Take a photo of a barcode or cover
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Body horror, Confinement, Death, Violence, Murder, War, Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Slavery
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Death, Violence, Murder
Moderate: Misogyny, Slavery, War, Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Rape, Torture, Colonisation
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Death, Gore, Misogyny, Sexism, Violence, Murder, Classism
Moderate: Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery
adventurous
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Emily Wilson does a wonderful job of translating The Odyssey for modern audiences while still holding true to the melodic poetry of other translations.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Blood
adventurous
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Giving a star rating to Homer seems wrong, so that's why I left it blank. This challenged me a bit, but I enjoyed it! I read it in high school before, but forgot much of it. I also used the podcast Let's Talk about Myths, Baby! to help recap the chapters, as I did miss some details. It's dense, of course, since we don't speak this way anymore, but once I got in the flow, I was able to really enjoy it. In the same podcast, Liz has episodes where she reads the entire book as an audiobook in podcast format, so that is also a very accessible way to get the story as well.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault, Violence
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Death
adventurous
emotional
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Death, Torture, Violence, War
Moderate: Rape
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Boy, has this translation ruffled some jimmies over on the parts of the Internet that are genuinely interested in classical scholarship and the meaning of Ancient Greek epic poetry composed over three millennia distant to our current time. I’m sure it’s all mutually respectful and productive and discussion of the difficulties of making an ancient and complex poem accessible for a modern audience whilst still conveying an accurate sense of its content.
I’m obviously well behind the curve on the Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey discourse, but the short version is that Wilson’s translation received some promotional coverage for being the first translation of The Odyssey by a woman. This provoked the usual backlash, that this translation was in some ineffable way ‘woke’ and ruining the poem by adding ‘wokeness’ to it, somehow. It’s extremely clear that all the objections to Wilson’s translation were theatrical nonsense cooked up by bad faith idiots who care little about classics but a lot about twitter follower counts.
I’m focusing on the translation here because it’s The Odyssey. You already know the story. Even if you’ve never heard it quite like this, you already know the story. This poem is so influential on the history of European literature that evaluating whether I liked it is really besides the point. It is interesting primarily as the source of all that influence, peering back into a story at once familiar and deeply alien. I do think it’s worth returning to if your only exposure to Greek mythology recently has been though modern romantic adaptations. Personally I think it’s valuable to remind oneself of the ways in which those texts are strange and unfamiliar. TL;DR Odysseus is a lot more naked and angry than you remember him, and the poem is a lot more concerned with how he orchestrates his return to his long vacant seat as king of Ithaca than it is with his journey.
In discussions like these it’s important to establish at least some bona fides. While I am not a translator or a classicist, Wilson’s Odyssey is not the only translation of the poem I’ve read. I’ve also read the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey and The Iliad (in their entirety). All this to say that I know what I’m talking about when I say that Wilson’s version is not meaningfully different from previous translations and anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about the original would know that.
The most striking change in Wilson’s translation is her choice of casual and accessible vocabulary to convey the context that the original, while poetic, would have been familiar to its Ancient Greek audience. It certainly feels different from the more ornate and poetic translations of earlier years (personally, I’ve never felt the poetry of iambic pentameter, sorry), but I have a hard time feeling particularly mad about it. It is important for us to understand that when The Odyssey was written, epic poetry as we now know it did not yet exist. Using ornate and old-fashioned vocabulary to evoke a feeling of ‘epicness’ is an anachronistic projection of our own archetypes onto the past. You can make a career out of debating what this would have been to the Ancient Greeks (though less so now considering cuts to higher education humanities funding), but we must consider Wilson’s choice to be a valid argument.
Of course, the vocabulary is not the center of the firestorm, which was over the translation’s ostensibly overly ‘woke’ treatment of women and slavery. I say ‘ostensibly’ because once you actually read the text you find just how comically short the offendingly ‘woke’ passages actually are. At issue is about ten pages of the translator’s note, in which Wilson explains her handling of slavery in The Odyssey and the poem’s female characters, most notably Penelope. The book as a whole is over five hundred pages long.
