Emily Wilson's Odyssey

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It was published in 2017.  Why have so many people been talking about it this weekend?

Selected readings



27 Comments

  1. CJ said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 12:10 pm

    My immediate guess is that Jorge Rivera-Herrans released the "The Ithaca Saga" of his "Epic: The Musical", which is an adapted retelling of the Odyssey. I've seen several Tiktokers say variations of "You're surprised by the ending and what the suitors planned? Go read the actual saga. I recommend Wilson's version. I'll wait."

  2. John from Cincinnati said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 12:36 pm

    Those of us of a certain age were introduced to The Odyssey of Homer via the George Herbert Palmer translation of 1884.
    The full 1921 edition is free online from Google books here

    Tell of the storm-tossed man, O Muse, who wandered long after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many the men whose towns he saw, whose ways he proved; and many a pang he bore in his own breast at sea, while struggling for his life and his men's safe return. Yet even so, despite his zeal, he did not save his men; for through their own perversity they perished, having recklessly devoured the kine of the exalted Sun, who therefore took away the day of their return. Of this, O goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak as thou wilt to us.

  3. Mark Liberman said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 1:30 pm

    Why?

    Rosa Cartagena, "Why is everyone talking about this Penn professor’s ‘The Odyssey’ translation?", The Philadelphia Inquirer 12/30/2024:

    Penn classics professor Emily Wilson is back in the spotlight this month, thanks in part to Christopher Nolan.

    The Oppenheimer director recently announced an adaptation of The Odyssey as his next project, prompting a deluge of reactions on social media, from newcomers googling the ancient Greek text to literature nerds disparaging anyone unfamiliar with it (and simultaneously decrying the state of English education).[…]

    Now that Nolan will adapt the epic poem for the screen, many hope that Wilson’s much lauded interpretation will serve as a reference point for his and his partner-collaborator Emma Thomas’ screenplay. Film production is scheduled to begin in 2025 with an estimated release date of July 17, 2026. So far a star-studded cast has been announced, including Matt Damon, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and Tom Holland.

    Here's the video from Wilson's reading and discussion of her Iliad translation at the Penn Free Library, starting with a performance of the start of the Greek original:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOzmmNMgN-w&t=131s

    I recommend her reading of Iliad 18, "Lament of the Nereids".

    And there are lots of Wilson Odyssey readings on YouTube.

  4. Ross Presser said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 1:45 pm

    I finally read through the Odyssey in 2017, over two or three nights that were completely sleepless due to anxiety. It was a MMPB edition (in English), I'm not sure whose translation.

  5. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 2:59 pm

    Prof. Mair's four-column comparison inexplicably omits the version of Richmond Lattimore (1906-1984), a staple of my undergraduate years which were not quite as long ago as his undergraduate years. I wouldn't call Lattimore bouncy. But I wouldn't give much credence to a pseudonymous internet persona who seems to think "bounciness" is a desideratum in translations of the Homeric corpus. I am, however, open to the possibility that Prof. Wilson's work may have been ill-served by some of its online publicists and enthusiasts.

    Truth be told, Lattimore's were the most "literal" of the then-popular extant translations and for that reason the most useful as a "trot" for those of us who were at the time supposedly learning how to read and sight-translate the original Greek but maybe sometimes in need of a shortcut late at night when we had not prepared for the next day's class quite as thoroughly as we ought to have. But as English verse it works surprisingly well considering that and doesn't come off as overly wooden or "translationese."

  6. Not a naive speaker said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 3:32 pm

    When I read the first line that Ulysses was a complicated ma; I thought of John Shaft

    Hayes:
    He's a complicated man
    But no one understands him but his woman
    Chorus: John Shaft

    Emily Wilson might have been influenced by the lyrics of Theme from Shaft

    The lyrics still work when we substitute Shaft with Ulysses

    Here are the complete lyrics:

    Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?
    (Shaft)
    You're damn right

    Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?
    (Shaft)
    Can you dig it?

    Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?
    (Shaft)
    Right on

    They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother
    (Shut your mouth)
    But I'm talkin' 'bout Shaft
    (Then we can dig it)

    He's a complicated man
    But no one understands him but his woman
    (John Shaft)

  7. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 3:59 pm

    No disrespect to Isaac Hayes*, but if you want to stick it to those "dudebros" you can get a less male-centered take on the traditional narrative with the wonderful-if-obscure 1985 song "Circumspect Penelope," by Look Blue Go Purple, who were AFAIK the only all-female ensemble in the astonishing efflorescence of musical talent that arose in and around Dunedin, N.Z. in the early/mid-Eighties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deElvcqbKJ8

    *According to our own historical sources, the specific text "Theme from Shaft" coincides with a break or at least shift in the Hayesian corpus, where due to the vagaries of fortune he stopped writing in collaboration with David Porter and instead wrote completely on his own. It would be an interesting question whether the textual-analysis techniques typically used by classical philologists to assess authorship could successfully detect that transition in the corpus absent external evidence.

