III. What Does a Translator Owe a Text?

If all translators have produced recognizably different Homers from the same timeless Ancient Greek original, then translation cannot consist only of substituting one language for another. Every translator is continually forced to decide what, precisely, deserves to survive the journey between languages—from the word, to meter, to emotional effect and authorial voice. What, after all, do we mean when we refer to literary “voice”? Every translator naturally responds to the challenge differently.

Wilson’s introduction to the Odyssey is refreshing because it refuses the belief that any of these mysteries can ever be solved. The Iliad and The Odyssey present readers with emotional realities that feel recognizable, even if their underlying social, religious, and philosophical assumptions often seem alien. They present readers with a world both familiar and strange. According to Wilson, this is no incidental feature, but one of the work’s defining qualities. To domesticate Homer would be to strip him of what grants his work such powerful imaginative longevity. Wilson is obviously correct that to mistake more archaic English for fidelity to the Greek original is simply foolish—and a far greater tragedy. Long before Wilson, the translation theorist Friedrich Schleiermacher addressed this same dilemma.

In his celebrated 1813 lecture, On the Different Methods of Translating, Schleiermacher argued that the translator ultimately follows one of two paths. As he writes: “the translator [either] leaves the author in peace as much as possible mov[ing] the reader towards him” or “he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the author towards [them].” Every translation of Homer, therefore, occupies some position between these two poles.

The contrast between Richmond Lattimore and Emily Wilson’s translations illustrates the point perfectly. In Lattimore’s translation, the Greek syntax is preserved. The work demands patience—which, in itself, is essential to his theory of translation. The very awkwardness of his cadences reminds us that we are guests to the fargone civilization of Homer’s Greece.

To illustrate this contrast further, see the different ways in which Lattimore and Wilson choose to open Book XX, opening on Odysseus’ first night returned to Ithaca:

Richmond Lattimore

Then the noble Odysseus bedded down in the forecourt, and spread
beneath him the raw hide of an ox, and uppermost many fleeces of sheep
the Achaians had dedicated.
When he had lain down, Eurynome threw a blanket over him.

There, devising evils in his heart for the suitors,
Odysseus lay awake; and out of the palace issued
those women who in the past had been going to bed with the suitors, full of
cheerful spirits and greeting each other with laughter.
But the spirit deep in the heart of Odysseus was stirred by this, and
much he pondered in the division of mind and spirit, whether to spring on
them and kill each one, or rather to let them lie this one more time with the
insolent suitors, for the last and latest time; but the heart was growling
within him.

And as a bitch, facing an unknown man, stands over
her callow puppies, and growls and rages to fight, so Odysseus'
heart was growling inside him as he looked on these wicked actions.

Emily Wilson

Odysseus was lying at the entrance
on an untreated oxhide, over which
he heaped a pile of fleeces from the sheep
the suitors sacrificed. Eurynome
spread a thick blanket over him. He lay there
but did not sleep; his mind was plotting how
to kill the suitors. Then the girls who had
been sleeping with suitors slipped outside,
giggling and happy to be out together.
His heart was roused to rage; he wondered
whether
to jump at them and slaughter every one,
or let them have one very final night
with those proud suitors—and his heart was
barking,
just as a mother dog will stand astride
her little puppies, bristling to fight,
if she sees any man she does not know;
so his heart growled inside him; he was
shocked
at their behavior.

Lattimore and Wilson’s intuitions prove almost antithetical. Homer’s Greece is already strange enough, and the translator need not manufacture additional distance by working in an English unnatural to modern tongues. We are accustomed to treating archaic English as evidence of faithfulness because generations of translators have trained us to hear Homer through such elevated diction as Lattimore’s. Her ambition is to ask whether the twenty-first-century English reader might recover something closer to that freshness with which Homer was first heard. (There’s no reason, after all, to presume that Homer sounded so ancient in his own time).

For centuries, the highest compliment a translator could receive was to replicate an original text so seamlessly that the distance between “original” and “adaptation” was erased, giving rise to the notion of “the invisible translator.” The problem with such thinking is that it invites readers to mistake interpretation for direct access to the source text. Wilson’s work is so striking because it refuses such illusion. As with Nolan’s film version, one need not agree with every decision to admire the intellectual honesty of her enterprise. Wilson asks readers to recognize something that translators have always known, but which literary circles have chosen to forget:

Another objection might arise at this point: that such liberties taken by Wilson, as her detractors insist, cannot become an excuse for translators over-imposing themselves on any given text.

In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, translator and translation theorist George Steiner writes that reading itself is a process of translation. Reading is never a purely passive act of reception. The fact that no literary text contains one fixed meaning means that each reader must construct coherence and resolve ambiguity for themselves. Translation does not introduce interpretation, says Steiner; it merely makes public what work the reader already conducts privately.

