Wilson’s lecture on how and why she translated the odyssey is fascinating, she talks about how gender has affected not only her translation but those men who came before her.Two years ago, Penn’s Classical Studies professor Emily Wilson rose to prominence as the first woman to translate Homer’s The Odyssey into English. She said of her translation, “ I try to avoid importing contemporary types of sexism into this ancient poem, instead shining a clear light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that do exist in the text, which are partly familiar from our world.“ Social Identities Wilson takes a scholarly and poetic approach, in which she attempts to portray the Greek as accurately as possible for the English reader. Wilson on the other hand, gives us the line, “They made my face the cause that hounded them” Mendelsohn translates the phrase as “bitch”: “shameless bitch that I am!” Most translators before Wilson, have interpreted this word with a modern day misogyny that isn’t present in the Greek.įagles has Helen call herself a “shameless whore.” For example, when Helen refers to herself as “dog-faced” in Book 4, it’s a tricky interpretation as the word κυνώπις is a pretty uncommon word. In fact, translations of The Odyssey that came before certainly have gender biases inherent in their interpretation. and I think that it’s a problem that we never seem to notice that or ask them about them.” People seem to assume that as a women, she must be interpreting and translating The Odyssey in a gendered way. Wilson has been asked about gender over and over again. Gender in Translation & Dog-faced Helen Bust of Helen of Troy by Antonio Canova at Victoria and Albert Museum, Image by Yair Haklai ( CC BY-SA 3.0) She also uses the same number of lines as the original, this makes her translation all the more enjoyable and maintains a certain faith to the oral performative tradition of the original poem.
Wilson chose to re-create the musicality of the original by using a regular rhythm in her poem, preferring the native English pentameter to the Greek original hexameter. Wilson has however, translated Homer’s epic poem into English and has done it fantastically. The poem has been translated into many languages by women, just not into English. Emily Wilson is not the first women to translate The Odyssey, as she has pointed out many times.
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