Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Dr. Emily Wilson on the Art of Translation

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

In this month’s bonus episode, Liza is joined by Dr. Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer’s The Odyssey into English. Liza and Dr. Wilson explore the vital but often underrecognized role of a literary translator, why she set out to translate The Odyssey and The Iliad, and the attention she pays to characters who historically have been dismissed in these works.We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this month's bonus episode, which is one of the last before season two starts coming out, we're joined by Dr. Emily Wilson, author, translator, and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She's best known for being the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, and she just followed that up with the translation of The Iliad. Hot tip, they make a great gift set. Dr. Wilson, thank you so much for doing this. Sure. Yes, I'm excited for this. It's so fun for me to get to speak to you. I'm a fan on many levels. But the reason I thought that it would be cool to talk to you on in this forum is because I feel that the role of translator is profoundly important and vastly under examined. any kind of news that might be coming from another part of the country to not give it the proper

weight and credit. And I'm speaking from experience, including very recently, embarrassingly enough, you know, reading Lydia Davis's translation of Madame Bovary and seeing how incredibly different it was from the Madame Bovary that I read in high school that was Stiegmuller's version. And of course, I had read Bovary in the original in college school that was Stiegmiller's version. And of course, I had read Bovary in the original in college, but I think my French wasn't good enough to really, you know, appreciate all of the nuances. So that's sort of where I'm coming from with sort of going like, oh, wait, nobody gets how important this connector is. So I was wondering if you could just start by talking about what the role of translator means to you. Yes, I think that was a fabulous introduction to it. I mean, I think there's all different

kinds of translation in the world. I mean, literary translation is just a small subset of the work of interpreters, who I think I admire so much, people who are able to, you know, generate translation just orally. And it's so important in the world in diplomatic purposes, but also there's business translation, medical translation, legal translation. I mean, all these international fields where people can't communicate without translation. And yet, in many cases, the translators are very poorly paid and under-recognized and international communication of any kind can't happen without translation. And also in literary terms, communication with the dead around the world can't happen without translators.

Right. I think of that classic joke that's made over and over again, and no one seems to really take it further than that, which is, you know, a translator mistranslating in a moment for comic effect, you know, sort of repeating the wrong things. But we're all so vulnerable to it. And so, yes, it resonates across all of these different spheres. So specifically in your world, I mean, I just, I'm still flabbergasted that you are the first, I mean, it's amazing, but like, that you're the first woman to have retranslated this piece of literature, which was not written down as a text.

Is that right? Homer was a bard? It was written down as a text. It's based on many pieces of oral poetic composition. But the Iliad and the Odyssey, what they are is poetic texts. They're written things. So to tell the story of Troy was done over and over and over. But not every story, not every song about Troy is the Iliad. Only the Iliad is the Iliad. I mean, there's also a lot of scholarly debate about the degree to which over the course of the centuries that the Iliad and the Odyssey were being re-performed by, they were called rhapsodes, poetry performers, in a way like actors, but their specialty was not multi-voiced drama, but multi-voiced epic. Over that period of

throughout the 6th, 5th, 4th centuries, how much did the performance text change? And that's still much debated. Right. That would be. Yes. So I've read many lovely and wonderful and helpful reviews and interviews to sort of illuminate some of the tiny little nuances that resonate so loudly in your work. But I'm wondering if you could say sort of broadly how it is that you think that your perspective was so radically different from everything that had come before. Is it just being female or is it everything else that makes you who you are? I think it's, I think, you know, gender is such a complicated thing, which I probably don't need to tell you. I mean, I did not think about my gender as particularly relevant for my work for most of the time that I've been, you know, working

as a classicist or as a scholar or as a translator or as a teacher. I mean, to me, what I thought I was doing when I set out to retranslate The Odyssey first and now The Iliad was I was frustrated that most of the translations that people read in English didn't have a meter and that they're laid out as verse, but they're not actually metrical verse or they're laid out as prose, but they're not actually metrical verse, or they're laid out as prose, and they're straightforwardly prose. And I felt that that element of the metricality, musicality, and read-aloudability, performability of Homer was not getting through in English translation. So I wanted to fix that and to provide metrical translations. So your initial irritation was a lack in the aesthetics, really, of the existing English translations. And then so at what point, I'm just trying, I'm laughing about like, you know, it's not hubris, but like the unbelievable ambition to say, you know, like I've heard many people say, oh, I wanted to read Nietzsche in the original, so I learned German. My father got a master's in Slavic languages and literature because he wanted to read the Russian writers in the original. A lot of people start out with this goal of, I'm going to master a language so that I can then understand this text that I love. And so I'm wondering for you, at what point in that journey, did you already have a command of Greek? Did you already have a command of Latin when you had that impulse? Okay, so that helps. Yes. Translation came very late in my career and I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been asked. I mean, I've been reading ancient Greek since I was, I guess, 15. I started learning it in high school and I'm older,

so that's like 35 years ago. So I've been studying Homer in the original for decades and teaching Homer both in the original for decades and teaching Homer both in the original and in translation for many, many years. So it wasn't that I sort of started off thinking, I want to translate this text so I will learn the language. It was, I've been studying the language for decades. And then it was only, you know, belatedly that I was asked to consider doing retranslations of these poems. Interesting. Okay. So you're asked to retranslate these texts that you love. You start with the aesthetic and then you drill down into, I mean, it's that thing where they say, you know, if a centipede had to think about moving each of its legs, it would never get anywhere.

