Dr Emily Wilson Profile picture
Mar 8, 2018 22 tweets 4 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
I know this is a downer but... for #IWD2018 I am thinking about violence against women. About how violence is enabled & perpetuated. About how gender inequality intersects with other forms of social injustice, like class, race and wealth. About recognition, stories and change.
I am thinking today, as often, about the slave women in the Odyssey, the ones who sleep with the suitors, who have been claimed by the wrong owners, who have the wrong memories. For Odysseus to claim back all power over his household, they need to be eliminated.
O. instructs his son Telemachus to hack the life of them with long swords. Telemachus adjusts the weapon: he insists they are too metaphorically dirty to touch with his sword (sic), so he hangs them instead.
The rope round the throat. What better way to stop a woman's most threatening orifice, her mouth?
Many translations import misogynistic language when it isn't there in the Greek. In Fagles' best-selling version, "You sluts -- the suitors' whores!" Lombardo: "Sluts". Lattimore: "Creatures". Fitzgerald: "Sluts". Pope's is the best: "nightly prostitutes to shame".
Let's look at the simile that describes these women's death. They are like birds, trying to fly, who are trapped in a net.
ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἂν ἢ κίχλαι τανυσίπτεροι ἠὲ πέλειαι
ἕρκει ἐνιπλήξωσι, τό θ᾽ ἑστήκῃ ἐνὶ θάμνῳ,
αὖλιν ἐσιέμεναι, στυγερὸς δ᾽ ὑπεδέξατο κοῖτος,
ὣς αἵ γ᾽ ἑξείης κεφαλὰς ἔχον, ἀμφὶ δὲ πάσαις
δειρῇσι βρόχοι ἦσαν, ὅπως οἴκτιστα θάνοιεν.
Many translations -- by men, and some by women, e.g. Anne Dacier -- blame the victims. It's their own fault they die, because they're "disobedient". Or because they're "sluts". It's normal, like killing a chicken. It's taking out the human trash. No empathy.
Loeb: "as when long-winged thrushes or doves fall into a snare that is set in a thicket, as they seek to reach their roosting place, and hateful is the bed that gives them welcome, even so the women held their heads in a row, and round the necks of all nooses were laid."
"Held their heads" suggests that they are willingly submitting to this natural process; the verb echon could suggest either "hold" or "have", but the translators choose to make the victims collude with their death.
Fagles: "Then, as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings
against some snare rigged up in thickets -- flying in
for a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them --
so the women's heads were trapped in a line
nooses yanking their necks up, one by one
The childish half-rhyme, "cozy... grisly", encourages us not to take any of this too seriously. Fagles reads these "whores" or "sluts" (his words) as girls who have partied too hard, hung "in a line", like chorus girls or clubbers on a night out. Fun times!
Lombardo
Long-winged thrushes, or doves, making their way
to their roosts, fall into a snare set in a thicket,
and the bed that receives them is far from welcome.
So too these women, their heads hanging in a row,
Lombardo makes the birds' home definitely non-human, and uses similar ironic/ sneering distance ("far from welcome"). The archaism "piteous" creates distance: from afar, we can observe that something painful is happening to someone else, but we don't need to feel it ourselves.
Fitzgerald:
They would be hung like doves
or larks in springès triggered in a thicket,
where the birds think to rest -- a cruel nesting.
So now in turn each woman thrust her head
into a noose and swung, yanked high in air
Fitzgerald uses literary allusion: "springès"recalls Polonius warning Ophelia not to let Hamlet take her virginity. "Thrust her head" suggests Fitzgerald's women are definitely gagging for it. There's nothing they like more than a good hanging.
Wilson:
As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly
home to their nests, but someone sets a trap --
they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;
just so the girls, their heads all in a row,
were strung up with the noose around their necks
to make their death an agony
I hope my version of the violence is not fun or normalizing or sensationalized. These birds want the same thing that Odysseus himself wants: to go home to bed. The nostos/homecoming of Odysseus means that many, many other people will never get to go back home.
These slave women are a poetic construct, imagined not real. But they stand in for millions of real silenced, abused and murdered women, in history and now, who never get to complete their journey.