Wilson is not taking a revisionist view. Her interpretation of Penelope strains above all to capture the uncertainty of the character. Wilson’s Penelope is far less explicitly insightful and decisive then she is in other interpretations. Wilson preserves the Ancient Greek sense of the masculine Warrior-Hero; Odysseus pillages and rages his way broth through foreign lands and his own territory while Penelope weeps and sleeps. It is a pretty dramatic contrast to Wilson’s much wiser and more self-aware Helen in her translation of The Iliad.
I was struck instead by how much more macho Odysseus is in the original text. In more recent adaptations and popular imagination, Odysseus appears as the more cunning and intelligent counterpart to the physically gifted Achilles and overbearing Agamemnon. As a consequence he also inherits the comparatively modern idea of a more scholarly character naturally being less macho. For the Ancient Greeks this was not the case. Plato, for example, means ‘wide’, since the philosopher was also an Olympic wrestler. Physical prowess was an essential characteristic of an Ancient Greek hero, so Odysseus is an exceptional athlete eager to flex his skills at violently dominating other men (read into that what you may).
Wilson’s interpretation of slavery in the poem is limited to using the word ‘slave’ rather than ‘servant’ or ‘maid,’ and the note pointing out that the loyalty of the slaves Eumaeus and Eurycleia is perhaps more a fantasy of the slave owner than an accurate account of the perspective of the slave. That’s it. This isn’t a romantasy cozy novel. Acknowledging that the characters in service are in fact slaves is just an objective assessment of the poem. Enslavement too, the power to steal, own, and compel loyalty was a key attribute of an Ancient Greek hero. And Odysseus’ attempt to sort the loyal from the disloyal is the key conflict of the poem, far moreso than any sense of journeying. If I allow myself one shallow dunk, I thought these were supposed to be the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings, respect the inequalities of the past’ dudes. You guys should want there to be more slavery here because within the context of the poem that is evidence of Odysseus’ masculine heroism.
Ultimately, this review is more for my benefit. The critics of Wilson’s translation don’t care about classics or translation and they don’t care about The Odyssey. It is immediately obvious that most of them haven’t read this or any other translation. This is only over the optics of a woman occupying a prominent intellectual position. The ‘woke’ Odyssey isn’t real, and if it is, it only exists as insufferable tumblr posts written by people with no meaningful contact with actual community.
They don’t care about the debate around how to translate the poetry and vocabulary of this poem and they don’t care about anachronism or accuracy. All they care about is whether it fulfills their inaccurate preconceived notion of what a classic is, with all its implications for Western Tradition.
I’m obviously well behind the curve on the Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey discourse, but the short version is that Wilson’s translation received some promotional coverage for being the first translation of The Odyssey by a woman. This provoked the usual backlash, that this translation was in some ineffable way ‘woke’ and ruining the poem by adding ‘wokeness’ to it, somehow. It’s extremely clear that all the objections to Wilson’s translation were theatrical nonsense cooked up by bad faith idiots who care little about classics but a lot about twitter follower counts.
I’m focusing on the translation here because it’s The Odyssey. You already know the story. Even if you’ve never heard it quite like this, you already know the story. This poem is so influential on the history of European literature that evaluating whether I liked it is really besides the point. It is interesting primarily as the source of all that influence, peering back into a story at once familiar and deeply alien. I do think it’s worth returning to if your only exposure to Greek mythology recently has been though modern romantic adaptations. Personally I think it’s valuable to remind oneself of the ways in which those texts are strange and unfamiliar. TL;DR Odysseus is a lot more naked and angry than you remember him, and the poem is a lot more concerned with how he orchestrates his return to his long vacant seat as king of Ithaca than it is with his journey.
In discussions like these it’s important to establish at least some bona fides. While I am not a translator or a classicist, Wilson’s Odyssey is not the only translation of the poem I’ve read. I’ve also read the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey and The Iliad (in their entirety). All this to say that I know what I’m talking about when I say that Wilson’s version is not meaningfully different from previous translations and anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about the original would know that.
