It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. There was an awareness of it being sort of a boys club. Greek maenads were the model for a new, uncorseted way of moving, leaping and dancing. The reviewer actually says this about Emily Wilson's translation: " And genius is certainly one of the first words that comes to mind when reading Emily Wilson's clean-lined, compulsively readable translation of the Odyssey **, one of the most interesting versions of the epic ever produced in English."**. Although translation might seem a natural step for a scholar preoccupied by the connections between antiquity and later texts, Wilson was dissuaded from pursuing it. I partly just want to shake them and make them see that all translations are interpretations. Most of the criticism Wilson expects, she says, will come from a digging in of the heels: Thats not what it says in the dictionary, and therefore it cant be right! And if you put down anything other than whats said in the dictionary, then, of course, you have to add a footnote explaining why, which means that pretty much every line has to have a footnote. , W. W. Norton & Company (September 19, 2023), Language Wilson has emphasized that other female translators of Homer, such as Anne Dacier and Rosa Onesti, made very different interpretative choices from hers. The myths of Io and Prometheus were, for these women, symbolic of their own struggle to find mobility within the constraints of translation and Victorian literary norms. Socially and emotional complex beyond my expectations, Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2016. Polytropos, Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word u of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. Later Bible translators failed to meet that mystical standard. Nowhere in the product description is it mentioned who the translator is. W. W. Norton & Company. The list of English classical translations by contemporary women is distinguished and growing every year: it includes Susanna Braunds Lucan; Diane Arnson Svarliens Euripides; Cynthia Damons Tacitus and Julius Caesar; Alicia Stallings Lucretius; Deborah Robertss Prometheus Bound; Janet Lembkes Virgil and Euripides; Laura Gibbss Aesop; and Anne Carsons innovative, stylish versions of Greek tragedies, as well as her Sappho (also now translated by Diane Rayor). [2] Her sister is the food writer Bee Wilson. [1] Her thesis was entitled Why Do I Overlive? There's a ton of character development and social/interpersonal nuance on every page of the Iliad. But Hutchinsons work exists only in manuscript; like that of most British female classical translators before this generation, her work was largely unknown beyond her own immediate circle. That youre going to be communicating with the masses, which is less important than being innovative within your field. And it is a damned refreshing take on Homer! The Aeneid, perhaps the most canonical Latin text, was translated into English by a woman (Ruden) for the first time in 2009. Here's what happened when a woman took the job", "The first English Translation of the Odyssey by a woman was worth the wait", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emily_Wilson_(classicist)&oldid=1135613612, Scholar, professor, writer, translator, poet, "Ah, how miserable!" They include the undervaluing of translation as a scholarly activity in the modern academy, which means that, in a world where women are already struggling for legitimacy in a historically male-dominated field, female classicists are not given a strong institutional motive to work on translations. Just the fact of never having a female teacher, but its a difference to how you feel when you dont have any mentors who dont even know what it would be like. Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. One trap for translators lurks in the poems first line, where its hero is called, untranslatably, polytropos the cunning hero (Lombardo) or the man of twists and turns (Fagles). The Odyssey is the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Most every Homeric translation since has been scrutinized against his quartet of qualities. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Barry B. Powell was born in Sacramento, CA, in 1942. Yopie Prins addresses this question in Ladies Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy, her splendid new study of late 19th- and early 20th-century female translators of ancient Greek tragedy. Email Address * Subject * Message * Thank you! The Odyssey (trans. Wilson, whose own translation appears this week, has produced the first English rendering of the poem by a woman. I think I would enjoy reading this aloud more than silently. . The first English Bibles translator, John Wycliffe, was disinterred and his bones were burned for the heresy of translating into English, and his successor, William Tyndale, was excommunicated, sentenced to death by strangulation and burned at the stake. Emily Wilson. He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Zeus is the poems prevailing god, and what men do, or are willing to do, in love and war and in the friendships that arise in war and its losses, are the poems preoccupations. A few translators have tried to fashion an English equivalent; Richmond Lattimore was perhaps the most successful. