Yep, in the original Odyssey, in the scene where Telemachus murders the slaves who were âsullied byâ Penelopeâs suiters, he refers to them with a word that roughly just means âthe female onesâ, however most translations will use words like âwhoresâ, âslutsâ and âcreaturesâ, these were all choices of the translators. The original text did not refer to them that way. Dr. Wilson refers to them instead as âgirlsâ, to highlight their age and the brutality of the action.
She also fixed all the times the previous male translators dodged around the existence of slaves in the text. Where they call slaves anything but slaves (housemaid, nurse, cook, ect.) Dr. Wilsonâs translation correctly calls them slaves as in the original texts. Itâs really a great translation, it doesnât soften anything, and lays bare the reality of the story.
One thing she did too, was she refused to make the descriptions of the women in the story more palatable to modern western beauty standards. The original text, for example, describes Penelopeâs hands as âthickâ. Most male translators change this to âsteadyâ but Dr. Wilsonâs translation calls them âfirm, muscular handsâ to correctly portray the original intent, that Penelope, as a character who weaves every day and every night undoes her weavings, has strong hands, as weaving does make oneâs hands more muscular, and that was clearly what was originally intended to be said given the context of her character and the weavings.
Of Odysseus himself, the original epic calls him âpolytroposâ poly, meaning many, and tropos, meaning turn. Some male translators used this to say the story itself had twists and turns, other ignored the word completely to write in a way that made Odysseus seem as though a straight up hero, a man âskilled in all ways of contendingâ, but Dr. Wilson uses it to mean âcomplicatedâ, because Odysseus isnât a straight up hero, he does some really shitty things.
So her translation got a lot of men very very mad, because they said that her being a woman has caused her to translate with bias since her translation is so different to others. She pointed out that perhaps people should have suggested that bias in the inaccurate menâs translations.
Anyway, go read Dr. Wilsonâs version of The Odyssey. Itâs very good.
