A long way home

Until recently, it seemed we were living in an age of Iliads. Since 2007, the ancient Homeric epic has been translated into English at least seven times (including by Caroline Alexander, the first woman to do so). Yet the Iliad’s sequel, the Odyssey — about war’s aftermath, the home front and the difficult return to civilian life — is just as topical. And with its greater emphasis on female characters and different walks of life, it should appeal to a broader audience. Until now, it has not been translated into English by a woman. Does this make a difference? Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her sleek translation, argues that it does.

The poem’s cast of female characters — princesses, queens, slaves, goddesses — along with its vagueness on the technical details of sailing and war, led Samuel Butler to propose, in his brilliant if zany 1887 book The Authoress of the Odyssey, that the epic was written by a woman. It’s true all the women in the Odyssey are clever and accomplished, if sometimes witchy or inscrutable. Athena, central to the poem, is the goddess of wiles and wisdom. While no one now takes Butler’s theory of the poem’s female authorship very seriously, his gendered interpretation seems at once quaint and prescient. As Wilson remarks in her Translator’s Note:

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.

Compare the macho stance of T.E. Lawrence, who began his translation in 1928 in modern-day Pakistan, regarding his unique qualifications:

I have… hunted wild boars and watched wild lions, sailed the Aegean (and sailed ships), bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men.