Throughout her translation of the âOdyssey,â Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented â âradicalâ in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.
The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilsonâs 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come byâŠ
Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldnât be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word theyâre translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseusâs nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (âof many a turnâ) and Cook (âof many turnsâ) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them â poly(âmanyâ), tropos (âturnâ) â answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does âa man of many turnsâ suggest the doubleness of the original word â a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the âOdyssey,â one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?
âI wanted there to be a sense,â Wilson told me, that âmaybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We donât quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text thatâs not going to be interpretively straightforward.â
Here is how Wilsonâs âOdysseyâ begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poemâs fifth word â 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 Godâs 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. Iâd never read an âOdysseyâ 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 (âwandered ⊠wrecked ⊠where ⊠workedâ) 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 (âTell me about âŠâ and âFind the beginningâ) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homerâs polytropos and Odysseusâs complicated nature.
Complicated: the brilliance of Wilsonâs choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of âcomplicatedâ is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means âto fold together.â No, we donât think of that root when we call someone complicated, but itâs what we mean: that theyâre compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.
âIt feels,â I told Wilson, âwith your choice of âcomplicated,â that you planted a flag.â
âIt is a flag,â she said.
âIt says, âGuess what?âââ â
âââ â this is different.âââ
The First Woman to Translate the Odyssey Into English, Wyatt Mason
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