Crossing the Wine Dark Sea by Emily Wilson review – a masterclass in translation | Classics

Ethe translations of the Odyssey in 2017 and the Iliad in 2023 by Mily Wilson are now the standard English versions, acclaimed for their conciseness and fluidity. Her infatuation with Homer began at the age of eight, when her primary school staged a production of the Odyssey, with her in the role of Athena, and the excitement has not worn off. We can question certain choices she makes in her translations (she questions them herself), but we cannot doubt the months and years she spent finding the “least bad” compromises.

His new book is a series of essays about the challenges of translation and the pleasures and insights that can be gained from reading the classics. She is fascinated by how the ancient world intersects with the modern world. Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus and Aristophanes are here, but also Spike Lee, Erica Jong, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves (a final link to the clever servants of Roman comedy) and Boris Johnson (“an incompetent drunk” who somehow passed for an intellectual “on the basis of his ability to repeat a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek”). Rich white men in Silicon Valley are also criticized for adopting stoicism (not to be confused with stoicism) in “a watered-down form.” The continuities between yesterday and today accumulate: war, cruelty and political unrest. But there are also important contrasts and she castigates those who consider Antiquity as “a mirror in which we always find ourselves”, even when we are not there.

With Sappho, the difficulty is that so little poetry has survived: reconstructing her work is “like trying to get an idea of ​​an entire Tyrannosaurus rex from a single claw.” Wilson especially admires Anne Carson’s version of Sappho, as “performance art on the page”, while finding the characterization of her disembodied and stripped of homosexual desire. The island of Lesbos was associated with blowjobs – the word lesbiazein means giving a blowjob – but it was through Sappho that female homosexuality was understood. Feminists have made him an icon, that’s understandable. But Wilson does not accept the idea that male poets – Baudelaire, Tennyson, Swinburne – “always rape Sappho metaphorically, while female poets sing with her.” As general as Sappho’s poems are, they “emphasize the isolation of the individual” and show us “what it means to be excluded and alone.”

Wilson describes herself, half-jokingly, as a pedant, and when translators are not up to par or critics miss the point, she is harsh-minded, not to mention scathing. Guinean, boring, sentimental, melodramatic, interminable, archaic, absurd: the disdainful adjectives accumulate. Robert Browning’s unidiomatic version of Agamemnon is described as “arguably more difficult to understand than the Greek version”. Edith Hamilton, a retired teacher who popularized the classics in the United States, is found guilty of racism when she “remade ancient Greece in the image of the idealized United States” and ignored disenfranchisement and slavery. Even the brilliant Peter Green sometimes turns out to be “strangely stiff”. As for the “armchair classics” who pontificate on television and in newspapers, she judges them guilty of being snobbish.

Gatekeeping is not Wilson’s style. She is eager to kill off the snootier combination of Latin and Greek as “a useful qualification for passing for a gentleman and keeping out the plebs.” Hence the warmth with which she writes about the poet Christopher Logue’s version of Homer in his War Music. Logue, as she puts it, came from a humble background, was court-martialed by the army, imprisoned for theft, and didn’t go to college. He didn’t know Greek either. But as “grand theft” and “extraordinary heist” as it is, his version of the Iliad is “a cause for celebration”: its jazzy rhythm and fetishistic love of detail dispel prejudices against it like a musty old classic. Not that she is insensitive: his modernizing comparisons (the blood shed “like in a car wash”, the men crowded into battle “like shoppers”) sometimes go too far, and he does not bring Helen of Troy to life. However, at least he is not one of those misogynists, mentioned in another chapter, who shame Helen.

Wilson’s brief departure from the classics is driven by the controversy surrounding Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize; the English version, by Deborah Smith, has been denounced as a betrayal of the original. This dispute raises questions about what makes a good translation. On one side are the insiders, who think the test is how easily accessible a book becomes in a different language; for them, the translator should be invisible. For their opponents, the foreigners, this is a “false form of homogeneity”; a translation should embody the strangeness of the original language and culture, not hide it. Translation theorists criticize the domestication of foreign texts as unethical and equate it with political conservatism.

Wilson occupies the happy medium. “Creating a more user-friendly translation does not necessarily imply a desire to appropriate or ‘colonize’ the foreign original,” she says. But she also doesn’t want the shock and surprise of a foreign text to be lessened. The tensions and complexities of the original must always be made legible, she believes. This also applies to verse form: in honor of Homer’s dactylic hexameters, his version of the Odyssey uses iambic pentameter rather than prose.

In by far the longest essay, she explores the best way to translate the Odyssey (even if there is no “best”), comparing notes with those of her predecessors. How, for example, can we translate the moment when the Sirens tell Ulysses that he must stop his journey and listen to their music? In the modern imagination, mermaids are scantily clad sirens, and it is because of their sexual power that Odysseus ties himself to a mast to resist their allure. But Homer’s mermaids aren’t sexy; they are “cognitively tempting” bird-women whose seduction is the promise of knowledge, not sex. Rather than referring to their “lips,” as many translators do, Wilson refers to their “mouths,” which are not so much kissable as dangerous.

No less fascinating is his choice of adjective to describe Odysseus in the first line of the poem. In Homer, it is polytropos which in modern English versions has been variously rendered as “this ingenious man”, “this man skilled in every way”, “the man of twists and turns”, and “the cunning hero”. Wilson is not impatient with these, except to complain about the verbosity: it is a point of pride that his version of the Odyssey is not longer than Homer’s. Her own choice for the adjective is “complicated,” which, she admits, can sound dour and, to my ear, reminiscent of emollient amateur psychology. She admits that she almost gave up on him after coming across the phrase “He’s a complicated man” in Isaac Hayes’ theme song for the film Shaft. But ultimately, she stood her ground and spent 10 pages explaining her decision.

As she says, when translating there is no good solution without an answer, and in the next 20 years, provided the world doesn’t collapse in the meantime, she hopes a younger generation will come up with their own ideas. To help them, she offers a manifesto-type afterword with 20 rules. “If the original makes you laugh, cry, get excited, get goosebumps, feel perplexed, get bored, get charmed,” she says, “then the translation should try to create those effects.” » It’s a lifelong project but well worth it. “Try to rethink everything. Come up with something different. It’s good to experiment… Don’t give up too soon. There’s always another way to say it.”