translation has this very long footnote about how exactly would you manage to kill 12 women with one rope? And that we should practice. It’s the theme of most of the classical scholarship about this passage is about that. It’s about what exactly will be the ship’s cables. Why could ship’s cable differ from one ship’s cable and so on. And so again, you can also talk about how to translate those shapes, the reading of the text through the notes and apparatus that they provide with it as well as by the translation itself.

So within the passage which describes the hanging, the women are compared to birds which have wanted to go back to their nesting place, but are instead caught in a trap, a rope, a rope trap to catch birds. That simile can work one of two very very different ways. It could work to dehumanize the women. It could suggest these are human beings who are being murdered, but no, let’s think of them like birds. We all eat chicken, it’s fine. And I think most translators that I’ve looked at do something along those lines of using the simile as a way to dehumanize. To me, I think the simile can also and in fact maybe more strongly work the opposite way to humanize by giving us the perspective of the birds and hence of the women. What we know the birds want is to go home. They want to nostos. Yet another group of characters in The Odyssey who are trying to get home and who fail to get home because part of Odysseus’s journey of nostos, journey of homecoming involves all these other people not getting to go back to their own beds and go home.

And then final thing is just this final horrible detail in the passage about the deaths of these women. What exactly does it mean that their feet are twitching for a little while or moving for a little while? I think both the Fitzgerald and Fagles translations, I was kind of surprised to realize this, they seem to be suggesting they’re kicking up heels. They’re having fun. This is what happens to party girls. And so, this is very clearly presenting the whole narrative of the murder within a particular language and a particular ethics of gendered violence. Whereby they’ve supposedly committed a sexual crime and they’re being punished for a sexual crime. I personally don’t read it that way, I don’t think that that’s what’s going on in the text at all. I think what’s going on in the text is that, this is a murder motivated by male shame and a desire to restore male honor. It’s not at all about anything that these slave women who’ve been raped have done. The text is presenting them as women who have minimal degrees of agency in these relationships. Odysseus himself has said very explicitly that they’ve been forced into this. Telemachus in the Greek doesn’t say anything about that there’s something wrong with them or they’ve made bad choices. What he says is that they’ve caused shame to himself and his mother, and that’s a very different kind of motivation. I think what the text is showing us is this clear-eyed understanding of what drives a bullied, fragile young boy to attack women whose existence makes him feel less of a man.

Okay, so I’m just going to read my version of that passage. I know you’ve already heard it but maybe it’s worth hearing again.

Telemachus then took initiative insisting, “I refuse to grant these girls a clean death “since they poured down shame on me and Mother “when they lay beside the suitors.” At that he wound a piece of sailor’s rope round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar, stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground. As doves so thrashes, spread their wings to fly home to their nests but someone set a trap. They crashed into a net, a bitter bedtime just so the girls, their heads all in a row were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death in agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while but not for long.

Okay, so I know that’s kind of disturbing so I’m not going to win with that, too horrible.
(laughs)
So I thought I should end with a happier scene, which is the scene which some readers in antiquity thought should really be the ending of the poem, the final reunion of Penelope and Odysseus.

I see this passage too as one where there’s more than one point of view. In both, I think modern scholarly accounts of the scene and of a central marriage and also in other translations, I think there can be a general tendency to subsume Penelope’s point of view into that of her husband to think it’s a happy heteronormative marriage so she must be happy because she’s a girl, girls like that and it must mean they both see exactly the same thing out of their marriage. What I get out of this, really this scene in Greek and what I wanted to make sure was very clear in my translation was how even at this moment of reunion, reconnection, the perspectives of the husband and wife are still extremely different, the ways they define their marriage, even though it’s through a shared physical object, the bed. Even the bed is interpreted totally differently by the husband versus the wife. For Penelope, it’s the bed of tears. It’s marked forever by her 20 years of abandonment. For Odysseus it’s what he constructed himself. It’s his own power and his own ability to rise above time and circumstances. There were very very different meanings. And I think it’s also really important that when Odysseus talks about, talks about the bed, he’s constantly repeating I, I, I, I, I. He’s always using the first-person singular about the bed and about his marriage, whereas Penelope uses the dual. She wants to think of the last possibility of there being more than one person in the marriage, including herself. So I’m going to just read the passage where they reunite and where she tests him by pretending to have moved this supposedly immovable bed.