You know, once you really start examining every single word, the possibilities become so huge. So do you have like an inner divining rod? Like when you come to a word, for example, I'll just refer to the first line of the poem, which is the, you know, I'm not even going to begin to attempt the Greek original word, but the word that you choose to describe Odysseus is complicated, right? Which was a very different word than anything that had ever been chosen to describe him before. And the list is long, so I will not get into it here. But so you're wrestling with this word. I imagine it takes quite a bit of time. Yes. At what point? Like, was there like an like an inner sort of sign that you have that you've found the right thing? How do you know

when you're sort of getting to where you want to be? Yeah, it's so difficult. I think translation is sort of one of those. I think writing in general, or very often for me involves a lot of rewriting and any piece that you really care about, you're going to do a first draft and the first draft won't be good enough. And you'll have a sense of what your vision is for the voice of this essay should be or what the voice of this short story should be or this poem. And in the case of translation, you, of course, also can read or hear the original text. And you have a sense of that's what it sounds like. That's what it's doing. I've read all the commentaries. I've read the original to myself over and over and over. And I know what the original is doing. How can I do that,

but with completely different words? And that's extremely difficult. I mean, I think I, in the case of turning to Tomeric translation, I felt that this wasn't my first set of translation projects. My first published translations were of Seneca's tragedies, and then I've also published translations of Euripides and Sophocles. So I already had a sense both of all of these are metrical poets in the original. I want all of them to be metrical in English, but I also want the specific poetic qualities of each text to emerge. And I want to think through what are my priorities, what are the priorities of how this particular poem or play sounds, as well as how does this particular character sound? How does the narrator sound here? How does this passage or the simile

sound? I feel I have to be very conscious in my own mind about what are my goals with this passage or this text. And then that in itself doesn't sort of answer, then what do I do? How do I fulfill those goals? But it at least gives me some sort of navigating compass around how to do this. I mean, so for instance, with Homer, I knew that I wanted it to be metrical. And I also knew that, I mean, as I said, my first published translations were of Seneca, who's a very bombastic and elusive

and sort of in your face, clever. I've read everything and you should have too. And it's also very melodramatic and sort of purple verse and over the top in certain ways rhetorically. And it seemed to me that quite a lot of English translations of Homer made Homer sound like Seneca. And Homer sounds nothing like Seneca in the original. So I felt that the clarity of Homeric storytelling

and the way that it's not elusive to a whole generation of previous literature, because of course that's historically nonsense. Homer is based on an oral tradition, so literary illusion doesn't work. And it's designed for the ready comprehension of illiterate audiences performing these poems out loud. So the clarity and speed and emotionality and also the ways that the Homerite poems are sort of proto-dramatic and have all these different characters in them. I thought those things were priorities for me, partly because they felt they'd been slightly underrepresented

in existing translations. How much do you read it out loud? Is it just constant reading it out loud? A lot of reading out loud, yes, all the time. And then if it doesn't sound right, I may read the original out loud is it just constant reading it out loud a lot of reading out loud yes all the time and then if it doesn't sound right i mean i may read the read the original out loud a few times and then do a draft and i use very often write a draft by hand and then try reading it out loud and then if it doesn't sound right i have to try again and try again is there ever a listener like do you do you perform it to people does that ever enter it or is it all just you? I occasionally do. I mean, when I feel I've got a pretty good draft, what I've very often done is sort of gather a little group of rad students and try out a little bit on students or whoever I can round up to listen to a book, a draft of a book and then discuss what worked well. That's so cool. One of the other crucial

distinctions, and I'm not going to claim to have read any of Homer in the original and certainly not enough of multiple versions of the text to be comparing them in any kind of useful way, but one of the aspects of your perspective that has felt very important is an attention to characters who may have been dismissed historically, traditionally, slaves, women. I remember one piece talking about the attention you gave to how to describe the prostitutes or the women who are on the island, on Calypso's island, right? Is that it? Yeah, so Calypso, like every elite character and elite woman in Homer, has a whole crowd of attendants who are described in the same language