The most striking change in Wilson’s translation is her choice of casual and accessible vocabulary to convey the context that the original, while poetic, would have been familiar to its Ancient Greek audience. It certainly feels different from the more ornate and poetic translations of earlier years (personally, I’ve never felt the poetry of iambic pentameter, sorry), but I have a hard time feeling particularly mad about it. It is important for us to understand that when The Odyssey was written, epic poetry as we now know it did not yet exist. Using ornate and old-fashioned vocabulary to evoke a feeling of ‘epicness’ is an anachronistic projection of our own archetypes onto the past. You can make a career out of debating what this would have been to the Ancient Greeks (though less so now considering cuts to higher education humanities funding), but we must consider Wilson’s choice to be a valid argument.
Of course, the vocabulary is not the center of the firestorm, which was over the translation’s ostensibly overly ‘woke’ treatment of women and slavery. I say ‘ostensibly’ because once you actually read the text you find just how comically short the offendingly ‘woke’ passages actually are. At issue is about ten pages of the translator’s note, in which Wilson explains her handling of slavery in The Odyssey and the poem’s female characters, most notably Penelope. The book as a whole is over five hundred pages long.
Wilson is not taking a revisionist view. Her interpretation of Penelope strains above all to capture the uncertainty of the character. Wilson’s Penelope is far less explicitly insightful and decisive then she is in other interpretations. Wilson preserves the Ancient Greek sense of the masculine Warrior-Hero; Odysseus pillages and rages his way broth through foreign lands and his own territory while Penelope weeps and sleeps. It is a pretty dramatic contrast to Wilson’s much wiser and more self-aware Helen in her translation of The Iliad.
I was struck instead by how much more macho Odysseus is in the original text. In more recent adaptations and popular imagination, Odysseus appears as the more cunning and intelligent counterpart to the physically gifted Achilles and overbearing Agamemnon. As a consequence he also inherits the comparatively modern idea of a more scholarly character naturally being less macho. For the Ancient Greeks this was not the case. Plato, for example, means ‘wide’, since the philosopher was also an Olympic wrestler. Physical prowess was an essential characteristic of an Ancient Greek hero, so Odysseus is an exceptional athlete eager to flex his skills at violently dominating other men (read into that what you may).
Wilson’s interpretation of slavery in the poem is limited to using the word ‘slave’ rather than ‘servant’ or ‘maid,’ and the note pointing out that the loyalty of the slaves Eumaeus and Eurycleia is perhaps more a fantasy of the slave owner than an accurate account of the perspective of the slave. That’s it. This isn’t a romantasy cozy novel. Acknowledging that the characters in service are in fact slaves is just an objective assessment of the poem. Enslavement too, the power to steal, own, and compel loyalty was a key attribute of an Ancient Greek hero. And Odysseus’ attempt to sort the loyal from the disloyal is the key conflict of the poem, far moreso than any sense of journeying. If I allow myself one shallow dunk, I thought these were supposed to be the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings, respect the inequalities of the past’ dudes. You guys should want there to be more slavery here because within the context of the poem that is evidence of Odysseus’ masculine heroism.
Ultimately, this review is more for my benefit. The critics of Wilson’s translation don’t care about classics or translation and they don’t care about The Odyssey. It is immediately obvious that most of them haven’t read this or any other translation. This is only over the optics of a woman occupying a prominent intellectual position. The ‘woke’ Odyssey isn’t real, and if it is, it only exists as insufferable tumblr posts written by people with no meaningful contact with actual community.
They don’t care about the debate around how to translate the poetry and vocabulary of this poem and they don’t care about anachronism or accuracy. All they care about is whether it fulfills their inaccurate preconceived notion of what a classic is, with all its implications for Western Tradition.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
adventurous
challenging
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Death, Gore, Misogyny, Sexism, Slavery, Violence, Blood, Murder, War