My brother is writing on Substack, but I’m still here, blogging like it’s 2003. I really have no desire to be part of a writing “community”…I want to get my thoughts out there, but I also want to be ignored by most people most of the time, so this works pretty well.
I’ve deleted my X/Twitter account, so I can’t cover the latest freak-outs over ostensibly woke translations of the classics, but that’s probably fine.
Every so often, people come after Emily Wilson with pitchforks on social media for her translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The latest flare-up dominated my “X” feed until I felt like writing the lengthy response you see here.
Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prominent X users have called her Odyssey “abominable, a crime against the classics,” and “a political manifesto advocating gynocracy” which “can in no serious way even properly be referred to as a translation.” The most concise offering was “wow this translation sucks.”
The translation does actually have a lot of fans. But why do some people hate it so much? In most cases, it’s a combination of the style (which as you can see in the image above is quite different from previous English versions) and her general perspective, which is typical of a current professor of literature at a prestigious university. “Making visible the cracks in the patriarchal fantasy” is one of her stated goals; her hobbies probably include problematizing things, like bodies and spaces, and sitting with them.
Had her interviews given off more of an “I just really love Homer” vibe, the pitchforks might be safely in storage. One also wonders how the world would have received this translation with a masculine nom de plume and no interviews. Alas, we can’t know. But according to one tweet, “our gripe with Wilson isn’t about the translation itself, it’s that she has so cynically capitalized on our current political/activist moment.”
When you put it that way it makes sense. However, many other commentators insist the translation itself is terrible, regardless of whether Wilson is cynically capitalizing on things. How can we judge this? Let’s consider some criteria.
1. Does it tell the same story as the original?
That’s a pretty low bar, but long ago — in the Middle Ages, say — you could write a new version of a story in your language and slap on the same title it had in the source language, even if the poetry was all yours and you added new incidents and characters. Wilson clears this bar easily. One might argue that her translation subtly encourages readers to interpret the story a certain way, but it’s the same sequence of events with the same cast of characters. She didn’t rewrite it from a siren’s perspective or anything weird like that.
2. Is it well-written in English?
Anyone can weigh in on this criterion. Unfortunately, those who do will never reach a consensus.
3. Does it give readers an accurate sense of the original?
This is what matters most to modern scholarly types. The academic standard is that the translation should reflect all the linguistic and narrative elements of the original as closely as possible while still being decent English. A friend of mine once bombed a Classics essay on Euripedes’ Bacchae because all her quotes came from a very free adaptation by Wole Soyinka — so free as to be considered a new work inspired by Euripedes, rather than a translation of Euripedes.
Wilson’s translation would pass the test that my unfortunate friend’s source failed. She is certainly aiming at modern standards of accuracy, as you can see from her Substack, where she gives detailed accounts of how she made her choices and how they compare to other versions.
In order to weigh in on this question of accuracy, you do have to have substantial expertise in Homeric Greek. I don’t, so I won’t. But I can say that in her writing I recognize the thought process of a serious translator making the kinds of decisions all translators make. So that one guy on X was definitely wrong to say it “can in no serious way even properly be referred to as a translation.”
Here is a negative review of Wilson’s Iliad by someone with the necessary expertise and here is a mostly positive one of her Odyssey. Both are interesting and demonstrate the level of knowledge required to evaluate it as a translation.
Although…there is something to be said for judging a translation entirely by criterion 2. “This is bad English writing” is a fair critique. I would just advise critics to make that clear, since “this is a bad translation” usually implies inaccuracy, and most of us can’t judge that. Sometimes translations are hated because they are hard to read, and that seems legit, with the caveat that the translator may simply be giving you an accurate sense of how hard it is to read the original. (Cyril Edwards’ Parzival springs to mind.)
Accurate translators are also supposed to “bring over” style and register. This raises several difficulties. For example, ancient poems are archaic from our perspective, but once they were fresh. Whenever we translate something from long ago, we have to choose where in time to locate our language.
When I translated an adventure story about Germans seeking their fortune in Papua New Guinea circa 1910, I tried to make the characters sound a bit like Richard Hannay; i.e. I tried to locate the English in their time. That’s the relatively recent past, so it wasn’t that hard to do.
But there was no English in Homer’s day, not even Old English, so English translations necessarily displace his work in time. What time do you pick, then? Should you give the language a Shakespearean feel? That would be consistent with how the poem seems to us and what kind of status it has in our canon. You could argue that even if Homer’s Greek has a rather stark and simple style (as Wilson claims it does), we should adorn it until it sounds like what we English speakers expect from great epic poetry. “Modern English is not a bardic language,” said one rando, voting to give it an archaic style. He has a point.