as the attendants of other elite women who are clearly enslaved women. I mean, they're not prostitutes. They're not that bad. They're women who've been either born into the household as enslaved people or captured in war. And that has traditionally never been presented with any kind of complication, right? It's just, oh, that's a category of slave or woman or, you know, sex worker or whatever it is. We're just leaving that over there. And your gaze seems to sort of want to unpack that stuff a little bit more. Is that right? A lot of it comes from both the desire for clarity about what exactly is the text saying or doing. And so if it's really clear in the original that this person is enslaved, I don't want the reader to miss something that's clear in the original. and i think it also comes from a sense that the homeric poems i mean part of why i love them so

much is that i think they the vision of these texts has a lot of empathy for every single character including the enslaved people and then also including the people who are you might think are arrogant jerk warlord kind of characters i mean it's not that i think one should be empathetic or that homer is empathetic only the underdogs. I think that's absolutely not the case. The Iliad in particular is extremely empathetic to people who are in dominant positions as well. And war is a tragedy for them as well as for the people who get captured in war. Do you have, sorry, this is a little bit of a random follow-up to that, but do you have sorry this is a little bit of a random follow-up to that but do you have I'm just wondering as you speak do you have a favorite I'm not going to ask you to pick a favorite poem

or favorite text but do you have a favorite character do you have a favorite moment in all of this stuff oh it's so difficult to pick a favorite because I mean all of it's my favorite I love it all um I mean I love the similes I love every single simile in the Iliad. And part of what I love we're always sort of stuck either inside the besieged city of Troy or in the quasi-besieged encampment of the Greeks or on the battlefield. We're in this tiny set of space and time, and yet we're always sort of looking to different worlds and here are the winds blustering around

and here's how the rope of war is like people tugging a bit of leather to stretch it out. These details that take us to different worlds. I mean, the virtuosic description of the new shield of Achilles forged by Hephaestus at the end of Book 18, I think is a wonderful set piece description and also speaks to the poem's interest in both poetic and material artifice. poem's interest in both poetic and material artifice. Do you have any fear for the world of translation in this sort of age of automation where, you know, apps can make it seem like a very

simple transaction to read, you know, a line into a phone and then get spit out a line in a different language does that you know give you tremors of anxiety as it does for me um i'm not sure i mean technology does does certain things but it doesn't do everything um i mean it so far i don't think ai translation is at all good at things that i the things i care about most mean, the things that have to do with style and literary form and characterization, I don't think it's any good at any of those things yet. I mean, maybe one day it'll get good at them. But so far, I haven't seen any evidence that, you know, if you've set a piece of metrical poetry and you say, translate it into the city, in a way that will reflect the meter and style and evoke all the alliteration that's happening in this passage in thoughtful ways

and also be a speech that could be put inside the mouth of this character in this moment. I don't know. I don't think it's anywhere near being able to do that yet. I mean, if it is, then that's great and we'll learn things from it. So I don't think we need to be defensive about it, but I just think so far it's not there. Do you feel as if there's, well, I guess the question I want to ask is, why do you think you were the first female to have translated these poems? So I'm not the first woman to have published a translation of the Iliad. Caroline Alexander published a translation of the Iliad

in, I think, 2015. And it's totally different from mine in its approach. It's not magical. It has these long lines. It's much more archaic. I mean, in a way, it's sort of looking back to the tradition of translation of Richmond Latimer, whose translations in the mid-20th century are still read. So, I mean, I think it's sort of worth saying that because it's a way of saying women aren't all the same and men don't all translate the same. And of course, I'm not, you know, there are many female Homerists who are much older than me and people, women have been studying Homer as scholars, you know, for generations and women have been translating Homer into different languages.

So I think it's sort of a cluster of both stuck with retranslation of ancient poetry within the Anglophone world, which is different from the world of French classics or Italian classics, where it's actually quite common for there to be women, female classicist translators. And I think it sort of has to do with a sort of cluster of different things. One is to do with how translation is conceived of in the academy, in the Anglophone Academy, as something very marginal. Like you're not going to get tenure for a translation, that kind of thing. So if you're somebody who might already be struggling to get tenure,

are you going to sign up to do an epic poem which will not get you tenure and not get you promoted? And then there's also the cluster of things that has to do with retranslations very often happen because an editor at a publishing house approaches a particular person and who you're going to call, you're going to call somebody who might fit your model of who a classicist is. And I think that combination of things may well mean the person the editor calls or the person who wants to do this has very often been a retired old man rather than a woman or rather than a person of color or rather than somebody in all these different kinds of social identities, which, you know, there are classicists who aren't old men. And yet the old men seem to have dominated the field of that particular subset of classics. Yeah. And among other fields.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. I was wondering, too, about, you know, you talk in an interview about how your mother was a bit of a vanguard in having children as an academic. dividends that are being paid for our parents' generations, having kind of gone through that discomfort of, you know, daring to do both things at once. And, you know, I say our generation, I think we're about the same age, you know, that we sort of reap the benefit of that and then are able to be available to do what we do in newer ways. But you're right, it's such a Western specific thing. Absolutely, yes. I mean, I also am just specifically about my mother's work. So she was a Shakespearean scholar, and she wrote a biography of Shakespeare, which in her obituaries and sort of in people looking back on her legacy, I felt there was a lot of sort of presentation of