  8. R. Fenwick said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 5:51 pm

    @J. W. Brewer: But I wouldn't give much credence to a pseudonymous internet persona who seems to think "bounciness" is a desideratum in translations of the Homeric corpus.

    Respectfully, this statement comes across as just the sort of elitism that Latin and Greek studies have struggled, mostly half-heartedly, to shed for decades. Whether willfully or not, it both misregisters and misinterprets @hyuumanatees's post: an obviously colloquially-phrased post on a length-limited medium isn't the place to look for a list of formal desiderata, but more to the point, the marking of "bouncy" with hedge quotes pretty blatantly shows that the author does not intend the term per ipsissimum sese as such a formal desideratum.

    In any event, "bouncy" or "bouncing" is not at all uncommon as an informal way to describe to non-specialists the rhythmic effect of iambic pentameter:

    This typically manifests in an abab, cdcd, efef, gg pattern of iambic pentameter, which is itself a sort of bouncing rhythm that relies on how the iambs in each line are arranged.) (source)
    Writers of lyrical ballads from the 18th to the 20th century, such as Coleridge and Poe, continued to use the "bouncy" rhythm of the iamb to tell their stories… (source)
    Iambic has a bouncy but natural-sounding cadence that best mimics the natural patterns of human speech in poetry. (source)
    Cueball's responses are each one line of iambic pentameter, just visually broken into two lines for space reasons. They read (adding the emphasis): "Well, I can meet the plane at ten of six" and "I'll meet him at the stairs before the gate" with a sort of bouncing rhythm. (source)
    I’ve never heard the big films, for example, use the sort of bouncing rhythm of iambic pentameter. It’s always delivered as if it’s prose. (source)

    Sadly, a number of other tweets (I found at least four while looking for examples) have directly engaged in similarly supercilious disdain for @hyuumanatees's phrasing here. Would that they'd take some lessons from the numerous condemnations of arrogance and self-importance throughout the Odyssey itself.

  9. David P said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 7:29 pm

    Wikipedia (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Homer#LattimoreIl) has a long list of English translators of Homer, along with first lines, stretching from George Chapman in 1611 to Emily Watson in 2023. Not yet on the list is Daniel Mendelson's translation of the Odyssey, reportedly due next spring, which I look forward to.

  10. Yves Rehbein said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 8:02 pm

    νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
    ἤσθιον

    The sun god's cattle even has a Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_of_Helios

    Helios, who in Greek mythology is the god of the Sun, is said to have had seven herds of oxen and seven flocks of sheep, each numbering fifty head.

    Does not this sound like a calendar, 7 heavenly bovids and 7 earthly ovids times 50 weeks? Did they literally "feast on the cattle", as Fitzgerald has it, or feast on every sun up and sun down, which would seem unremarkable to us but opens the scene in Book 1 of the Odyssey.

    κατέδο is a bit rough to translate, for me anyway, because κατα- seems to mean completely but ἤσθιον is imperfect to έδο, so it is hardly the perfect sense of "devour" we get from Fagles (and NB Wiktionary "eat up, devour" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/καταέδο). Wilson's "they ate the … cattle" is short and to the point, if έδο is the correct interpretation. I am skeptical because the association of the sky respectively the sun with cows is not exclusively Indo-European. It may be debatable if it is thoroughly Indo-European at all, but cattle raiding definitely is and ritual slaughter may be the intended meaning, which designates the inept ήπιοι as noble freedmen.

  11. Chris Button said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 9:02 pm

    Anyone read Alessandro Barrico's "Omero, Iliade"?

  12. Chris Button said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 9:03 pm

    *Baricco

  13. Victor Mair said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 10:25 pm

    Very nice comment by Yves Rehbein.

    ======

    When I was visiting archeological sites in Ireland with J. P. Mallory (author of In Search of Irish Dreamtime) 2-3 weeks ago, I was struck by how many ancient bovine based toponyms there were, especially important / sacred rivers.

    "Know your Narts: cattle rearing and cattle raiding" (6/6/20)

    "Translating the I ching (Book of Changes)" (10/11/17)

    "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic Reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20), with a long bibliography

    "Cattle raid, spray, whatever" (12/21/13) — be sure to read all the comments

  14. Seth said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 10:26 pm

    It's interesting that even in the first few words, there's so much variation in underlying meaning:

    "man skilled in all ways of contending" = physical abilities related to war
    "various-minded man" = mental state
    "man of twists and turns" = external events, roughly "ill-fated"
    "a complicated man" = mental state, with more contemporary phrasing

    Just looking at the surrounding context, "man of twists and turns" strikes me as fitting the best conceptually, but that's just my impression with no subject-matter expertise.