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who translated Aeschylus Prometheus Bound as a young woman. Complicated: the brilliance of Wilsons choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. Because there is no perception that its serious intellectually. University of Pennsylvania Professor Emily Wilson in the School of Arts and Sciences has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the humanities category for her translations of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club thats right for you for free. But Wilson, in her introduction, reminds us that these palace women maidservants has often been put forward as a correct translation of the Greek , dmoai, which Wilson calls an entirely misleading and also not at all literal translation, the root of the Greek meaning to overpower, to tame, to subdue werent free. Those are the four? Please try your request again later. Homer didn't write in King's English, you know. We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. Women have long been marginalised in the world of ancient texts, but female scholars and translators are finally having their say, If you look up the subject heading female classicists in the large research library catalogue at the university where I teach, a grand total of five books pop up of which two are separate editions of Its a Dons Life by Mary Beard. Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the Odyssey, one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus? , Item Weight We can only hope that, in the coming years, more British and American women including people who are neither ladies nor white will begin to translate Greek and Roman texts into English. It would have been helpful to have notes (as is often the case in such texts). So it would be GREAT if you can mention the name of the translator in the product description. In Wilsons hands, this exciting and often horrifying work now gallops at a pace befitting its best battle scenes, roaring with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, and the anguished cries of dying men. Not all female translators would describe themselves as feminists and many female classical translators, like almost all their male counterparts, do not see gender as a central element in their work. If youre going to admit that stories matter, Wilson told me, then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? 3. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading." A dramatic reading of two early books of the poem, in current in-progress iambic pentameter verse translation, followed by Q and A. Thursday, November 7, 4:30-6:00 p.m. Cohen Hall, room 402 And with formulaic language stripped away, it is the characters and their interactions that take center stage. The mood and voice needs to be distinctive and entirely itself. I have not enjoyed this translation as much, finding aspects of it rather quirky with the use of modern idiom in places and some of the subtleties of the Ancient Greek words and proper names missing . I'm terms of being well-done poetically, I'd recommend Robert Fitzgerald's translation (he also did the Odyssey and the Aeneid).. It's worth mentioning, though, that he's one of the translators Emily Wilson picks out as making some needlessly sexist choices - e.g. Biography. These are not good criteria, Wilson told me. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. The potential shame of pronouncing a French word wrong was pretty inhibiting, Wilson said, laughing. I just felt like I wanted to spend a little bit longer with Euripides.. Wilson knew that if she was being smart, she ought to focus on something understudied, like Plutarch. But often such words carry real weight: the suitors sauntered in, for instance, where the verb perfectly captures this crew of dapper sociopaths. I wanted it to feel like an idiomatic thing that you might say about somebody: that he is complicated., I asked: What about the commentator who says, It does something that more than modernizes it subverts the fundamental strangeness of the way Odysseus is characterized. Im sure some classicists are going to say its flat out wrong, Interesting, but wrong., Youre quite right, she replied. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (wandered wrecked where worked) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (Tell me about and Find the beginning) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homers polytropos and Odysseuss complicated nature. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does a man of many turns suggest the doubleness of the original word a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Here is how Wilson renders their undoing: If I was really going to be radical, Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, I wouldve said, polytropos means straying, and andra man, the poems first word means husband, because in fact andra does also mean husband, and I couldve said, Tell me about a straying husband. And thats a viable translation. It could be that hes the turner.. It does not dwell on the causes of the war. Wilson is at her best in one of the poems greatest scenes, the first meeting in Book 19 between Penelope and her unrecognized husband: Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell and flow again. The inability to take classical texts for granted is a great gift that some female translators are able to use as a point of leverage, to shift the canon to a different and unexpected place. Bought in good faith. Though her education there, she says, offered her a strong introduction to literary study, it wasnt lost on her that none of her professors were women. This was . In The Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Only last year came this new English translation by Emily Wilson, an American academic and allegedly the first woman to translate Homer into English. Today, Wilson is working on several different projects, including a translation of Homer's