We often imagine that translators first understand a work and only afterward begin translating. But my own experience translating student materials, ad copy, and occasional poetry and fiction in East and Southeast Asia leads me to wonder whether the opposite is just as often true. Every rejected word clarifies more of what the word actually means and what it does and does not permit, and it is only through the process of translation that meaning finally emerges.

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IV. Reading Emily Wilson

Everything I have written in the preceding pages might lead one to believe that I am writing solely in defense of Wilson. I have suggested that translation cannot be simplified to the popular understanding of swapping one language for another, and that every new Iliad and Odyssey brings us a new Homer, to such an extent that every new translation must be treated as its own form of literature, with an obvious authorial voice.

As in later epics—from Virgil’s Aeneid to Milton's Paradise Lost—Homer opens with his famous invocation of the Muse, choosing to describe his hero with the Greek adjective polytropos. With enough study, one can’t help but puzzle over the choice: it’s a word that seems intentionally crafted to confuse and frustrate future readers and interpreters. In his Odyssey, Robert Fagles’s first description of Odysseus is that of “a man of twists and turns. From Wilson, we receive “a complicated man.” The choice is interesting but nonetheless limiting. Polytropos gestures toward movement, strategy, and intelligence—and, in some academic circles, a kind of tease at the circularity and intricately woven patterns of the narrative itself. Flattening polytropos into a psychological diagnosis is certainly bound to offend some scholars, and “turn off” some readers, but it is precisely the kind of sacrifice the translator of Homer faces. This is how a single ancient Greek adjective has produced such a polyphony of Homeric voices from the very start.

Perhaps the single most contentious issue to arise since the publication of Wilson's Odyssey is her decision to refer to the women who serve the king and queen of Ithaca as "enslaved women," where previous translators have most often referred to them as maids or servants. I find myself easily persuaded by Wilson's treatment here. The word "maid," after all, has become so softened through its usage over time, and if it’s an ethical consideration at all shaped by contemporary perceptions, it nevertheless restores to Homer what already exists in the surviving Greek.

Where I begin to part with Wilson’s (very careful and very apparent) precision is in her relationship to ambiguity. In other translations of Homer, the actions of characters remain at least partially unexplained. Homer's epic heroes frequently act before they or the reader understands why, which lends the text an interpretive capacity that I feel Wilson narrows. In Chapman, as in Pope, as in Lattimore, and so on, meanings accumulate, and the poem relentlessly exceeds our capacity for compression and comprehension.

Wilson’s retelling of the episodes involving Calypso, played by Charlize Theron in Nolan’s film version, is perhaps the most instructive example. At a crucial moment, when Odysseus understands that he cannot leave, she simply writes: “He had no choice." The sentence arrives with an admirable directness, but it illustrates the pitfalls of Wilson’s intolerance for leaving the motivations of Homer’s characters unresolved:

Emily Wilson

Acknowledging the edict sent from Zeus,
the goddess went to find Odysseus.
She found him on the shore. His eyes were
always
tearful; he wept sweet life away, in longing
to go back home, since she no longer pleased
him.
He had no choice. He spent his nights with her
inside her hollow cave, not wanting her
though she still wanted him. By day he sat
out on the rocky beach, in tears and grief,
staring in heartbreak at the fruitless sea.

Where other translations of Homer remain more suggestive, Wilson’s English becomes far more definitive, translating ambiguity into psychological explanation.

Wilson is surely right that English should sound like English. My objection is that the greatest literature ever written owes its longevity to its undecidability and the fact that meanings cannot be exhausted by any single interpretation.

Homer survives because each millennium, century, and generation has found new possibilities in his works. This is why Chapman remains worth reading, why Pope remains worth reading, and why, I suspect, any translator who follows Wilson will continue to reveal new dimensions in his works.

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I. Before Homer Was Homer

When Christopher Nolan announced that his next film would be an adaptation of The Odyssey, one detail generated an unusually disproportionate amount of discussion: the famed director, fresh off the success of Oppenheimer, would be drawing heavily upon University of Pennsylvania Professor Emily Wilson’s translation for his own adaptation of the Homeric epic.

Upon its initial release in 2017, Wilson’s Odyssey was praised by many as the finest English translation of Homer in generations; and, indeed, her interpretation is lucid, formally disciplined, and adapted to the expectations of twentieth-century readers. Other critics, however, saw something quite different—a new, “socially conscious” Homer—and, seemingly overnight, the discourse around her work abruptly shifted.

The poem became another front in familiar debates about identity, politics, and the contemporary university, to the point that online discourse around the upcoming film seemed centered less on Homer than on the female translator whose English had channeled his Ancient Greek into this century. Wilson’s Odyssey was immediately branded by online influencers as “the feminist” or, more dismissively still, “the woke translation.”

