If you pay any attention at all to news related to the ancient world (which, if you’re reading this blog, you probably do), you’ve most likely already heard that the publisher W. W. Norton has just released a new translation of the Iliad by Emily Wilson, the professor at the University of Pennsylvania who became a household name for her translation of the Odyssey, which came out in 2018. Both of Wilson’s translations have received widespread acclaim, both have now become commercial bestsellers, and they have gotten people who don’t normally read ancient Greek literature reading and talking about the Homeric epics. It’s definitely an exciting time to be someone who studies ancient Greece.
For better or worse, the media narrative surrounding Wilson’s translations has fixated heavily on the fact that she is the first woman to commercially publish a translation of the entire Odyssey in English. This has led to an incorrect impression among lay readers that Wilson is the first woman ever to translate Homer. In reality, as Wilson herself has repeatedly and emphatically pointed out, this is not true. Read on to learn more about some of the other women who translated Homer before her.
Previous women who have published translations of Homeric works
The first woman to publish a complete translation of either Homeric epic in any language was, in fact, the French scholar Anne Dacier (lived 1647 – 1720). Dacier’s father was the famous French classical scholar Tanneguy Le Fèvre, a professor of classics at the Academy of Saumur, who made the unusually progressive decision for the time to teach his daughter the Ancient Greek and Latin languages and literatures, which, at this time, were normally only taught to men.
In time, Dacier became a famous classicist in her own right. She published a complete translation of the Iliad in French in 1699 and a complete translation of the Odyssey in 1708—a full 310 years before Wilson’s. Dacier’s translations of the Homeric epics are both in prose, not verse, and they seek to follow the literal meaning of the Greek as exactly as possible.
Dacier accompanied her translations with extensive (and often quite polemical) commentary, in which she seeks to prove the ancient epics’ aesthetic and moral supremacy and disparages the works of modern French poets as far inferior by comparison. This praise of the Homeric epics and denigration of modern poetry fanned the flames of a literary dispute in France of this period known as the querelle des anciens et des modernes or “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.”
The male writer and poet Antoine Houdar de la Motte—who, unlike Dacier, did not know any Ancient Greek whatsoever—took offense to Dacier’s translations and commentary, so, in 1714, he published his own “translation” of Homer as a response to hers. This consisted of a rendition of Dacier’s own translation into verse, with some changes to make it better suit La Motte’s own modernist aesthetic sensibilities.
ABOVE: Portrait of Anne Dacier, the first woman to publish translations of both the Iliad and Odyssey in any language
Over the next several centuries, other women followed in Dacier’s footsteps. The Italian scholar Rosa Calzecchi Onesti (lived 1916 – 2011) published a complete translation of the Iliad in Italian in 1950 and a complete translation of the Odyssey in 1963, both of which remain fairly widely read today among readers of Italian. Women had also published translations of the Odyssey in Turkish, Modern Greek, and Dutch before Wilson.
Women also published English translations of works traditionally attributed to Homer other than the Odyssey before Wilson. The Irish writer Jane Barlow (lived 1856 – 1917) published an English translation of the Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, a comic epic in dactylic hexameter that was sometimes attributed to Homer in antiquity, all the way back in 1894, complete with illustrations by the British artist Francis Donkin Bedford.
ABOVE: Portrait of the Irish writer Jane Barlow, who published a translation of the Batrachomyomachia in 1894, painted in 1894 by her friend Sarah Purser
Over a century later, in 2005, the American scholar and translator Sarah Ruden published a verse translation of the Homeric Hymns, a collection of Greek hymns in dactylic hexameter dating to the Archaic Period that were attributed to Homer in antiquity. Even though it came out thirteen years before Wilson’s Odyssey, this translation did not receive nearly as much attention, most likely due at least in part to the fact that, although the Homeric Hymns are exceptional pieces of Archaic Greek hexameter poetry, they are not nearly as well known to the general public as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
In 2015 (i.e., three years before Wilson’s Odyssey), the British classicist, author, and documentary filmmaker Caroline Alexander became the first woman to publish a complete translation of the Iliad in English. Unlike Dacier’s translations, which were in prose, Alexander’s Iliad is in verse, but it is similar in that it strongly prioritizes faithfulness to the literal meaning of the original Greek.
Alexander takes very few poetic liberties. One can easily match all the words in her translation with the corresponding words in the Greek text. She often even retains the original Greek word order, which is not always conventional for English. She doesn’t try to force her translation to fit a specific meter, which would require changing words themselves and their order significantly. The line numbers in her translation exactly match the line numbers of the original Greek. She explains her approach as follows on page xl:
“My approach has been to render a line-by-line translation as far as English grammar allows; my translation therefore has the same number of lines as the Greek text and generally accords with the Greek lineation. I have tried to carve the English as closely to the bone of the Greek as possible. The translation is in unrhymed verse with a cadence that attempts to capture the rhythmic flow and pacing, as well as the epic energy, of the Greek, and which like the Greek varies from verse to verse. It is meant to follow unforced rhythms of natural speech.”