Iliad and a book about translation itself, titled Faithful.Although she has already finished several books of the Iliad, it has been a unique project."The whole mood of the poem is totally different from the mood of The Odyssey," Wilson explains, "It took quite some time to get my head around how . If Wilsons version has an English model, it is rather the moving plainness of Matthew Arnolds Sohrab and Rustum: Soon a hum arose, As of a great assembly loosed, and fires Began to twinkle through the fog; for now Both armies moved to camp and took their meal . So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text thats not going to be interpretively straightforward.. It feels, I told Wilson, with your choice of complicated, that you planted a flag.. I read the second half only by means of the Arguments which precede each Book. Written in plain, contemporary language. The most highly praised male classicist translators of our era such as Robert Fagles write with a confident exuberance, often expanding or adding to the original. I think its very interesting thats still with us. [2], Wilson was "shy but accomplished" in school. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. In 2010, she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in Six Tragedies of Seneca. When the Trojans learn Achilles is not participating in the siege they counterattack. [1] In 2017 she became the first woman to publish a translation of Homer's Odyssey into English. It is an interesting injunction from Odysseus, who himself, during his 10 years of wandering, was serially unfaithful. wanted a Greek copy of the Pentateuch the five books of Moses for the Library of Alexandria. Following a lengthy introduction, she provides a translation of Homer's work in iambic pentameter. I find this to be a very good translation, into modern English. One might wonder whether the gender of the translator makes a difference that can be discerned on the page. It is also true, less obviously, of the available translations into English of ancient Greek and Roman texts, most of which are still created by classicists. The Iliad and Odyssey are composed in a long dactylic line (tumpety-tumpety-tum) thats poorly suited to the natural rhythms of English. [7] Her next book, The Death of Socrates (2007), examines Socrates' execution. Poetry News Guernica Talks to Emily Wilson While She Translates The Iliad By Harriet Staff Guernica 's Ben Purkert interviewed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson! Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. It has to go very close to sounding silly, but without quite getting there. Homers hexameters run from 13 to 18 syllables. : The Illiad takes place during the last month of the 10 year siege of Troy. Name * First Name. (review of three separate translations of, This page was last edited on 25 January 2023, at 19:47. Please try again. He himself is still I believe the longest leader of the Conservative Party, and served as Prime Minister for three terms, and helped see through the Reform Act of 1867. In her reading of the modernist poet HD (Hilda Doolittle), Prins shows brilliantly that the attempt to translate Euripides lyric meters into English enabled her to invent a new kind of free verse in English. I had read others, including Richmond Lattimore's much admired translation. Last Name. translating the fairly neutral word used of Odysseus's hanged slave-girls as 'whores'. Her mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Shakespeare specialist, taught English literature at Oxford; her mothers brother, Roman history at Cambridge; her mothers father, a disappointed philosopher disappointed because, though he went to Cambridge, he couldnt get a job there taught at Birmingham; and her mothers mother, Elsie Duncan-Jones, also at Birmingham, was an authority on the poetry of Andrew Marvell. From the Latin verb complicare, it means to fold together. No, we dont think of that root when we call someone complicated, but its what we mean: that theyre compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand. (In fact, a handful of women are buried among the classicists; one can find here several studies of Victorian classical scholar Jane Harrison, including a fine one by Beard.). Graduate Coordinator: Katelyn Stoler 236 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 (215) 573-0250 kastoler@upenn.edu So were her lovely cheeks dissolved with tears. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time. $39.95. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Find all the books, read about the author, and more. Not all female-translated texts are marketed as such; the Amazon listing of Menschs The Age of Caesar lists Plutarch and James Romm (the classicist who wrote the footnotes) as the primary authors. So the question, Wilson continued, of whether hes the turned or the turner: I played around with that a lot in terms of how much should I be explicit about going for one versus the other. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The whole question of What is that story? is going to depend on the language, the words that you use.. I agree with almost everything Bruce Trinque says in his review with one obvious exception, so I'll concentrate on that. [17], Beginning, "Tell me about a complicated man", Wilson's metrical verse includes some creative and unusual phrases (such as "journeyways of fish"), although much of her verse translation uses "plain, contemporary language",[18] attending to both Homer's "fleetness" and "rhythm and musicality". Publisher "We discussed toxic masculinity, pseudo feminism, and which pronouns are most appropriate for Homer," says Purkert. The wide sea keeps him trapped upon some island, captured by fierce men who will not let him go. Maria Dahvana Headley (whose new Beowulf has just appeared) and Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey, now at work on The Iliad) joined LTAC Director Susan Bernofsky for a far-ranging conversation on the radical practice of making translation a space of resistance and joy. But, not heeding her colleagues advice, she began to translate Greek and Roman tragedies. Definitely worth it. "[2] The work received the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2003. Wilson is at her best in one of the poem's greatest scenes, the first meeting in Book 19 between Penelope and her unrecognized husband: Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr scatters. I need to have a better answer to them, because they will certainly review it, and they will certainly have a loud voice. Though she has resisted them, the women in her palace have not. This is a short version of the episode. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. They knew that an encounter with this alien language and culture could help them move, feel, think and write differently. Both works attributed to Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey - are over ten thousand lines long in the original. On the other hand, as Prins says, these plays could be read more than one way. Currently at work on a translation of The Iliad, Wilson is animating classical literature for new audiences and revealing connections between the social, political, and ethical issues they explore and those our current era faces. Learn more. Its just the boys club., I do think that gender matters, Wilson said later, and Im not going to not say its something Im grappling with. . Im trying to take this task and this process of responding to this text and creating this text extremely seriously, with whatever I have, linguistically, sonically, emotionally.. In addition to Homers. Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above couldnt be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word theyre translating. Emily Wilson 2021. I struggle with this all the time, Wilson said. Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, "Iliad Translation In Progress: A reading.". [12][13], In January 2020, Wilson joined the Booker Prize judging panel, alongside Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay. 180 Dr Emily Wilson @EmilyRCWilson The story is so good/intense it ruined my life for a solid week. So do the breezy complacency of Menelaus, the innocence of Nausicaa, the gruff decency of the swineherd Eumaeus. Capping a decade of intense engagement with Homers poetry, Wilsons Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation. In the Odyssey, preoccupations shift, radically. Its all going to be talked out. The first English translation of The Iliad by a woman (Alexander) came out last year. Please try again. The fact that its possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? Since the Odyssey first appeared in English, around 1615, in George Chapmans translation, the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseuss ill-fated 10-year attempt to return home from the war in Troy to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, has prompted some 60 English translations, at an accelerating pace, half of them in the last 100 years and a dozen in the last two decades. : Greek, Latin and English Tragic Survival. Next up, alphabetically, is female cleaning personnel, which has a larger number of volumes devoted to it: six, with no duplicates, none by Beard. Male classical scholars are represented by the heading classicists which counts more than 200 volumes. Alexanders Iliad mirrors the length and redundancies of the original, providing a welcome reminder of how distant Homers world is from our own. It is the Pope translation. Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2022. She wept for her own husband, who was right next to her. We are in a bull market, especially in the US, for new translations of classical texts. Its very easy to pronounce a French word wrong. But with Latin, Wilson found an instant home. Introduced by: Amy Stolls. Many female classical translators, such as Mensch, seem to find themselves drawn to a foreignising, markedly uncontemporary style, as if to shore up authority in a world where they (we) may still be seen as interlopers and to demonstrate fidelity to the dead male original. But Wilson aims for a direct equation: one line of English for one of Greek. Wilson. Predictably, there are no entries for male classicists. I've always greatly preferred the Iliad. Polydamas says, plausibly, this sign means the Trojans should pull back from attacking the Greek wall: casualties will be too high, and gains few." We feel sadness on both sides when Odysseus sleeps with the nymph Calypso, not wanting her / though she still wanted him. We feel sympathy for Helen, and even for Odysseus slave women, executed for sleeping with the enemy or as Wilson puts it, the things the suitors made them do with them. (This goes further than the Greek, but not further than is allowable.). , with an introduction and notes, in Six tragedies of Seneca 2010, she began translate! Not heeding her colleagues advice, she translated Seneca 's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in,... Words that you use * Subject * Message * emily wilson, the iliad you, 2022 publish. Socially and emotional complex beyond my expectations, reviewed in the product description but, heeding! 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