So Odysseus has washed up all the helpful slave women, of whom there were many in the Odyssey, has washed all the blood and gore with which he’s soaked from all the men that he’s murdered. And then Athena also very helpfully, as she does several times in the poem, gives him a lovely makeover so he looks great. And even then, she holds out against him until she does this trick which is designed to push him to admit his own vulnerability, to admit that there is a possibility that the immovable bed could have been moved. She could have slept with somebody else in the course of 20 years. She could have moved the furniture. He might not be omnipotent. And so it’s a moment in which there’s a meeting in the space of vulnerability as well as in the space of a shared physical object.

This is Penelope speaking. “Now, Eurycleia, make the bed for him outside the room “he built himself. “Pull out the bedstead and spread quilts and blankets on it.”

She spoke to test him and Odysseus was furious, and told his loyal wife, “Woman, your words have cut my heart. “Who moved my bed? “It would be difficult for even a master craftsman. “Though a god could do it with ease, “no man however young and strong could pry it out. “There was a trick to how this bed was made. “I made it, no one else! “Inside the court they grew an olive tree “with delicate long leaves, full grown and green, “as sturdy as a pillar. “I built the room around it. “I packed stones together and fixed the roof and fitted doors. “At last I trimmed the olive tree and used my bronze “to cut the branches off from roof to tip “and skillfully transformed it to a bedpost. “Now I have told the secret trick, the token. “But woman, wife, I don’t know if someone, “a man, has cut the olive trunk and moved my bed, “or if it is still safe.” At that, her heart and body suddenly relaxed. She recognized the tokens he had shown her. She burst out crying and runs straight towards him and threw her arms around him, kissed his face and said, “Now you have told the story of our bed. “You made my stubborn heart believe in you.” This made him want to cry. He held his love, his faithful wife and wept. As welcome as the land to swimmers when Poseidon wrecks their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves and driving winds. A fewer escape the sea and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine. Grateful to be alive they crawl to land. So glad she was to see how own dear husband and her white arms would not let go his neck. So I’m sorry, I went on a few minutes long than I meant to. I’d love to have questions from the audience.

– [Woman]
Maybe you can speak to this. This poem has been the core of a classical education forever and ever. And tonight you have illuminated how profoundly political the language is and revealed the number of choices that can be made that would have tilted people’s minds and conceptions of humanity and relationships, especially between men and women so differently.

The politics of translation and I’m sure this applies to all kinds of other cultures where a dominant culture will appear to be deeply appreciative of that culture and yet through the power and asymmetry, translate or bring across things in a particularly politically accented way.- Absolutely, yes. I mean I guess, I completely agree with you. I mean I think it’s useful just to remember that, I mean we think of the Homeric poems as having been part of education forever. But of course in fact that’s not really true, right? It’s only really throughout the 20th century the translations of Homer have been central to education in the United States. And I think it’s actually useful to look back historically to earlier translations and you can sort of see how the politics of Chapman as the Elizabethan gentleman kind of translation or the Christian stoic kind of translation is a different politics from the politics of Pope and the world of etiquette and the enlightenment kind of approach to the poem. And it can be hard to see the political resonances of translations where we’ve so fully absorbed that that is the way it is, and then you sort of can’t see that there are political choices being made in every translation. I think The Odyssey isn’t necessarily a poem about politics in a sense that it’s a poem about community. And of course it’s the Greek Polis, the Greek city-state didn’t exist but in the period of archaic Greece, so it’s proto-political, but it’s certainly about how do we form communities and what are the ways that communities, justifiably or unjustifiably, exclude particular people from participation in community.

– [Man]
What are your thoughts about Matthew Arnold on translating Homer?- So Matthew Arnold wrote a famous essay about translating Homer in which he said that the translator of Homer had to have four essential qualities. The translator of Homer must be, must have rapidity, which I completely agree with. That’s partly why I do the whole line-for-line thing. Must have plainness of style

and plainness of style and plainness of something else.

And also must have nobility. The nobility piece I find, I’m not quite sure what kind of nobility. I mean I think actually the very own nobility that Arnold himself achieves in sort of rostrum in a way the kind of nobility I was going for. I think he doesn’t have to be as related to the political question. I don’t think the nobility of Homer has to be represented as this is a poem which only shows the perspectives of the elite or in the way that it doesn’t have to be a pompous kind of style, because I actually don’t think Homeric Greek is stylistically pompous. So I think the whole question of what do we mean by quote unquote heroic verse or nobility of style. I think it has to have dignity of some kind. And I definitely feel that you have to have a sense that the narrator respects everybody and respects the details of the world. This is a world where even if some moments are very funny, it has to have a sense that things matter. And in that way, it has to have some kind of dignity, some sense of worth and value.