I found the controversy fascinating, though not for the reasons most commentators seemed to: Wilson, Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Chapman, Pope, and every other English translator of Homer were imagined as competitors attempting to reach the same destination. In the minds of many, somewhere behind them was a single, stable Odyssey, and it was the duty of the translator to recover it, meaning that all strove towards the same original text. Translation is more like a kind of “restoration,” according to this view: remove enough centuries of dust and the original author reemerges. But it’s not that simple, particularly in the case of Homer.

So before asking whether Emily Wilson has translated Homer well, we ought first to ask which Homer she believes she’s translating.

Emily Wilson begins her introduction with a rather shockingly sparse definition of the epic:

“An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is told.”

The sentence slips past—as, frankly, many of Wilson’s more contentious claims do—but it radically alters the terms of Homeric discussion. A tale that is told does not exist in quite the same way as a novel rests unchanged upon a bookshelf, because an epic exists in more forms: in performance, in cultural memory, and in repetition. Each incarnation differs from the one that comes before it; it is an event that unfolds between performer and audience member. Though we associate literature primarily with writing because writing is how we inherit it, Homer is inherited from a form far more ancient.

Few works in world literature have inspired more uncertainty about their own origins. The traditional image of Homer as a solitary blind poet composing two of the greatest epics in Western literature somewhere along the coast of Asia Minor has proven remarkably durable. The “Homeric Question” has generated libraries of scholarship without producing anything like definitive proof of any one claim. We have all the great questions, but nothing like consensus on the matter of The Iliad and Odyssey’s genesis. Was there a single, definitive Homer? Are the works original, or merely a stringing together of songs and episodes (more in the vein of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance)? Or has the case for an actual, historical Homer been convincingly debunked, to the extent that all our questions are futile? We cannot know.

The most consequential change in Homeric studies emerged during the twentieth century, thanks in large part to the field expeditions of the American classicist Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. Traveling through what was then Yugoslavia, Parry and Lord—American classicists of the Harvard circle—encountered oral singers capable of performing epics of extraordinary length without memorizing a single line, or anything, for that matter, like a fixed text. In these oldest surviving oral epics, each performance was composed anew from a shared repertoire of formulaic phrases and narrative patterns—including recurring scenes (or “episodes”). Whatever the veracity of their claims, their work transformed Homeric scholarship forever by introducing the notion that The Iliad and Odyssey were not originally written texts but the culmination of a long oral tradition.

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Homer seems in some respects already to have understood this. When Odysseus reaches the island of the Phaeacians, he encounters the blind bard Demodocus, beloved of the Muse. Significantly, the stories he sings are not his own, but stories his audience already knows. As Wilson suggests in her introduction, Demodocus “does not invent an original story of his own composition.” Rather, “the skill and inspiration of these illiterate singers . . . [lies] in their ability to retell ancient stories.”

Here is how Wilson presents Demodocus. Readers who have seen Christopher Nolan’s film will immediately recognize this passage as the basis of the scenes featuring “The Bard,” played (in one of the film’s more controversial casting choices) by psychedelic trap MC Travis Scott. At the very least, Scott functions as a kind of stand-in for Homer’s Demodocus:

The house boy brought the poet, whom the Muse adored.
She gave him two gifts, good and bad: she took his
sight away, but gave sweet song. The wine boy
brought a silver-studded chair and propped it
by a pillar, in the middle of all the guests,
and by a peg he hung the poet's lyre above
his head and helped him to reach it, and he set
a table by him, and a bread basket and a cup
of wine to drink whenever he desired. They all
took food. When they were satisfied, the Muse
prompted the bard to sing of famous actions,
an episode whose fame has touched the sky:
Achilles' and Odysseus' quarrel—how
at a splendid sacrificial feast, they argued
bitterly, and Agamemnon was glad because
the best of the Achaeans were quarreling,
since when he had consulted the oracle
at Pytho, crossing over the entry stone,
Apollo had foretold that this would be
the start of suffering for Greeks and Trojans.

It is an extraordinary passage in Wilson. The Muse gives Demodocus “two gifts, good and bad—blindness and “sweet song.” The bard does not choose what to sing: the Muse “prompt[s]” him—and the story he tells is already “an episode whose fame has touched the sky.” His gift lies in receiving an old story and making it live again. Homer, according to Wilson’s interpretation, imagines the poet not as a solitary genius, but as the latest voice in a tradition that stretches far beyond his own epoch.

Before there were translators, there were singers; before there were publishers, there were surely bards who edited the poems; before there was anything we would comfortably call an original, there were already “versions”—a plurality of texts.
By the time the modern translator of Homer sits down to their work, the poem has already survived thousands of years of interpretation. The text that arrives on a translator's desk is, in itself, “history,” carrying within it layer upon layer of previous readings and refashionings.
But if every incarnation of The Odyssey is already a necessarily partial reflection of its age, what, exactly, are the obligations of an Homeric translator?