ABOVE: Photo of Caroline Alexander, the first woman to publish a translation of the Iliad in English
Why Wilson’s translations have received more attention than Alexander’s
At this point, some readers may be wondering why, if Caroline Alexander published an English translation of the Iliad three years before Wilson’s Odyssey, her translation didn’t receive the kind of attention that Wilson’s did. The answer to this question, I think, lies in a couple of factors.
The first factor is simply prestige. Although Alexander holds a PhD in classics from Columbia University and is a bestselling author of popular nonfiction, she does not hold a faculty position at a university. Wilson, by sharp contrast, is a full tenured professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania, which is an Ivy League university and one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. As a result of this, the general public is more likely to see her as an authority and media outlets are more likely to consider her work worthy of attention.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the entrance to Claudia Cohen Hall (formerly Logan Hall), one of the more architecturally imposing buildings of the University of Pennsylvania, where Emily Wilson is a professor
The second factor is that Alexander and Wilson take very different approaches to translating. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other, since they both have merits, but Wilson’s is one that, in general, is more likely to appeal to a broader audience. While Alexander generally tries to hew as closely as possible to the word-for-word meaning of the Greek, Wilson tries to remain faithful to the sense of the Greek while also prioritizing having a set meter and making the text comprehensible to a contemporary lay audience.
As I discuss in greater detail in this post I wrote back in June 2022, all ancient Greek poetry was composed in set meter. This was the defining feature that distinguished poetry from prose. In the original Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey are both in dactylic hexameter, which, in the Greek world, was the traditional meter used for heroic and epic poetry.
Wilson seeks to replicate this aspect of the poems in the original language by rendering both of her translations in iambic pentameter, which is the traditional meter of prestige in English. (It is, for instance, the meter that William Shakespeare uses most frequently in his plays and that John Milton used for his epic poem Paradise Lost.) Thus, she is sometimes willing to deviate from what a literal translation would be in order to recreate the poem’s metrical character. Whether one agrees with this will depend on whether one thinks original meaning or poetic sound is more important.
Wilson also tries to convey the meaning of the Greek to her readers in ways that make it easier for modern lay audiences to understand. The case for doing this that, if the purpose of translating is to render what an audience cannot understand into a form that the audience will be able to understand, then, if an audience still cannot understand a translation, the translator has failed to fulfill their purpose. Thus, if the literal meaning of a word or phrase is not automatically comprehensible to a contemporary lay audience, a translator must be willing to dispense with the literal meaning and translate the word or phrase in a way that better captures the sense.
To illustrate this, let’s examine how Wilson chooses to translate the word πολύτροπος (polýtropos), which is an epithet that the narrator uses to describe Odysseus in the very first line of the Odyssey. This epithet is a compound of two words; the first word is πολύς, which means “much” or “many” and the second is τρόπος (trópos), which literally means “turn,” “way,” or “manner.” It comes from the verb τρέπω (trépō), which literally means “to turn” or “rotate,” but can mean, by extension, “to change someone’s mind” or (in the passive voice) “to wander.”
Thus, the epithet literally means “much-turning,” but the sense of the term is ambiguous. On the one hand, Odysseus may be “much-turning” in the sense that he spends ten years wandering all over the known world, but, on the other hand, he may also be “much-turning” in the sense that he is crafty and he knows how to persuade people to give him what he wants.
An epithet like this creates serious problems for any translator. On the one hand, a translator can try to render the epithet’s literal meaning through a translation like “much-turning,” but, if one does this, then most readers who don’t know Ancient Greek will not understand what this means and will find the obscure expression confusing.
Wilson therefore decides to go a different direction; she translates πολύτροπος as simply “complicated.” Every reader knows what the word “complicated” means and, although it does not capture the literal meaning of the Greek, it neatly captures the approximate sense.
Some critics have attacked Wilson for this translation choice. For instance, a man on Twitter named Max Meyer (who admits that he only took one year of introductory Classical Greek, that he was an “average student,” and that he couldn’t translate the Homeric epics himself) complains: “She just can’t help insulting Odysseus… in the first line.”
The fact of the matter, though, is that one can read the epithet πολύτροπος itself in a negative sense as a reference to Odysseus being a liar who will tell anyone anything to get what he wants. The potentially insulting implication is right there in the Greek. That’s not Wilson; it’s Homer.