Someone on X compared Wilson’s work to the No Fear Shakespeare series. If you haven’t seen these, they are study aids that suck all the poetry out of Shakespeare’s plays until they lie, mere desiccated husks, on the floors of classrooms where students might as well be reading terms and conditions for downloading software. Quite a diss, in other words. This comparison presupposes that Wilson has “dumbed down” Homer but she claims precisely the opposite – that others have embellished Homer and hers is the more accurate version.
Wilson’s choice of iambic pentameter is reminiscent of Shakespeare, but her language itself sounds contemporary. I was amused to learn that Wilson’s Odysseus begins his slaughter of the suitors with “Playtime is over!” No good, said some commenters, it sounds like a Hollywood action movie. Well, said others, perhaps this was the equivalent in its day and this line hits you the same way the original line hit the Greeks. Then again, this review asserts that Homeric poetry had a distinctive poetic language that sounded at least vaguely archaic in its time, drawing from “vastly different centuries of Greek language and culture.” We might find an English equivalent of that in Howard Pyle.
At any rate, these are decisions that must be made and you can’t find a solution everyone will agree with. Religious people will never stop arguing over whether the Bible or the liturgy should be like bright, new copper or have the green patina of age, and we’ll never collectively decide whether Homer’s Odyssey should “sound ancient” when translated into a language that, again, did not exist when it was written.
If you’ve followed the colorful discourse about whether Wilson is murdering Homer and corrupting our youth, this is a good time to reflect on why there used to be so much anxiety about Bible translations. I’ve written something about that as well.
My brother and colleague, Scott Spires, has abandoned his old Lakefront Linguist blog for a Substack called Lakefront Review of Books.
A couple years ago he lent me his copy of the Wyndham Lewis book Self Condemned. I never got around to reading it so I gave it back to him, and now he’s written a review of it that makes me want to read it after all, darn it.
The world recently lost an inspiring teacher and all-round excellent person: Prof. Raymond Furness of the University of St. Andrews.
He was the first German tutor I met at St. Andrews, at a reception for overseas students. I saw “German” on his name tag and said, “Oh!” but when he turned my way I came over all skittish and bolted across the room. Luckily our paths crossed again and he asked me in his usual booming voice what I was studying — he was of course very happy to hear (faintly) that it was German. He asked me about myself and I mentioned my Shetland sheepdog; in every significant conversation we had over the next 6 years, he would ask, “How is your little dog, Tuppence?”
He was our tutor for first-year literature and I’ll never forget the day when, about 10 minutes into class, he realized none of us had actually read the assigned book. He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you’re naughty children, aren’t you?” he said, “Well, no need to waste my time with you, I’m going to the pub.” And he put his coat on and walked over to The Central, leaving us to exchange sheepish glances.
If you passed a room where he was teaching, you knew it because some over-the-top comment like “I MEAN LADIES! WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO SHARE YOUR HUSBAND WITH A DEAD MAN??!?” would be distinctly audible through the door.
His German Expressionism class was a highlight for most honours students, who really got what they came for on the days when he read aloud from Georg Kaiser’s Gas or Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord.
In my third year, at a dinner for students in another tutor’s Nietzsche module, someone called him a misogynist so I popped by during his office hours soon afterwards to say, “Hi, Professor Furness, are you a misogynist?” He said he loved women and to prove it, he invited me in for several glasses of sherry and picked my brain for gossip, which was exactly what I had been hoping for.
Ray Furness was in tune with everything that was chthonic, decadent, fatalistic, grandiose, disjointed, or existentially troubling in German arts and letters. You could rely on him to know everything about every famous German or Austrian who had ever gone mad or shot himself in the head. But he was a very nice person. If there’s a heaven, I’m sure he is there playing ping-pong with Max Schreck…or something like that.
In 2007, I was a frumpy housewife in small-town Ontario with two children running in all directions and two German degrees gathering dust in the attic. My career up to that point had consisted of a couple of poems one of my professors had seen fit to publish, an annual review of the German legal market which was lengthy but posed few stylistic challenges, and a decision to move to the margins of civilization to focus on having babies, canning beets, and feeding a woodstove.
“I know you’re dreadfully busy,” wrote an old friend on Facebook, which I used to check in between changing diapers, sealing mason jars, and flinging logs onto the fire, for in those days Facebook was still fun and I was still there, “But I have this family friend who is a translator and has too much work, do you think you could possibly help her out?”
The translator was Aileen Derieg and I was delighted to heed this particular call to adventure. She sent me the first job: an earnest meditation on building bridges, literally and figuratively, and what St. John Nepomuk could teach the EU. “Aileen Derieg has drunk champagne with you!” Facebook cheerfully notified me after I sent her my translation. That was about the best feedback I could have hoped for, so our collaboration continued.
And it turned out Aileen Derieg was about the best person one could ever hope to collaborate with. Not only had she established an enviable network of clients through years of highly competent work, but she was also thoughtful, patient, rational, open-minded, gracious, helpful, and – crucially in my case – understanding about the ups and downs of childcare and their impact on deadlines.