II. Every Generation Writes Homer Again

If The Odyssey has never existed as a single, immutable text, neither can there be a definitive English Odyssey. The conclusion follows inevitably, even as it remains surprisingly difficult for readers to accept, still—the underlying assumption being that somewhere among all the versions of Homer produced over time, there stands a single, solitary, recoverable Odyssey.

Yet the history of Homer in English translation tells quite a different story. The Homer we read in English changes because the language changes—and because readers change. Every generation discovers a different Homer because the questions brought to Homer are never quite the same.

George Chapman—the first great translator of Homer into English—belongs unmistakably to the Renaissance from which he was born. Chapman approached Homer primarily as a poet writing for other poets, producing an English epic whose inexhaustibly stunning, rolling verses seem less concerned with Homer’s Greek than demonstrating what English itself has become capable of achieving in his own time, though, reading Chapman, one cannot help but feel that Homer has learned to speak as an Elizabethan.

The title of John Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” alone indicates an awareness of the work’s mediation. While the poem is usually remembered as his tribute to Homer, but a second look at the title might convince us otherwise:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Keats does not pretend to have discovered some untouched Greek original. “That deep-brow’d Homer rule[s],” he writes, the text’s “demense,” but it is Chapman, “loud and bold,” whose presentation overwhelms him. He discovers Homer through Chapman, and the poem celebrates that fact precisely.

Alexander Pope—one of the eighteenth century’s most famous and prolific poets—inherited a very different literary world from Chapman. Indeed, in his Iliad and Odyssey, Pope seems to approach translation as if it were some mere extension of “English hospitality.” Of course he wrote a very different kind of Homer, and it should be no surprise, then, that critics frequently observe that Pope’s Homer sounds a lot like Pope himself. The difference between our time and Pope’s is that neither he nor his readers would have perceived this as a failure.

The generations of Romantic poets that followed rebelled against the ideals of Pope’s Augustan school. The poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats sought to recover the imaginative freedom they believed to have been robbed of the arts by eighteenth-century decorum, regularity, and wit, and—indeed—the difference is there on the page: Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” has far more in common with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene than it does Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism.” The difference is not merely one of style but of poetic philosophy: where the Augustans prized balance, symmetry, and control, the Romantics pursued sublimity, emotional intensity, and imaginative openness. Keats therefore inherits a literary tradition already predisposed to admire the Homer of Chapman more than the Homer of Pope.

The difference between Chapman and Pope is perhaps best illustrated in the following—from the Sirens’ song episode—one of The Odyssey’s most famous moments. The difference is not merely indicative of personal differences, but also immense civilizational transformations:

George Chapman

Come hither, thou renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Greeks;
 Stay thy ship, that thou mayst hear our voice.
 For never man passed this way in his black ship,
 Till first he heard the honey flowing from our lips;
 Then went he on, well pleased, and knowing more.
 We know whatever the Argives and the Trojans suffered.
 In spacious Troy through the gods' appointment;
 And whatsoever anywhere is brought to pass
 Upon the fruitful earth, we know it all.

Alexander Pope

Oh stay, O Pride of Greece! Ulysses, stay!
 Oh cease thy course, and listen to our lay!
 Blest is the man ordain'd our voice to hear;
 The song instructs the soul, and charms the ear.
 Approach! Thy soul shall into raptures rise;
 Approach! and learn new wisdom from the wise.
 We know whate'er the kings of mighty name.
 At Ilion acted, or what Fate became;
 All that beneath the sun's bright journey lies,
 We see, and all that passes, know, and prize.

Chapman’s Sirens entice through the vigorously imaginative and imagistic movement characteristic of the poetry we derive from the Elizabethan tongue. Pope’s Sirens are no less beautiful, but their beauty is more contained to the page, the episode’s seduction polished into the symmetry of Pope’s heroic couplets.

Crucially, neither translator primarily strives for fidelity; what we are left with instead are two of the most instructive case studies in Renaissance and eighteenth-century poetical styles.

Leaving Richard Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald (a personal favorite) aside for the moment, Robert Fagles was my first real encounter with Homer as an undergraduate. The lines in his translations are muscular, sinewy, action-packed, and driven by an unusually cinematic vision, and for a long time, I returned to Fagles thinking that this is what Homer actually sounded like.

And so—as we turn our attention to Wilson—it seems to me that the only question worth asking is whether the Homer she resurrects is actually worthy of being inherited.

The Commonplace Book

Essays on Books, Film, and Culture.

By Brock Eldon

Null Point

Fiction, poetry, author interviews, and personal essays by Brock Eldon

By Brock Eldon