Tag: Emily Wilson

When new translations sound old

In the LRB Conversations podcast series, Emily Wilson discusses her recent piece in the London Review of Books (8 October 2020) (restricted access) on three (relatively) new translations of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. One would have to say, mixed reviews; Wilson of the opinion that all fail to adequately reflect newer scholarship in respect to the state of democracy and justice in fifth-century Athens, and how that is reflected in the language of tragedy and specifically that of Aeschylus. She concludes the Oliver Taplin translation to be much the better of the three (though his introduction disappoints), and she recommends also that of Sarah Ruden (in The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, 2017 Modern Library Classics).

Aeschylus’ Ghosts
Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

Emphasised is the misunderstanding of the breadth of the feted Athenian model of state – a “democracy” that applied in fact only to a very limited constituency and only a handful removed from an oligarchy, and where a majority of the populous had absolutely nothing to say. In this regard, there are through the ages analogies aplenty – countries who adopt “Democratic” to their name and are quite obviously not is one example – but I specifically thought about the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in which that insinuated by “men” and “people” abounded with obvious exceptions – gender, race – until the last half of the 20th century, and less obviously – through disenfranchisement – still.

My thoughts flying to the young America, are echoed in the turn of conversation to the performative aspects of Greek tragedy, whereupon it is suggested that “Hamilton”, with its use of music and dance (and I would say the “state” folklore it serves) is perhaps the best modern analogue to classical Greek drama. In retrospect, I often wonder whether Athenian statecraft and European puritanism may have always been an imperfect mix upon which to build the foundations of a new nation.

More than once, the difficulty factor of Aeschylus is stipulated to be at the higher end – though in the course of the trilogy it moderates. Should one be deterred or accept the gauntlet handed down?

An interesting afterword: Emily Wilson, referring to her translation of The Odyssey, reveals a little of her criteria for (re-) translation (one of the reasons behind her criticisms of the above): first comes the request (in her case from an editor at Norton, with whom she had previously worked), but then a careful deliberation as to whether it is warranted, and what new stuff, if any, there is to brought to the fore, and her decision being further informed by her experience as a teacher of college students in the US. And, particularly she was convinced of the need for a new translation that returned to the metrical and syntactical rhythm of the ancient text, after years of versions rendered in prose form. Further, she recognised the opportunity to present a work that moved away from a purely Odysseus centred telling and gave the story in many voices, as multi-faceted, if you like, as the hero himself.

And, an after, afterword: Emily Wilson mentions at the very end of the podcast, that her Iliad translation will include Book 10 which, unbeknownst to me (well, who would have thunk it!), has been a matter of controversy over the years; the essence of the argument being that this book was a later addition and to be, therefore, discarded by the purist. The Stephen Mitchell translation, that does just that and to which Wilson refers, was reviewed at The New Yorker in 2011 by Daniel Mendelsohn.

A pig in a poke

In a blog entry for the LRB in 2018, Emily Wilson gave a lesson in reportage gone awry – lost in translation or just plain misunderstood. Whichever, the claims circulating in the media at the time that a clay tablet discovered near Olympia, with lines from Book 14 of the Odyssey, was perhaps the oldest extract from the epic, were way off-base – for all the reasons she explains in her entry.

For my purposes, I mention this in passing only because of where I am at the moment in my epic reading, and Emily Wilson’s comments in respect to the nature of the inscription. Following is some of the passage on the tablet, and in her own translation:

His yard was high and visible for miles,
of fieldstones topped with twigs of thorny pear.
He built it in the absence of his master,
with no help from Laertes or the mistress.
Around the yard, he set a ring of stakes,
of wood with bark stripped off. Inside the yard,
he made twelve sties all next to one another, 
...

Book 14 [lines 8-14] The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson

Of course, we have here the beginning of Book 14, and Odysseus, in the beggar’s guise created for him by Athena, is approaching the humble yard of the swineherd, Eumaeus. It is this descriptive passage that leads Wilson to wonder at the purpose of the artefact – the subject matter is hardly the most profound; perhaps its origins were of a more mundane or utilitarian nature than cultural.

Not exactly a pig in a poke, but close. Just as it is wise to check your purchases, so it is to double check sources of information. Emily Wilson ends on a positive note anyway:

The bright side to this inaccurately reported story is that it reveals a hunger among the general public for news about the ancient world. […] Maybe this fake news story will inspire more people to investigate the ancient world for themselves, and also to realise that the stories told about the Odyssey are – like the poem’s wily, scheming, deceitful protagonist himself – not always to be taken at face value.