her as deeply iconoclastic, as if people weren't able to see how much she loves Shakespeare or loved Shakespeare as a poet, as a dramatist, because she was sort of questioning the received norms about Shakespeare the man. And I see a sort of echo of the ways that people sort of sometimes think I'm so iconoclastic in presenting Homer in new ways. And it's not that I'm doing that because I'm trying to rip Homer down. I'm doing that because I have a different perspective about how to translate Homer. So in a way, I absolutely agree with you that our mothers and both spiritual mothers and literal mothers have paved the way.

But then also there are echoes of what's happened in earlier generations can happen again, still be happening. In another interview, you also mentioned that when you were cast in a role in The Odyssey in elementary school, which is also what they performed at my children's elementary school. So I love that that tradition persists all over the place. And that you were cast as Athena, who you think is like the most kick-ass of all the gods, and that you aspire to be like Athena. And as I read in your sort of translator notes about how it's time to shift some of the received ideas about Homer, about, you know, these texts, about the world that it portrays, it does feel very bold and brave in a way that, you know, I think Athena would be very

proud of. But do you feel that way? Do you feel sort of that you're like, you know, taking a big chance when you, to me, that seems like a really daring thing to write, to say, you know, that you're challenging the, you know, the fathers of this school of thought and saying, I don't think so. I think that maybe there's a new way to do this. Does that feel scary? I mean, maybe there's two parts to the question. One, there's a minor one that I think I maybe should say first is, I mean, Athena is a daddy's girl. I mean, I think she's a very problematic feminist icon because she's always speaking up for the power of the father, except when she's colluding with her against him. So, I don't know. I mean, I can certainly see the coolness of Athena as just as I could when I was eight, but I don't think she's entirely a role model for people in real life. Fair enough. I mean, I think both that, of course, it's scary to say, I don't think that,

I think this, but I also think it's a complete waste of time to publish something unless it's doing something new. I mean, I think unless I can say there are particular things that I want to do differently, then, you know, I'm wasting everyone's time by publishing a new translation of a book that's been translated and has been published for hundreds of years. And there are dozens of them out there and a lot of them are quite similar to each other. And I think that's a bit of a waste of time.

So, I mean, I tend to think it would be even scarier to feel my work has no originality whatsoever. That's a terrifying. Right. Much more terrifying. That's a very good point. I want to say something a little bit different because, you know, otherwise, who cares? You use the word feminist.

I'm wondering, it's become, I feel, such a loaded term. Maybe it always was. And I wonder, I've seen you called a feminist translator or that this is a feminist translation of these texts. How do you feel about that? I think it's very loaded. And I don't call myself a feminist translator because I think that tends to foreground

a particular feature of my identity that is really not the only one or the main one I think about. I mean, as I was saying before, the main one I think about. I mean, as I was saying before, the main thing I think about all day when I'm working is poetics. And does that have anything to do with gender? Usually not. So, I mean, I also think feminist translator can be used as code for a woman who produces translations and we don't trust them. for a woman who produces translations and we don't trust them.

And everything she says and does must be filtered through her ideology, which is again code for she's a woman and we don't trust her. And I don't know, everything all of that is so unfair and so bogus. So, I mean, I also, I feel uncomfortable about saying, no, I'm not a feminist translator because I'm a translator and I am a woman. And I do think, you know, in general, feminism has been a power for good in the world. And, you know, if feminism means, you know,

there are actually real structural inequalities based on gender and that's wrong, then I'm a feminist. I mean, there's a lot of ways that feminism seems to me straightforwardly right. But is that the main thing about my work? No, it's not. Well, I think it's appropriate to interrogate the meaning of a label in this conversation. Absolutely. Yes. Words matter. Yeah. So a question that we ask everyone who comes on the podcast and can be answered in Absolutely. Yes. Words matter. of some other kind? Is there somebody or some multitude of people who feel that way to you? Ah, that's an interesting question. And it's hard for me to figure out immediately what the answer is. I mean, as a translator, there's always a significant other, right?

There's always the original text. I mean, I'm hesitating to say original author if it's Homer, because I don't want to get into the whole authorship questions about Homer. But the original text is the significant other in most of my work. And the Greek is the significant other behind my translations of the book. That's great. That is a totally original answer. Which I love. Thank you so much for this.

This was really so special. Good. It was wonderful. Thank you so much. We'll be releasing bonus episodes right up until season two comes out. So don't forget to hit the subscribe button. And as always, we welcome any and all suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can email us at significantpod at gmail.com.