This fall, I taught an evening course at a university about an hour’s drive from my house. The drive in was a dismal drive at the tail-end of rush hour, and at this latitude at this time of year, the journey was dark both ways.
In those dark and tired hours, I found a source of great joy: The audiobook version of Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey.
Experiencing an epic poem as an oral performance is entirely different from reading it.
Wilson used iambic pentameter, the traditional meter for English verse. The lines are shorter than in Homer’s dactylic hexameter, but the number of lines in the poem remains the same, in Wilson’s translation. Wilson also used simple language because “stylistic pomposity is un-Homeric” and to encourage a more visceral engagement with the story.
The short words roll like a drum beat. Every word matters so much; and if there’s an underlying thesis to this translation, that’s what it is: That words do matter.
The difference between this Odyssey and the versions I read years ago is astonishing. The cruelty is starker, the emotion is purer—and Claire Danes brings an unfussy empathy to her performance in the audiobook. The plain language has also shown me that the poem is a lot funnier than I ever realized. Take this scene, for example:
Odysseus jumped up from out the bushes.
Grasping a leafy branch he broke it off
to cover up his manly private parts.
Can’t you just see the embarrassed Odysseus on the beach, scrambling in the presence of a bunch of pretty girls?
Compare that to Alexander Pope’s version, at the other end of the spectrum between flowery and plain:
Then, where the grove with leaves umbrageous bends,
With forceful strength a branch the hero rends;
Around his loins the verdant cincture spreads
A wreathy foliage and concealing shades.
There’s a purity and precision in Wilson’s still-musical version that thrills the writer in me.
It specifically thrills the historical-fiction writer in me. As Wilson explains in her note, the temptation to use vaguely archaic English when telling the stories of the ancient world can sometimes obscure just how distant that world is from us: The past seems both more relatable, and stranger, when it’s told in plain, contemporary language. The Odyssey was written more than a millennium before any form of English even existed.
As a writer of historical fiction, I strive to find a tone that is neither distancing nor inadvertently jarring (sometimes I want to jar), and I deliberately push back against the idea that fancier language is somehow more historically accurate. Our rudest words are, after all, some of our oldest.
There are many spots in Wilson’s introductory note that made me want to stand and applaud (I didn’t; I was driving), but perhaps none so much as this:
The gendered metaphor of the ‘faithful’ translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.
Wilson is the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. To hear her translation read in a woman’s voice has been to understand this poem in an entirely new way. Like John Keats, amazed by George Chapman’s translation, I feel like I’m seeing new stars in a sky I’ve been gazing at for years.
I’ll end with the first lines of Wilson’s translation, lines that give me goosebumps and make tears spring to my eyes:
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.
Among other things, when I hear these lines, I imagine Penelope unraveling her shroud every night, to “find the beginning.” I imagine the work we do to understand how we arrived at this moment. To find the beginning of the thread again and for the first time.
Kate Heartfield is the author of the historical fantasy novel Armed in Her Fashion (ChiZine Publications) and the time-travel novella Alice Payne Arrives (Tor.com Publishing.) The sequel, Alice Payne Rides, will be published on March 5 in audiobook, ebook and paperback and is available to pre-order now. Kate also writes games, journalism and short fiction. She lives in Canada. Website: www.kateheartfield.com. Twitter: @kateheartfield
One Response
Yes! I loved this translation but didn’t think of listening in audiobook form. One to check out.