LRB Blog, 14 JULY 2018, “Making a Pigsty” by Emily Wilson

Booker 2020

Literary awards stop not for this mean, increasingly unpredictable virus making lives miserable – and to various degrees, dependent upon circumstance. Here, then, providing a modicum of distraction, the just announced longlist for The Booker Prize 2020:

The Booker Prize 2020 longlist
  • The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
  • This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
  • Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
  • Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
  • The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
  • Apeirogon by Colum McCan (Bloomsbury Publishing) 
  • The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
  • Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
  • Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)       
  • Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
  • Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
  • Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (Corsair, Little, Brown)
  • How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Virago, Little, Brown)

I can only say that I have only read Mantel; and the daunting task of writing my thoughts on her remarkable work remains on my longlist (of things to do)! And, I can only say what I’ve said before, and that is: the United States has any number of major book awards (National, Pulitzer being foremost) why on earth the Brits allowed them in the Booker a few years ago I really don’t know. Well of course one does – $$$! In my opinion, it is becoming too top heavy stateside these days – no antipodean, only one resident (I think) of the African continent, none from southern Asia, or the Caribbean. In fact there are only three listed from the UK which means, the laws of probability being such as they are, one may very well end up with a shortlist without a British writer! I hear already the screams of “Scandal!” – but what would the Booker be without controversy? Rarely has there not been a loud gripe of some sort – in or out, sponsor, judge … What was it last year? Oh, I remember – against all the “unwritten” rules, it was awarded jointly to Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.

And I will also say that I haven’t read Anne Tyler for donkey’s years, and she was a constant companion of … let me see… the third decade of my life. Can I read Tyler again without bemoaning my lost youth?

The jury is diverse which is good, and I also note with delight that Margaret Busby leads it and Emily Wilson is another of the judges. Of the latter I need say nought (see my never ending Odyssey project!), but Busby reminds me of The Daughters of Africa, which I would like to read after all these years and then their is last year’s follow up anthology.

The Booker Prize longlist July 28th 2020

Look who else is reading “The Odyssey”!

Emily’s Odyssey readings for the young (and young in spirit!)

While hopefully not neglecting working on her awaited Iliad translation, Emily Wilson has been using some of her time with a little playful emoting from The Odyssey – perhaps directed towards a younger audience than I, but a lot of fun anyway. The clip below is from Book 1, and short readings from each book are on her YouTube channel, and here is an overview on Emily’s website. Maybe I can get some pronunciation and elocution tips! I have been making my own recordings (as an incentive to read aloud!) but more often than not fall afoul when it comes to the pronunciation of people and places.

Emily Wilson reads a section from her translation of The Odyssey, Book 1.

And this news of a further lorbeer for Emily. May she not rest on her laurels.

The Odyssey (1)

Introduction

pp. 1-79

A fairly long but very fine introduction that should inspire any interested reader, and certainly further kindled my enthusiasm. Emily Wilson seriously wants me (and you, and you, …) to go on this journey, for not just its literary and cultural worth but as an exploration of the underlying themes that are deeply relevant to our contemporary human condition and concerns.

We are reminded of just how small an epic story or life can be, and conversely the grandiosity of each and every ordinary life. The epic hero Odysseus is, when it’s all said and done, just a man.

Wilson discusses the narrative structure, the vast tableau of characters – gods and human and neither one nor the other, and geography – getting home is never easy, and time – beginning as it does in medias res – of this great epic tale.

She ponders Homer in depth, but in words and tone accessible to we, the non-classicists; authorship, reception, oral tradition, dialectic and folkloric influences. And his world – the whens and wheres. The temporal; debated vigorously but some consensus at about 8th – 7th century BCE, and place (places!); all at sea, but certainly the Mediterranean and Aegean, and as muddled as the peoples that populate them.

The pages relating to “hospitality” – to somewhat abbreviate the discourse – are especially interesting. It says something I think that the ancient Greek word, xenia, meaning hospitality and a particular sort of friendship, is now associated with the negative connotations of xenophobia, and all the turning away and keeping out that it implies (p.23). It is hard to overlook an analogy in our own time – the plight of refugees on the aforementioned seas and their reception which is more often less than welcoming.

I read with interest the precision in which Wilson defines xenia as “guest-friendship”, differing it from the more familiar, intimate “friendship” but going beyond the somehow rather clinical notion of “hospitality”, and not used very much in everyday English. Living in Germany, I note that “Gastfreundschaft” is very much a concept and a word often used (though practiced or not to various degrees!).

