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Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey in 2017 and the Iliad in 2023 are now the standard English-language versions, acclaimed for their conciseness and fluency. Her infatuation with Homer began at the age of eight, when her primary school put on a production of the Odyssey, with her in the role of Athena, and the excitement hasn’t worn off. You can question some of the choices she makes in her translations (she questions them herself), but you can’t doubt the months and years she has spent finding the “least bad” compromises.
Her new book is a series of essays on the challenges of translation and the pleasures and insights to be gained from reading the classics. She is fascinated by how far the ancient world intersects with the modern. Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus and Aristophanes are here but so are Spike Lee, Erica Jong, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves (a last link to the clever servants in Roman comedy) and Boris Johnson (“an incompetent drunkard” who somehow passed as an intellectual “on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek”). Wealthy white men in Silicon Valley get a look-in, too, for embracing Stoicism (not to be confused with stoicism) in “a watered-down form”. Continuities between then and now pile up: war, cruelty and political turmoil. But there are also important contrasts and she scolds those who look back on antiquity as “a mirror in which we always find ourselves”, even when we’re not there.
With Sappho the difficulty is that so little of the poetry has survived: reconstructing her work is “like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw”. Wilson mostly admires Anne Carson’s version of Sappho, as “performance art on the page”, while finding the characterisation of her disembodied and stripped of same-sex desire. The island of Lesbos was one associated with blowjobs – the word lesbiazein means to fellate – but it’s through Sappho that female homosexuality has come to be understood. Feminists have made her an icon, understandably enough. But Wilson doesn’t buy the idea that male poets – Baudelaire, Tennyson, Swinburne – “are always metaphorically raping Sappho, while female poets sing with her”. However all-embracing Sappho’s poems, they “emphasise the isolation of the individual” and show us “what it means to be excluded and alone”.
Wilson describes herself, half-jokingly, as a pedant, and when translators don’t come up to scratch or critics miss the point she’s tough-minded, not to say scathing. Stilted, boring, sentimental, melodramatic, long-winded, archaising, nonsensical: dismissive adjectives pile up. Robert Browning’s unidiomatic version of Agamemnon is described as “arguably more difficult to understand than the Greek”. Edith Hamilton, a retired schoolteacher who popularised the classics in the US, is found guilty of racism when she “remakes ancient Greece in the image of an idealised United States” and ignores disfranchisement and enslavement. Even the brilliant Peter Green is found to be “oddly stiff” on occasion. As for the “armchair classicists” who pontificate on television and in newspapers, she finds them guilty of snobbish gatekeeping.
Gatekeeping isn’t Wilson’s style. She’s eager to kill off the snootier association of Latin and Greek as “a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs”. Hence the warmth with which she writes about poet Christopher Logue’s version of Homer in his War Music. Logue, as she says, came from a modest background, was court-martialled from the army, imprisoned for theft, and didn’t go to university. He had no Greek, either. But “grand larceny” and “extraordinary heist” though it may be, his version of the Iliad is “cause for celebration”: its jazzy rhythm and fetishistic love of detail dispel prejudice against it as a musty old classic. Not that she’s uncritical: his modernising similes (spilt blood “like a car-wash”, men crammed in battle “like shoppers”) sometimes go too far, and he doesn’t bring Helen of Troy to life. Still, at least he’s not one of those misogynists, discussed in another chapter, who slut-shame Helen.
Wilson’s one brief departure from the classics is prompted by the controversy over Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 International Booker prize; the English-language version, by Deborah Smith, was denounced as a betrayal of the original. The row raises questions about what makes a good translation. On one side are the familiarisers, who think the test is how comfortably accessible a book becomes in a different language; to them, the translator should be invisible. To their opponents, the foreignisers, this is “a false kind of homogeneity”; a translation ought to embody the strangeness of the original language and culture, not disguise it. Translation theorists criticise the domestication of foreign texts as unethical and equate it with political conservatism.
Wilson occupies the middle ground. “The creation of a more reader-friendly translation does not necessarily imply a desire to appropriate or ‘colonise’ the foreign original,” she says. But nor does she want the shock and surprise of a foreign text to be smoothed over. The tensions and complexities of the original should always be made legible, she believes. This goes for verse form, too: in honour of Homer’s dactylic hexameters, her version of the Odyssey uses iambic pentameter rather than prose.
In by far the longest essay here she explores how best to translate the Odyssey (even if there is no “best”), comparing notes with her predecessors. How, for example, to translate the moment when the Sirens tell Odysseus he should stop his voyage and listen to their music? In the modern imagination, the Sirens are scantily clad mermaids, and it’s because of their sexual power that Odysseus ties himself to a mast to withstand their allure. But Homer’s Sirens aren’t sexy; they’re “cognitively tempting” bird-women whose seduction is the promise of knowledge, not sex. Rather than allude to their “lips”, as many translators do, Wilson refers to their “mouths”, which aren’t kissable so much as dangerous.
No less fascinating is her choice of the adjective to describe Odysseus in the poem’s first line. In Homer he is polytropos which in modern English versions has been variously rendered as “that resourceful man”, “that man skilled in all ways”, “the man of twists and turns” and “the cunning hero”. Wilson isn’t impatient with these except to complain about verbosity: it’s a point of pride that her version of the Odyssey is no longer than Homer’s. Her own choice for the adjective is “complicated”, which she admits might sound stark and which to my ear is reminiscent of emollient amateur psychology. She owns up to almost dropping it after she came across the phrase “He’s a complicated man” in Isaac Hayes’s theme song for the film Shaft. But in the end she stuck with it and spends 10 pages explaining her decision.
As she says, when you’re translating there’s no unanswerable, right solution and in the next 20 years, provided the world doesn’t go bang in the meantime, she hopes a younger generation will come up with their own ideas. To help them along she offers a manifesto-like afterword with 20 rules. “If the original makes you laugh, cry, feel excited, get goosebumps, feel puzzled, get bored, be charmed,” she says, “then the translation should try to create those effects.” It’s a lifelong project but worth the effort. “Try to rethink everything. Offer something different. It’s OK to experiment … Don’t give up too soon. There is always another way to say it.”