Ultimately, I think that it is good that many different translations of the Homeric epics exist. No single translation can ever perfectly capture all qualities of the original poems and different translations are useful to different audiences for different purposes.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of the head of a Hellenistic marble statue of Odysseus in the act of blinding the Kyklops Polyphemos, found in the cave of Tiberius at Sperlonga, Italy
Conclusion
Although Wilson’s translations are unique and groundbreaking in certain ways, it is important to remember that she is not the first woman who has ever translated this material. Although it is true that, for most of the time the field of classics has existed, the overwhelming majority of scholars and translators in the field have been men, women classicists have existed for as long as the field itself has existed, albeit as rare exceptions for most of the field’s history.
Sadly, the media narrative that focuses on Emily Wilson being the first woman to publish a complete translation of the Odyssey in English risks erasing the actually longer and more complicated history of female Homeric translators.
Analogous to translating Homeric works is a much more modern poem composed in a language currently in use by 200 to 300 million people. Yet four English translations, from the original French, of Charles Baudelaire’s “The Cat” are collected here— https://fleursdumal.org/poem/146
They don’t differ radically, making it difficult to chose one to pay tribute to my own copper and straw familiar (I can rule out the feminine version). It’s a short read for those interested in translation variations.
Interestingly, my translation of the Odyssey is Dacier’s. She translates the first words as “Tell me, Muse, the man of a thousand tricks”. The term can probably be read pejoratively, but I doubt that was Homer’s intention, and it seems that all previous translators have gone in that same direction.
I may make a post at some point in the future about how, even for ancient poets and audiences, Odysseus was a deeply complicated and morally ambiguous figure. I originally had several paragraphs about the ancient reception of Odysseus in this post, but I took them out because I felt that they were too off-topic.
Great to see an article on this topic, it has annoyed me for some time that Wilson is described thus. I had learned of Dacier before, but I did myself think Wilson was the first woman to translate them *to English*. Quite bizarre that Alexander seems so forgotten considering she did it in the same decade!
Wilson is indeed the first woman to publish a translation of the Odyssey in English, but other women had published English translations of the Batrachomyomachia, the Homeric Hymns, and the Iliad before her.
Thank you.
But, where and in what shape was the original?
What kind of material the original text written on?
Where (in which museum) the original is kept today?
Regards.
Dear Spencer,
Thank you for your fine scholarship! Just as I didn’t have to be a good center fielder to enjoy seeing Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays after him play center field, I needn’t be a reader of Homer to enjoy reading your discussion of the subtleties of translating Homer (though I did read Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Iliad and somebody’s—maybe also Gilbert Murray—translation of the Odyssey in the early 1950’s when there might not have been anything better around).
I wonder if the right adjective for Odysseus is “wily”—but I haven’t the faintest idea what the “eke” in “eke Agamemnon” meant.
Keep up the good work, and in what I hope will be a long life for you, consider using your gift for scholarship in other domains.
Yours,
Danny
Thank you for this, Spencer! And, welcome back from ‘ancient Greece’ and for keeping us updated as to your travels.
I’ve been debating whether or not I ought to buy Wilson’s translations, but I already have Lattimore’s and Fagles’s. And Fitzgerald’s Odyssey. Even after so many years, I think I still prefer Lattimore’s. If what I read is correct, he manages to retain much of the flavor of the original, while still rendering a modern poem.
Articles on other topics are perfectly fine, and this is a good one. However, I’m still waiting for the final part of your adventure in Greece.
I’ve started writing it! I just need to finish writing it.
It’s very nice to see metrical poetry still employed even in a modern context! (totally biased comment from someone who really likes, and occasionally dabbles in, metrical poetry)
If I was interested in the actual original text of the Odyssey I would probably prefer a translation less careful about the form, but metrical translations of metrical origins make for very memorable texts! It’s no wonder that, when asked how the Iliad starts, any Italian would reply by saying: “Cantami o diva, del Pelide Achille”, Monti’s 1825 translation in endecasyllables, and not Calzecchi Onesti’s version, much closer to the original text. The latter is however the one we read passages of in school.
I suspected when I mentioned Onesti that you might be able to tell me more about her translation! Sadly, I could find almost no information about her in English and I don’t know Italian myself, so it was hard for me to do any research on her.
I hope that I do learn Italian someday, but I will have to learn French and Modern Greek first (French because I will be required to learn in during my PhD and Modern Greek because it’s very personally important to me that I learn the modern language of the primary country that I study).
It’s also interesting that you say “endecasyllables,” since, in English, we would say “hendecasyllables.” I assume that they’re called “endecasyllables” in Italian?
So, I actually don’t know all that much about Calzecchi Onesti, as I didn’t study in a classical lycaeum; I know that her translation is the standard reference edition of the Homeric works in Italian. A few other things I know about this translation:
1) Cesare Pavese, a famous Italian writer, actually commissioned this translation to her while she was still young; they had a long exchange of letters, but Pavese let Calzecchi Onesti have the last word on every matter.