So I think Matthew Arnold–

I mean I kind of hesitate about how much I want to say Arnold was totally right because I also think– I think he did a lot of armchair theorizing and also a lot of his critical comments are sort of tied up with an idea that the elite British public schoolboy of a particular type that he is, is the only possible way to have good taste and then all men of good taste will think blah blah blah and then that sort of imposed as the universalizing norms, which I think is problematic. So that’s why I said we want to unpick what nobility means and redefine it.

– [Man]
Hi, thank you for this and for your translation. I want to ask about the experience of translating into iambic pentameter. What was that like? Did you have a lot of experience with that and did it lead you to any like particular choices or understandings that might have not been apparent if you had just been doing a free-type of translation?- So, I’ve done other verse translations. I had already done those verse translations of Euripides in iambic pentameter. So this wasn’t my first project doing that which I think was good, I think it was both a good thing that I’d practiced it before. I wasn’t sort of having to practice for the first time and also I think it was relevant that my earlier translation projects had been drama that I was used to thinking about how to voice different characters in metrical verse. I mean I guess as I was trying to emphasize I wouldn’t have bothered if it was going to be yet another free-verse translation, because there were already so many of those out there.

I don’t know.

Yes, writing in verses in some ways more difficult than waiting in prose. I mean there were different requirements. To get a good line of prose is also quite difficult. To get a good line of free-verse is also, potentially, quite difficult. It certainly took a lot of rewrites, a lot of drafts, a lot of reading out loud to try and– And just trying also to figure out where are my line breaks and if I have to recast the passage because I have to condense it, because I have to make it line for line. Then other line breaks going to not work anymore in which case I have to rewrite the whole thing. I had many days like that of just realizing, because I couldn’t– Also, may be this is a detail, it’s a technical detail that maybe I was speaking to your question. I realized fairly late on, but I’d been letting myself get away with the idea that Odysseus, even if it’s possessive maybe I can just make that that number of syllables and then I don’t have to have it always be Odysseus’s and that takes up half the line. But then I realize no, nobody ever says Odysseus shoes, you say Odysseus’s shoes. So I actually have to use the whole line for that. I mean at a little fairly late stage I had to go back and do huge amounts of rewriting to give me that work.

– [Man]
I read the Margaret Atwood book right after I read your translation. My question is when did you read her book and what’s your take on how that fits into your whole interpretation?

– I read it years and years ago, and I really liked it. What I liked about it primarily was the way– I love all kinds of things about it. I loved the way that she mixes up ballad-style poetry with prose. I love the different voices. I love the way that she– I think it’s the text that’s all about grappling with women’s complicity in violence against women and I thought that was actually a really helpful way of thinking about the position of Penelope in The Odyssey, in the real odyssey. I don’t go all the way towards Atwood’s reading of Penelope and I think she sort of makes her into a Margaret Atwood character in a way that I don’t necessarily– Nobody said that Atwood has to do that. But I definitely found it helpful in just thinking about how is Penelope not just a woman, but also an extremely elite, privileged woman and in what ways does that set her apart from the women who are always surrounding her who are less privileged than she is. And then just the jump rope rhyme. In fact I was at Key West Literary Festival with Atwood and she read that rhyme; it was so moving. And I think it’s a wonderful– She creates a jump rope rhyme out of a scene that I read about the hanging of the slave women. And she was just saying in very direct terms we are the ones you killed, the ones who died, it was not fair. I think it’s very powerful, yeah.

– [Woman]
So I feel like most of the time, the character of Odysseus is usually very glorified and idealized as like a hero in Western canon. And I noticed that between your use of complicated in the first line versus historically, it’s like wiser, etc. etc. I just was wondering how much you paid attention to the actual flaws of the character himself versus like the way he’s seen as like a classical hero in your translation.

– Right, I feel like it’s a very recent phenomenon of sort of post superhero American culture idea that heroes have to be the Superman kind of good guy. I mean in antiquity people did not think that way about Odysseus whatsoever. I mean hero cult in antiquity is about the important characters of myth who might be demigods or might be incredibly powerful or more than mortal in some way, but it’s not about being nice. Ancient Greeks would have been astonished by the idea that anyone would think Odysseus would be nice.