I read Fagles' text this way partly because it seems to be reinforced by how he does the last line: "they kicked up heels for a while, but not for long". It is a disturbing passage, and differently disturbing than the Greek. "Kicked up heels" is a notable idiom to add.
Here and in my other comparative threads: I'm not trying to be a hater. I am sure that all these earlier translators are or were lovely people. I'm not trying to pretend that my own version is somehow perfect. Like all translations, mine is totally different from the original.
My main goal is simply to draw attention to the fact that translations are, always, texts, available for close reading like any other text; and that these texts are, always, the result of a series of writerly choices, tiny as well as large, conscious as well as unconscious.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Dr Emily Wilson

Dr Emily Wilson Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @EmilyRCWilson

Aug 8, 2018
A question that is always present, for any translator: What is stylistic "equivalence"? Is "equivalence" even the right term? Translation Studies over the past few decades has taught us a lot about how complex that question always is.
Homer includes words from many eras and many dialects. It's regular metrical dactylic hexameter, not prose, and it comes from a time when prose didn't yet exist. Many formulaic elements. Many polysyllabic words. But syntactically v. easy, quick, fun and absorbing to read.
What is "equivalent", in a contemporary Anglophone context, to how all of this sounded in the Greek-speaking world of, say, the 6th century BCE? There's in fact no equivalent. We just don't have a text or a tradition that occupies the same cultural / literary/ poetic space.
Read 13 tweets
Aug 6, 2018
Why and how is translation so hard? Here's a little non-comparative case study to help make the process more visible. 9 words from the very start of the Odyssey, lines 1-2: ὃς μάλα πολλὰ / πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν. Syntactically easy.
Relative clause: the "man" is one who had/ did/ suffered a whole lot of going-astray/ bafflement/ wandering. Then temporal clause: when he'd sacked Troy. Why just him, singular? Scholiast claims, b/c he thought of the Wooden Horse. Maybe!
How much of Troy did he sack? ptoliethron is the lengthened form of polis, "city" (later, city-state). Sometimes =central part of city. But sacking just part of Troy isn't really enough... Shd. the translator make it non-dumb if possible, or not worry about that?
Read 24 tweets
Jul 22, 2018
Here is a classic in-progress translation struggle. I am working on "Oedipus Tyrannos". Creon says he is not, or not yet, τοσοῦτον ἠπατημένος as to want anything other than good things that benefit him.
These two lines are, I'm finding, really tough to get into an idiomatic but viably-serious-verse-drama-register iambic pentameter couplet. Specifically, do I want him to say, "I'm not kidding myself"? Or is that too slangy? Or, "I'm not yet so deluded", or is that too stiff?
To what extent is Creon suggesting that this kind of delusion is normal, or abnormal? That's not clear, and it makes a big difference to the rhetoric here. Are most people, in Creon's eyes, idiots who want useless things like the pomp of the Presidency? Or is it unusual?
Read 9 tweets
Jul 16, 2018
After one of my recent "Conversation" interviews (in Sydney), someone asked me if the hanging of the slave women in the Odyssey is "right". Summarizing my answer here on rec. of a friend, bc it brings up a key distinction for thinking about any literary text. Lit. 101.
There are 3 separate questions intertwined. 1: Do I personally, Emily Wilson, think it's right to murder women because of any sexual behavior, even if they were 100% empowered and responsible for whatever it was? Easy question. No.
2: Do Odysseus and Telemachus think it's right? Yes, but let's define what kind of "right". Odysseus presents the slaughter of the suitors as just punishment. Murder of the slaves is presented differently: it's about being respected & controlling memories & (re) gaining power.
Read 10 tweets
Apr 19, 2018
The Homeric poems are very ancient and very alien and very formulaic. They are also vivid, direct, gripping, beautiful, enjoyable, ethically and psychologically complex works of narrative and poetic art. Translators have to choose which matters most: to alienate, or to engage.
Why do some reviewers assume that translations that play up the poem’s repetitiveness & foreignness are self-evidently more “faithful” or less “partial” than those (like mine) that play up Homer’s beauty and clarity and depth?
A couple of recent reviews (Colin Burrow in LRB, & Susan Kristol in Weekly Standard) complain that (like many translators) I do creative things with the repeated epithets, & and various characters and relationships sound different in from other modern English translations.
Read 13 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(