Much more is discussed in the introduction. Women, for instance. Of course as characters – Penelope, Calypso, Athena – but Wilson also sketches how it could have been to be a woman in the ancient world, as an elite or as a slave. And the coming of age and father and son story identified in respect to Telemachus. And the multitude of translations, versions, adaptations of The Odyssey, that continue to inspire.

Translator’s notes

pp. 81-91

Given in the context of this scholarly work but informing well beyond the particular, there is a short essay on the technical aspects of translation, especially as pertaining to classical works, and the choices that have to be made by a translator, and the choices made by this translator.

I am learning here, so I will record just briefly some of Emily Wilson’s comments. The Odyssey was originally composed in dactylic hexameters, that is, in six-footed lines, the conventional meter of ancient Greek verse. Previous English translations have used a variety of techniques, for instance, George Chapman (1615) in iambic pentameter, Alexander Pope (1715) went a step further with rhyming couplets, but most modern translators like Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Robert Fagles (1996) have shied away from a regular beat in favour of free verse or prose.

Wilson returns to the iambic pentameter, being the convention of “…regular English narrative verse…of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats..”[p.82] To my mind that makes absolute sense, for this is the “sound” that many people have “heard”, however fleetingly, at school or university, in theatre or film. I haven’t got this far yet, but I imagine that familiarity and the regularity of beat may well provide parameters for a good reading aloud (privately!).

The translator also is firm in her commitment to forgo rhetorical flights of fancy in favour of plainer language and contemporary speech patterns, but I certainly don’t understand that to mean simplification or rigidity; in fact perhaps the opposite is achieved through precision in language, varying metaphors and epithets and what she describes as “a wide range of stylistic registers” [p.84]

Reading Homer’s “The Odyssey”

My reading project

As a special project in this new year 2020, I intend to embark upon a personal and concentrated reading of Emily Wilson’s celebrated 2018 translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey”, and will regularly write some posts to accompany my progress. Whether I can be as industrious as Penelope during her long tormented wait for Odysseus’ return is debatable!

To avoid the complication of having a separate blog, I’ll categorise and number in brackets each post (as in the header above) pertaining to my readings; collated, together with other related material, they will then be accessible as My Odyssey Reading from the main menu.

Page numbers, Book titles and other references will be cited from my hardback first edition copy: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson, First Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2018

My copy of Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey“

writer and translator

Before getting to the book and the really very substantial introductory pages therein, firstly an introduction to the writer, poet, composer, and all the plurals of the same, that we call simply Homer, and his, her, their most recent translator Emily Wilson.

Marble bust of Homer, British Museum, London.

Whilst legends persist (the blind bard for instance) and are certainly not without interest, whether there was this one Homer to whom can be attributed the epic works of The Iliad and The Odyssey is debatable. I very much like the idea of differentiating between a historical Homer and the poet Homer, which is probably not a terribly original thought but it seems to me a bit like the way of, for instance, approaching the historical Jesus alongside he explained through the lens of Christian dogma. Also, it may be that in a literary sense, identification is better explained through the more generalised “Homeric Question”; answered also with many a dissenting voice but all with the emphasis on Homer as an oral tradition.

Unlike Homer, Emily Wilson is absolutely one real person and has a website and can speak for herself, but briefly: Wilson is a British classicist born into the right family to therefore be educated at the right places to now be Professor of Classics at University of Pennsylvania, celebrated overnight it seems with the publication of her translation and she is, loathe that I am to mention it, since the Summer a recipient of one of these so-called genius grants. None of which I begrudge her, and mercifully, though she may sound a twee bit posh, I don’t think she would hang high the “genius” label! Following is a really interesting lecture she gave in September at Columbia University, focusing on her Odyssey translation, but with more generalised remarks on her method of work.

Also, I think Emily Wilson would have appreciated this review by Gregory Hays in The New York Times with its imperative on the nuance that she brings to her translation, and this is a nice magazine piece also in the Times. Together they say something about the person as scholar and translator, and the very special art of translation. Further links I will add to the sidebar menu.

In the coming days I will post some thoughts on Wilson’s introductory and translator notes – interesting enough in themselves I must say. I am really quite excited about this (Winter!) reading project; in itself an odyssey of sorts. My only encounter in any meaningful way with classics has come in recent years via Gregory Nagy’s edX course The Ancient Greek Hero (which may be caught in a new iteration) and the private reading and study that it encouraged, so the best I can do here is present the observations of an everyman, -woman.

Famously, The Odyssey has 24 books or scrolls, but my ambitions do not stretch to writing systematically on every one of those, instead I’ll condense the purely narrative and concentrate on more thematic aspects that I find to be particularly thought-provoking.