Here's The New York Times review:
A Version of Homer That Dares to Match Him Line for Line
By Gregory Hays, Dec. 5, 2017
THE ODYSSEY By Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Dismal as it has been in other respects, the fall of 2017 has been good to readers of Homer. September brought us Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey,” his memoir of teaching this poem about fathers and sons to a class at Bard College that included his own father. Now we have an excellent new translation of the epic by the British classicist Emily Wilson. Norton trumpets it as “the first English translation of the ‘Odyssey’ by a woman.” (Anne Dacier’s French prose version appeared in 1708.) But Wilson’s rendering is remarkable in other ways as well.
All English translators of Homer face a basic problem. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are composed in a long dactylic line (tumpety-tumpety-tum) that’s poorly suited to the natural rhythms of English. A few translators have tried to fashion an English equivalent; Richmond Lattimore was perhaps the most successful. But most have preferred iambic pentameter, the default meter for English poets. Chapman and Pope did the poems into rhyming couplets. Their successors favored blank verse. Recent translators have tried to split the difference between Greek and English; Stanley Lombardo, Robert Fagles and Stephen Mitchell all use a looser, longer but still five-beat line.
Wilson returns to strict iambic pentameter. Among modern renderings hers is perhaps closest to Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version. But there’s a further wrinkle. Homer’s hexameters run from 13 to 18 syllables. To fit them into his shorter 10-syllable line, Fitzgerald simply used more lines. But Wilson aims for a direct equation: one line of English for one of Greek. The result is an idiom of great spareness and simplicity:
… But I am sure that he
is not yet dead. The wide sea keeps him trapped
upon some island, captured by fierce men
who will not let him go. …
The words are short, mostly monosyllables. Almost none have French or Latin roots. None is independently striking; their force comes from their juxtaposition with one another — pat pat pat, like raindrops on a metal roof.
At first glance one is reminded of the translation from “Odyssey” 11 that opens Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” Pound wanted to evoke Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (“We set up mast and sail on that swart ship / Bore sheep aboard her ...”). His “Odyssey” was archaic and fragmentary, an artifact forged by firelight and rusted by time. If Wilson’s version has an English model, it is rather the moving plainness of Matthew Arnold’s “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 …
Arnold wrote a famous essay, “On Translating Homer.” Though he never produced a translation himself, I think he would have recognized his Homer — a poet “eminently rapid…, eminently plain and direct” — in Wilson’s.
Some trade-offs are inevitable. One characteristic of Homeric verse is the formulaic epithet: “much-suffering Odysseus,” “lovely-ankled Ino.” These arose as byproducts of oral composition — “pitons,” Mendelsohn calls them, “stuck into the vast face of the epic” to provide a momentary respite for both bard and hearers. Often they are long, rolling words: polyphloisboio thalasses, “the much-thundering sea,” or rhododaktylos eos, “rosy-fingered dawn.” Wilson’s short line preserves some, but others vanish or survive only as adverbs (“pensively Penelope sat down”).
In compensation we get moments of surprising lyricism: the Ethiopians, “who live between the sunset and the dawn”; a sea gull “wetting its whirring wings”; seals whose “breath smells sour / from gray seawater.” Wilson has a fine ear, as when her Penelope waves away a compliment: “The deathless gods destroyed my looks that day / the Greeks embarked for Troy.” Notice the interplay of d, l and g, interwoven like the threads on the queen’s loom.
The general plainness of the language makes longer or unusual words stand out. Wilson doesn’t shy from colloquialisms: “fighting solo,” “pep talk,” “on day eighteen.” And there are some daring choices. When Telemachus visits Menelaus, a slave girl brings him bread “and many canapés.” (Well, there is a wedding in progress.) But often such words carry real weight: “the suitors sauntered in,” for instance, where the verb perfectly captures this crew of dapper sociopaths. One trap for translators lurks in the poem’s first line, where its hero is called, untranslatably, polytropos — ”the cunning hero” (Lombardo) or “the man of twists and turns” (Fagles). Wilson is more understated: “Tell me about a complicated man.” Too understated, one might think at first — but gradually the adjective comes to feel just right.
Aristotle said that the “Iliad” was a poem in which things happened to people, while the “Odyssey” was a poem of character. And with formulaic language stripped away, it is the characters and their interactions that take center stage. The frustrations of the teenage Telemachus come through clearly. So do the breezy complacency of Menelaus, the innocence of Nausicaa, the gruff decency of the swineherd Eumaeus. Wilson is good too with the poem’s undertones and double meanings. She made me hear for the first time the veiled menace when the disguised Odysseus answers an insult from one of the nastier suitors:
Crafty Odysseus said, “How I wish,
Eurymachus, that we could have a contest
in springtime in the meadow, when the days
are growing longer; I would have a scythe
of perfect curvature and so would you.
The grass would be abundant; we would test
our skill by working all day long ...
This is the man whose curved bow will mow down Eurymachus and all the other suitors just a few books later.
The “Odyssey” is notable for the range of its female characters, and for the sympathy and respect with which it treats them. These Wilson shares. 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.)
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 across the mountain peaks; then Eurus
thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell
and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks
dissolved with tears. She wept for her own husband,
who was right next to her.
Wilson gives us the simile, one of the loveliest in Homer. But then she goes on to give us Penelope’s ordinary grief: “She cried a long, long time, / then spoke again ...” — where “cried” (not “wept”) and the repeated “long” evoke Penelope’s sobbing as powerfully as any other words could do.
To read a translation is like looking at a photo of a sculpture: It shows the thing, but not from every angle. Like every translator, Wilson brings out some features more clearly than others. But altogether it’s as good an “Odyssey” as one could hope for.
GREGORY HAYS is an associate professor of classics at the University of Virginia, and a translator of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.”
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For comparison, here is The Guardian's review three days later: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review.