2) The translation had, as an aim, to transfer the meaning of the poems as closely as possible, as opposed to convey any poetical meter, the aim of all previous translations in Italian. However, the translation also tried to have some sort of poetic rhythm, not strictly regulated, but instead inspired by the poetic tendencies in Italy of the mid-1900s – in Italy metrical poetry declined much more than in English-speaking countries, and by the 1950s no one seriously wrote anything using meter, with the exceptions of a few authors (like Sandro Penna), whose use of meter was a specific characteristic of their style; compare this to how even now iambic pentameter is reasonably common in English poetry.
So, I will compare the first seven lines by Calzecchi Onesti and Bonfiglio, a later translator:
CALZECCHI ONESTI:
Canta, o dea, l’ira d’Achille Pelide
Rovinosa che infiniti dolori inflisse agli achei
Gettò in preda all’Ade molte vite gagliarde ,
d’eroi , ne fece il bottino dei cani ,
di tutti gli uccelli –consiglio di Zeus si compiva
da quando prima si divisero contendendo
l’Atride signore d’eroi e Achille glorioso
BONFIGLIO:
Narrami, o musa, l’ira di Achille, figlio di Peleo che rovinosa costrinse i greci a sopportare dolori infiniti . L’ira che privo della vita molti valorosi eroi , il cui corpo esamine finì in pasto ai cani e uccelli rapaci. Si compiva infine la volontà di Zeus, che in principio aveva voluto il litigio e il distacco tra il re dei Greci, Agamennone e Achille.
Bonfiglio’s version is in prose, not formatted as a poem, and tries to explain in idiomatic Italian some expressions. For instance, in Bonfiglio, Achilles’ anger ‘forced the Greeks to withstand infinite pain’, fairly normal Italian. In Calzecchi Onesti, it ‘bestows infinite mourning to the Acheans’. Easy to follow, but less idiomatic, probably closer to Greek (?). I also like the ‘consiglio di Zeus si compiva’ (‘Zeus’ judgement came to pass’) as an aside in Calzecchi Onesti, which does convey quite well the classical caesura. Bonfiglio has nothing of the sort, but reads like a new sentence. Bonfiglio also explains a bit more, so the ‘Acheans’ are ‘Greeks’, and ‘Atride’ is ‘Agamennone’.
3) The one translation choice I know about, is that Pavese wanted all epithets to be written as one word, without spaces, so he proposed ‘rapidopiede, bracciobianco, occhivivaci’ (swiftfoot, whitearm, livelyeyes), but these are not usual in Italian, a language which doesn’t use compound constructions as much as English or Greek. She thought this kind of device would sound forced and gimmicky, so she put a space in the middle of the components. I can’t help but agree.
4) A very small tidbit, but I remember a fellow scout in my scouting group who was a rather passionate classicist. I remember him saying that a teacher of his disliked Calzecchi Onesti’s translation because of how she translated… something related with weaving. I don’t remember it he meant loom, spindle, shuttle or whatever else xD
5) About Calzecchi Onesti, she also wrote ‘I read Mark and I learn Greek’ and ‘I read Agostine and I learn Latin’ (two titles semi-rhyming in Italian), which are about Greek from a Christian perspective. In her later years she focused mostly on Christian Byzantine texts.
> It’s also interesting that you say “endecasyllables,” since, in English, we would say “hendecasyllables.”
You are right! In Italian we didn’t retain the Latin ‘h’, and we simplified many consonant clusters and merged ‘y’ and ‘i’, so whenever a words containing these comes up, one often messes up when finding the Latin/English equivalents! And yes, they are called ‘endecasillabi’ in Italian, that being the foundational verse of Italian poetry, the meter that more than 90% of all metrical poems and poetical forms are made of.
“… more complicated history of female Homeric translators.”
Complicated. Ha!
Isn’t Columbia also an Ivy League University?
Yes, it is, but Caroline Alexander only earned her PhD there; she isn’t a faculty member there or at any other university. Emily Wilson earned her PhD in classical and comparative literature at Yale and is now a tenured full professor at Penn.
When it comes to prestige, it matters whether a scholar holds a faculty position and, if so, which university they hold it at.
Not to throw shade unto Anne Dacier (and of course since I can’t read French, I can’t speak for the quality of Ancien Régime-era French poetry), but how you describe her opinion of the literary works of her time gave me “This generation, they don’t know. They don’t know. Kids these days. Kids these days. This generation, they don’t know, they missed out.” vibes.
Honestly, that’s the general tenor of a lot of what she says.
I can only imagine what she’d say about today’s literature.