Compared to other Homeric heroes, most Homeric heroes have a single superpower, a single epithet. So Achilles is swift-footed. He’s always running the fastest, speaking most directly the truth straight up, sticking it to the man, running the fastest all the way to death. Whereas Odysseus is always the one who has multiple different epithets. Most of his epithets have to do with multiplicity. He’s polymechanos, polymetis. As in polygamy, poly means many. He’s the many epitheted, many person. And so I think the poem itself is also interested in many-ness, in many different scenes, many different characters. And also in the central character himself being many different and trying to be multiple. And the whole question of can you be multiple and also insist on “and this is me and I’m back home.” “This is me, as the way I always was.” And if you ever thought I was anyone different, you’re wrong, not me. So I think he has that, the essential element of deceit and disguise. Do we think that’s good or bad? It’s interesting, right? I’m not sure that we have to think he’s a villain if he’s not a saint. It’s not that kind of simplistic. And I think it’s also this idea that if it’s ancient literature, it must be primitive, right? It must be morally simplistic, which certainly The Odyssey isn’t.- [Man]
This seems like a terrific undertaking. Can you talk a little bit about your process, the way you work?

– Mm-hmm, sure, yes. Yes, so I would read a passage in the Greek and then I would read it again and I’d read it again. Then I would look some words up in a lexicon and I would look up and see where else is that used in Homer and do I understand the usage of it? Do I understand the range of uses? Is it used in later Greek? Do I get a better sense of connotation by looking up in more dictionaries? Then I read a commentary, then I read it again and then I write a draft and then I rewrite my draft. And I read my draft out loud and I think, “Oh, it doesn’t sound good, I got to rewrite it.” And then I’d get stuck on a particular word which wasn’t at all difficult in the Greek, but I just can’t think of a way to say it in English. And then I spend three weeks feeling frustrated.
(laughs)
It’s kind of like that.

– [Man]
Busy.

– I thought I wasn’t going to, I mean it seemed like a miracle, but the goddesses helped me out, I don’t know. It actually got easier. I mean the more I struggled– For the first two years, I got nowhere. And then I started to figure it out. I don’t know.
(laughs)
– [Woman]
In what ways do you feel that you’ve been able to the give female characters in The Odyssey more power and agency as compared to other texts when you spoke about the slave woman and Calypso, but more specifically to Circe or the Sirens?

– Sure, I mean the Sirens is a very short part of the text. It’s disappointingly short. I mean I didn’t know when I first signed up to do this that I was going to have the whole first woman to translate The Odyssey be the main headline about it. And of course not every woman is a feminist, not every woman is out to unpick misogyny. I don’t want it to be sort of presented in deterministic terms that because I’m a woman, every line I write must be essentially feminine in a way that men aren’t held to that. We don’t sort of read a translation by a man and think, look how much did he is in the male characters and ask him in every interview, “You must be giving the male perspective.” “You must be only interested in the male characters,” all that. But I do also– I mean as it happens, I’m am interested in feminist readings of The Odyssey, as well as in feminism.

It’s sort of hard, hard to say how much was deliberate and how much was less deliberate. Because I also have realized in going back, as I said, I’ve gone back and looked more closely at other translations next to mine in just sort of little bits. And one thing that’s surprised me is that in cases where I hadn’t thought I’m doing anything different in a particularly gendered way, I sometimes have been. And that sometimes it’s been surprising to me, I hadn’t realized this thing about the sluts. It hadn’t occurred to me that one would want to put that kind of abusive language into the mouth of Telemachus. I don’t think it’s a predetermined by the fact I’m a woman, but it certainly didn’t occur to me. And similarly, it didn’t occur to me to sort of think the Sirens must be presented as sexy kind of seductress rather than– They’re like the “into that” kind of seduction, and it’s a very different kind of seduction. And that it’s sort of part of the whole pattern of dangerous female mouths and the male fear of being swallowed up by the female mouth which of course is sort of recurrent through the wandering books that there’s this fear of either the cave or the mouth or the many mouths of Silla.

So obviously part of that is just informed by thinking about gender, while not necessarily by me being a woman, but I certainly was thinking about gender a lot, yeah. Yeah, I (indistinct).

Thank you.
(audience applauding)