  15. Jason Stokes said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 10:59 pm

    This sales pitch reminds of the "Liberals Hate this American Flag Company's Pro-America Views" advertising you see on Alt-Right sites, just in reverse.

  16. Andrew Usher said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 12:26 am

    Yes, and I don't see why that isn't called out. If the best thing you can say about a translation is that ;dudebros' won't like it, that says little for the merits of the translation; if it's merely the one most important to you, it shows your inability to give an useful opinion on it.

    Of course iambic pentameter can be called 'bouncy' and can sometimes sound that way; the point is that that's considered a _fault_ in a serious work, such as anything that purports to be a rendering of Homer is. Its use as a term of praise is further evidence of the poster's ignorance or lack of appreciation.

    There is nothing wrong with being ignorant of, or lacking interest in, the classics. But one must be honest about it, which in this case would probably mean not posting.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  17. Thomas said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 5:07 am

    What is a “dudebro” and why are they a measure for the quality of a translation from Ancient Greek to contemporary English?

  18. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 5:19 am

    Homer's Odyssey was still echoed in Japan, as the legend of Yuriwaka appeared influenced by the poet through the plays of the Buddhist Sutras transported from the Tarim Basin and China. Tsubouchi Shoyo (Japanese: 坪内逍遥 1859-1935), James T. Araki, and Saida Khalmirzaeva have already published on this subject.

  19. Bob Ladd said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 12:33 pm

    I'm with R. Fenwick here, not Andrew Usher. I was given a copy of Wilson's translation for Christmas a year ago and got a lot out of reading it aloud. I'm persuaded by Wilson's arguments for a translation that really works when spoken, not just read silently.

    I also don't understand why iambic pentameter isn't suitable for "serious" poetry. For example, I don't think Yeats was merely aiming for bounciness when he wrote

    "… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity."

  20. Tom Recht said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 2:42 pm

    @Yves Rehbein, that's interesting — I'd never noticed before that ἤσθιον was the only imperfect verb in the proem, with all the other verbs in the plot synopsis being aorist. (It's also one of the only two whose subject isn't Odysseus, for what that's worth.)

    I don't think that rules out a perfective reading of κατά, though — telic Aktionsart can combine with imperfective aspect. And there doesn't seem to be another relevant sense of κατεσθίω.

    The usage of the Greek imperfect can be unexpected if you're coming from Latin/Romance, since unlike in those languages it's not limited to a narrative background function. I'm not sure what to make of the choice in this case. Maybe its effect is to deepen the culpability of the sailors by drawing out the action, in a sense — presenting it not as a simple off-the-cuff event but as an act that takes time and has some internal structure (which in fact gets described in detail when the narrative reaches this point in 12.340-365).

    You'd think commentaries on the Odyssey would have something to say on this point, but it doesn't get a mention in Stanford, Heubeck et al., or any of the older ones I can find online.

  21. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 2:43 pm

    I certainly wouldn't call Chapman's translations of Homer "bouncy," but I don't care for them and I think they help show why forcing those particular texts into the straightjacket of English iambic pentameter is typically not a good strategy. They're not supposed to be 17th-century English poems and they're not supposed to be 21st-centuiry English poems. Classical texts are inherently weird and alien to a modern sensibility, which is one reason why there is value to trying to engage with them seriously, so you can be knocked out of your temporal provincialism. A translation that obscures that is a bad translation. Many classics teachers tried to paper this over for a long time, with blah blah blah about the continuity and supposed harmonious unity of Western Civ, and they did a lot of damage with their clumsy attempts to make their objects of study seem relevant and tame. Taking the ancient text on its own weird and offputting terms on the chance the encounter might transform you is an act of humility rather than elitism.

    You can always paraphrase, either a little or a lot, as long as you are honest about what you're doing – I first "read" bits of Homer at the age of maybe 7 or 8 in a comic-book adaptation that preserved (some but not all) important plot points without giving any feel whatsoever for Homer's language, and I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with versions like that as long as there's honesty about what they are and what they aren't.

    But again I have not read Wilson's versions and I certainly remain open in principle to the possibility that they are better than their defenders are. That said, there are so many works out there worth reading that I have not yet read that I am comparatively unlikely to devote much of my remaining years of life to reading new translations of works (especially long ones!) I have already read in some other translation as well as having tasted, just a little bit, and certainly not with any great fluency, in the original.

  22. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 2:49 pm

    @Thomas: I believe it's a transliteration of δυδεβρω, an ancient pejorative sufficiently obscure that Liddell & Scott don't have an entry on it.