For years, she had been converting the densest, most intricate German prose into clear and readable English. Behind her back, those of us to whom she was subcontracting would sometimes trade frustrated messages. As one of her other assistants wrote to me in 2008: “I am despairing! My text is incomprehensible! Impossible! AAAARGHARGHARGHRGHAGHGAHRGHAGRHGAAAAGH. I have given up trying to understand the text, I am just painstakingly translating every sentence word by word…” But Aileen inhabited a lofty realm where such texts were the norm, and she translated them with aplomb.
One thing that became obvious when any of us asked Aileen for help disentangling webs of critical theory was that she had the utmost respect for all her clients and never adopted a mocking or dismissive attitude towards their work. Perhaps she was merely an early adopter of the maxim, “Dance like nobody’s watching, email like it’s going to be read out in a deposition someday,” but I believe she truly was filled with saintly goodwill. No matter how complex the style of a text or how surprising its content – she handled it with a sincere desire to understand it and communicate its message in English. This attitude, along with all the specific useful feedback she gave me over the years, taught me what I needed to know to go forward.
Aileen is retired now, and I will think of her with gratitude every day. Her very talented son, Christopher Hütmannsberger, and I will be available to serve her client base. And now that she’s not drowning in book projects, I might pepper her inbox with thorny translation questions every day. Watch out, Aileen!
Recent events have inspired me to re-read Fritz Stern‘s book Five Germanys I have known (grammar nerds will note that it is “Germanys,” not “Germanies,” because the usual plural spelling rules don’t apply to proper names), specifically the middle section about nurturing, preserving, and defending liberal democracy.
Reading this book ten years ago, I skimmed that part thinking, “Yeah, mm-hmm, whatever.” But it all seems terribly relevant now. Take his comments on the student revolts of ’68, when he was teaching at Columbia University:
I was angry at the jubilant desecration of the university, and afraid that we were betraying our patrimony. […] I was afraid of the radical youths who were intoxicated by their own rhetoric, enthralled by the initial successes of violence, and convinced of their historic role as iconoclasts. […] Their disruptions were not cost-free: I feared a massive backlash, a reaction by conservative yahoos who would feel justified in their paranoid hatred of liberal (and expensive) institutions.
How relevant.
Then there was a rising desire on the right for repressive law and order, along with a “professed faith in the virtues of hard work and economic individualism, and contempt for the welfare state that ‘coddled’ the weak…a new version of Social Darwinism, bloody-minded if economically effective.” And there were advocates of la politique du pire — “that delusionary policy that holds that the worse things go, the better for radicals. I have often fought with these self-righteous ‘wreckers,’ who seldom realize how bad and irredeemable things can get.”
Ditto.
Having fled Nazi Germany for an America that was — on the whole and despite its economic woes — confident, well-meaning and optimistic, with a president who insisted the only thing to fear was Fear itself, Stern was wary of radicals on the left and right. Like G. K. Chesterton, he understood that it was worthwhile, and an adventure, to keep your horse running straight when it is tempted to veer onto the paths that lead to insane extremes.
He gave an interview to Greenpeace magazine in January 2016, a few months before his death at age 90. The interview seems to be available only in German, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating an excerpt here:
Historian Fritz Stern: “We are facing an era of fear.”
GP: Is Europe moving too far to the right?
FS: I fear it is. I believe we are facing an era of fear, widespread fear — the fear that can be exploited by the right. And you can already see in the example of Poland how fragile freedom is. It is shocking how quickly an authoritarian system is being built up in Poland. […] And as an American citizen I am also deeply concerned.
GP: About what comes after Barack Obama?
FS: Precisely. On the whole I’m an admirer of Obama and it was a great achievement on the part of this country to have elected him twice. But the current situation is so serious, so destructive, so dysfunctional, that it can only make you worry.
GP: You mean Donald Trump?
FS: Trump is the best example of the dumbing-down of the country and the appalling role of money. An absolutely amoral guy who flaunts his money and ignorance. I arrived in this country when Franklin Roosevelt was president. That someone like Trump, who is a nobody apart from money and monstrous ambition and ugliness – that he would not only put himself forward but would even be accepted by many people as a candidate, is simply beyond comprehension.
GP: What has changed in American society?
FS: I’ve already spoken of dumbing-down. That is due in large part to the media and to the fact that there are fewer and fewer objective journalists. Most people can choose the ones who preach what they want to hear. […] A certain kind of new religiosity, which has very little to do with true religiosity, is also on the rise. I believe we are facing a new illiberal age. And for someone who dedicated his life to a certain liberalism, those are sad tidings. It’s a decline.
RIP Prof. Stern. If there’s anything I can do to keep that horse on the trail, I’ll do it.