What's Different About New 'Odyssey' Translation?

First of all, for the first time it's translated by a woman, as Wyatt Mason points out at the New York Times. Emily Wilson, the epic poem's newest translator, is a mother and descendent of a long line of classics scholars. "That there could still be big questions about a nearly-three-millenniums-old poem that most everyone has heard of" Mason writes, "...has everything to do with how Wilson is seeking to redefine the job of modern literary scholarship, an ambition that seems, in part, an inheritance." From there:  

Born in 1971 in Oxford, England, Wilson comes from a long line of academics on her mother’s side. Her mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Shakespeare specialist, taught English literature at Oxford; her mother’s brother, Roman history at Cambridge; her mother’s father, “a disappointed philosopher” — disappointed because, though he went to Cambridge, he couldn’t get a job there — taught at Birmingham; and her mother’s mother, Elsie Duncan-Jones, also at Birmingham, was an authority on the poetry of Andrew Marvell.

That inheritance was as much literary as it was a matter of temperament. Her mother’s experience as a female academic, Wilson said, over lunch the next day at a noisy bistro, “was tied up with her colleagues in Somerville,” the women’s college where she taught. “The older colleagues were mostly childless women and had this whole sort of anger — anger and also refusal to understand that there might be extra demands on my mom’s time, because she had children.” Wilson’s mother and another colleague took matters into their own hands. “It was revolutionary,” Wilson tells me, with uncomplicated pride, “and it was resented: I was the founding member of the Somerville crèche. She and another female colleague who had a child who was the same age as me organized this day care, first in my house and then it moved to this building near Somerville College.”

Let's take a look at the start of the poem and Wilson's "complicated" word choice to see why Mason is so enamored with this new translation:

Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:

Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men

back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,

they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,

tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.

When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered ... wrecked ... where ... worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about ...” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.

Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.

Learn more at the New York Times.