  23. Tom Recht said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 2:52 pm

    It's actually a deformation of δύσφρων "ill-disposed, malignant".

  24. Andrew Usher said,

    December 31, 2024 @ 7:50 pm

    I think Bob Ladd mistakes me when saying:

    > I also don't understand why iambic pentameter isn't suitable for "serious" poetry. For example, I don't think Yeats was merely aiming for bounciness …[well-known text]

    That is not at all what I meant and would be absurd given the history of English poetry. I implied that iambic pentameter if it were done with the aim to sound 'bouncy" would be. Yeats's poem here is about as far from that as possible for pentameter, and reading it like that would sound mad.

    I think J. W. Brewer above is nearest to the truth, and probably not by accident is not unlike what Palmer says in the preface linked to.

    If you honestly prefer Wilson's version as a matter of taste, you're entitled to. But that's no argument for its being better or even a good translation; if the only criterion for the latter were taste, there'd be no reason for them at all!

  25. Elizabeth Barber said,

    January 1, 2025 @ 2:40 pm

    I studied Greek as an undergrad with Richmond Lattimore. He was rather shy, and we had a game going to see who could ask a question that would cause him to take his pipe out of his mouth and spill some of his wisdom onto us. My senior year, I was trying to write a paper on Greek lyric poetry for the other Greek prof, who suggested–when it turned out that the library's copy of that corpus was missing–that I ask Lattimore if I could borrow his copy over the weekend. He obligingly got his Oxford edition from a shelf, went to his desk, and put a sturdy rubber-band around it. As he handed it to me, he asked that I be very careful not to dislodge any of the little bits of paper in it. As soon as I got to my room, I set it carefully on my desk, removed the rubber-band, and opened it to the nearest slips of paper. As I read through the poems and the slips, I learned how Lattimore came up with his remarkable translations. Apparently, whenever he happened to think of JUST the right translation for a line or phrase, he would write it down and stick it into the text. Later, he had all these to draw from when he set out to finish a complete translation. This volume was now heavily pregnant, and his book of translations of Greek lyric poetry came out 2 years later. I've always felt utterly privileged by that experience.

  26. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 1, 2025 @ 6:49 pm

    Elizabeth Barber's reminiscence of Lattimore was a lovely thing to read on the first day of the year, and I am grateful to her for sharing it.

  27. Yves Rehbein said,

    January 4, 2025 @ 7:16 pm

    Interestingly, M. L. West has more info on cattle and cows with different qualifiers, about "Indo-European Poetry and Myth", and, incidently, a bit of shade that's relevant to the woke gender studies:

    <blockquoteThe position of the poet in ancient India and medieval Ireland has provided scholars with much further material for comparison. In both countries poetry was a hereditary profession that ran in certain families, the art passing from father to son, as in the six families of Rishis responsible for books 2–7 of the Rigveda.

    It is also noted below that professional poets would seek hosts and may be rewarded with the usual currency:

    In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, when the infant god demonstrates his newly invented lyre with a song honouring all the gods, Apollo exclaims, ‘this is worth fifty cows!’ (437). The reference is to his own fifty cows that Hermes had stolen, which he is now content to let him keep in exchange for the lyre.

    It ocurs to me that Pentacost is literally the fiftieth day after Pessach. I am not sure why this is significant. All I know is that the fourtieth is traditionally men's day, German Vatertag. Egyptian jfdw "4" comes to mind and ḥm.w "40" actually fits the bill, compare Himmelfahrt "Ascension Thursday" (fourth day of the week).

    Phaethousa and Lampetie are in Homer daughters of Helios, who herd the cattle, but "In the Odyssey (23.246) Eos appears once as a charioteer, with two swift horses named Lampos and Phaethon." On the other hand, "The Daughter of the Sun, Lithuanian Sáulės dukrýtė, Latvian Saules meita (‘Sun's girl", presumably for older
    Saulēs duktē), […]"

    She is in constant relationship with the Sons of God (Jonval nos. 369–417) in a way that strikingly parallels
    Sūryā's relationship with the Aśvins, the Divó nápātā. On occasion they are at odds (370–4, 416), but more
    often they are on friendly terms (375). They greet her on Midsummer Day (404). She rides on a sleigh behind the Son of God's horse (417). She heats the bath for the two Sons of God, who arrive on sweating
    horses (381).

    I believe this is significant because ox-carts are older than chariots and sleighs are older than the wheel.

    The Egyptian book of the sky cow, of which I was thinking of a non-IE counter example, is actually not attested before Tutankhamun. Erik Hornung 1982 as the principle source makes a case for earlier references to bovids. More surprisingly, the myth is connected to the flood myth.

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