Homer's Odyssey Three Ways: Recent Translations by Verity, Wilson, and Green

In the twenty-first century it has become fashionable to apply the term 'translation' to any sort of work recognizably based on an original.¹ Thus one could call 'translations of the Odyssey' not only renderings by, say, E.V. Rieu and Richmond Lattimore, but also James Joyce's Ulysses, Derek Walcott's The Odyssey, A Stage Play, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and perhaps even Romare Bearden's wonderful Odyssean collages.²

I have no quarrel with that. However, if the word 'translation' is to be used in this very broad sense, then we need to distinguish between translations; and such a distinction must be based on the purpose for which a translation is made. In the case of the three books under review – two of them published by university presses, the third by a major provider of college textbooks – their leading purpose is clearly to present Homer's Odyssey to first-time readers of the epic, and especially to university students as texts for study. Let us call versions of this kind 'academic' translations – meaning by 'academic' only the purpose I have just outlined, and nothing in any sense pejorative – and the other kind 'creative' translations.

Now, of course, any translator will bring their own personality, outlook, store of language, and set of values to their work. But there is still an obvious difference between an 'academic' translation and a 'creative' one, the difference being that creative artists have complete freedom with regard to the text of the Odyssey. They may bring any agenda they please to their version. They are perfectly free to transform the ancient epic into a novel or drama, or to make their text all about issues utterly foreign – or only tangential – to Homer's main concerns. And although prior knowledge of the Odyssey may enhance readers' enjoyment of such versions, those versions are to be judged as autonomous works of art.³

Not so an academic translation of Homer, which must be judged both by its fluency as a work in English and by its relationship to the Greek original.⁴ For such a version, scholarly precision and accuracy are essential, though not on their own sufficient. The translation has to create an English diction adequate to Homer,⁵ it must be readable, it must hold its target audience's attention.

Of the three Odyssey translations under review, Emily Wilson's is certainly the most unusual, and will therefore receive the most attention here. Her version appeared amid a barrage of positive publicity. The great and the good endorsed the work. In my judgement, however, Wilson has not produced an academic translation – i.e. one suitable to be recommended to first-time readers, or to undergraduate students of epic – though it may interest readers who already know the Odyssey, or those concerned with translation as a process.

The two great novelties of Wilson's Odyssey are the way she represents a group of characters that we might term 'underdogs' – notably the Cyclops, and the suitors and their allies – in a sympathetic light,⁶ while representing Odysseus as, on balance, reprehensible. The big problem, however, with Wilson's heterodox approach to the characters of the Odyssey is that she can sustain it only by distorting and misrepresenting what the Greek text says.

For Wilson, the Odyssey 'to some extent⁷ glorifies its protagonist', but far more importantly Odysseus is, for her, not heroic,⁸ but 'this liar, pirate, colonizer, deceiver, and thief' within whose sphere 'other people – those he owns, those he leads – suffer and die, and who directly kills so many people' (p. 66).⁹ And...