So glad she was to see her own dear husband, and her white arms would not let go his neck. Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land.

As welcome as the land to swimmers, when Poseidon wrecks their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves and driving winds a few escape the sea and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine. He held his love, his faithful wife, and wept. The pertinent passage goes as follows (all translations are Wilson’s unless otherwise noted): In her introduction to the Odyssey, Wilson - who is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania - notes that a “surprising slippage” takes place in the immediate aftermath of Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion and mutual recognition. She understands, I suspect, that a woman’s perspective changes things, and she’s not just thinking of her own. She treats the fact of her gender and the event of her book as fundamental to one another even as they don’t totally consume each other. She doesn’t act coy about the “first woman” tag - “Oh, am I the first?” - or dismiss it as incidental. As the media excitement following the book has made clear, she knows that she’s raising a challenge to a cantankerous bulwark, and isn’t afraid to own it. But one of them is certainly an awareness of her own daring.

There are many other stunning things about Wilson’s translation, from the five-beat lines to the straightforward speech, free from the elegant clunkiness that we usually see when scholars try to carry words over from one language to another. I mean that seriously, not sardonically: what does it matter that a woman has finally translated the Odyssey into English, Caroline Alexander having become the first woman to tackle the Iliad (in English) only a year before? That it’s largely uncharted territory, like the waters Odysseus traverses for a decade? You can already imagine, practically hear, the whining that Wilson is not, actually, the first woman to translate the Odyssey, just the first to do so into English - as if there’s room for only one woman within a boys’ club of Homer translators, as if the addition of another translation by a woman, especially into a language that reaches a wide audience, isn’t a stunning achievement.Īnd that rage alone should convince you that it is one. Norton & Company, $30.73/£30.00) is the first rendering of the text into English by a woman.

Reading Emily Wilson’s Translation of the Odyssey With Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad John William Waterhouse, “Penelope and the Suitors” (1912)ĭisclaimer: this article contains affiliate links.Īccording to the press packet, Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey (W.W.

Emily wilson the illiad