Last year, I finally had the chance to read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and currently I’m savoring my way through her recently-released translation of The Iliad.
I’ll preface this by saying, I’m no scholar of Homer. I’ve been digging deeper into Greek mythology of late as part of my day job as lead narrative designer on Titan Quest II, but I don’t present myself as an expert on the subject. I have read previous translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, but it was so long ago that my memories of each are too hazy for drawing direct comparisons.
What I can say, and what I like about Wilson’s translations as a non-expert, is how extremely approachable they are. Her language is poetic, but unornamented, and she’s not afraid to state directly what other translations render in more obscure, figurative turns.
So, Wilson opens The Odyssey with “Tell me about a complicated man” where Robert Fagles has gone for the more elaborate, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.” But are choices, and both choices have their merits, but I find the benefit of Wilson’s rendering is that I can already form a concrete picture of this character whose story is about to be told—whereas Fagles’s “man of twists and turns” is less precise. I do not know what it means for someone to be a man of twists and turns; already as a reader, I’m getting distracted trying to form a clear picture from the figurative language.1
The approachability of Wilson’s translations has its advantages and disadvantages, of course. No doubt she chooses to simplify the text, choosing interpretations for the reader in the interest of clarity. (This is definitely the advantage of Fagles’s “man of twists and turns;” does it refer to his cleverness? the facets of his personality? his twisty-turny journey home? or all of the above?) But what I think her translations excel at that the others struggle with, is storytelling. By making specific storytelling choices and avoiding overly-labored metaphorical language (except when absolutely demanded by the original text), Wilson is able to deliver versions of these poems that feel immediate, propulsive, and populated by intriguing, often maddening characters whose choices and values are made clear in the action of the story.
And what a pleasure it is to see these characters—gods and heroes alike—revealed in this way! These are, even by the standards of their time, deeply flawed men. Their greatness is in their lineage (almost all of them are royalty, almost all of them claim some form of direct or indirect descent from the gods) and in the memorability of their deeds, not in their rightness.
As I’ve said, I’m no expert on ancient Greek culture, but it’s hard to imagine that Homer’s audience wouldn’t have found it just as blackly comical when Agamemnon, after resolving to attack Troy, decides to test the Greeks by telling them to pack up their bags and go home, and the Greeks take him at his word and start packing, requiring the likes of Athena and Odysseus to go amongst the troops, whispering encouragements in their ear in the former case and administering bloody beatings in the latter case, to remind them of their duty and get them to stay. The Greeks fail Agamemnon’s test in the wake of his fight with Achilles over the slave Briseis, and the scene serves as much as a judgment of Agamemnon’s own leadership at this stage in the conflict as it does of the cowardly Greek army’s desire to return home.
I’m struck again and again by the subversiveness of these stories. There is a picture of nobility—of what’s fair and unfair for a warrior-king to demand of the men he leads—but the heroes rarely live up to it. Agamemnon throws a fit about having to give up one of his prizes, so steals from his best soldier. Achilles fumes and rages over the transgression, calling on his goddess mother for help like an injured child. In the conclusion of The Odyssey, Odysseus is so bloodthirsty, so incapable of separating himself from war, that even after he’s murdered all the suitors and tortured and killed the slave-women who slept with them, he is prepared to fight the armies of all the suitors’ families to the death. Only Athena’s intervention interrupts his frenzy and ends the story—abruptly and without real resolution.
I think it’s interesting how much the modern understanding of heroism has changed. There’s an expectation that heroes are not only powerful, but morally upright. This tends to extend to recent adaptations of Greek myth, with a lot of the rough edges being sanded away (from the stories’ heroes at least—the villains are free to remain true to their original portrayals.) Circe is just misunderstood (while Odysseus and Athena remain manipulative and violent.)2 Hades did not abduct Persephone.3 Achilles was gentle with his slave Briseis until she fell in love with him.4 Just to name a few.
It’s not just that the ancient Greek audience had different values and was more used to stories of abduction or the enslavement of women during war (although that is true), it seems to me that they did not expect their heroes to be models at all. Insofar as these stories reinforce ideas of nobility, it’s as much through the flaws and failures of the heroes and gods at their center as it is through their example. They may have divine blood coursing through their veins, but that only makes the consequences of their choices and bitterness of their fates the greater.
Someone will accuse me of not understanding or appreciating metaphor. That’s not the case. I love figurative language, but I find it’s strongest when there is a clear referent. In this case, the referent is Odysseus himself. It’s a tautology. What is a man of twists and turns? Odysseus. And who is he? A man of twists and turns. A complicated man, on the other hand: I’ve known many of those.
Madeline Miller’s Circe. (Which I very much enjoyed, by the way.)
The video game Hades and Lore Olympus
The movie Troy