Crossing the wine-dark sea: Making sense of a deeply complicated past

By Arundhuti Dasgupta

How often does one get to see a tattooed classicist recite Homeric poetry to an enrapt audience of young non-Greek speaking students? Or for that matter, how many classicists could break the internet with a movie review? Meet Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad, whose withering takedown of Christopher Nolan’s newest magnum opus, the Odyssey, has lit up all the social media platforms.

Wilson is a longstanding champion of the classics. She has also been vocal about the need to engage more deeply with the process of interpretation and translation of the ancient texts. She has translated the Odyssey and is currently retranslating it because she believes there is more to say. She has also translated the Iliad and written extensively on the networks that link literary texts from antiquity to contemporary readers.

This book — Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through ancient literature is a collection of essays that have emerged out of Wilson’s engagement with the classical world as teacher and translator. The essays allow readers (and potential future translators) to get a close look at the contemplations and debates that have shaped her work. She writes: “I trace the complex combination of chance, changing tastes and wilful editorialization that led us to the canon of ancient literature that we have today.”

Wilson straddles the world of academia and social media with remarkable poise. She is popular but also controversial. She fills up large rooms with her Greek recitations of the epics and at the same time, also divides the academic world with her translations and interpretations. A common criticism is that she lacks the poetic flourish of earlier translators of ancient texts. She revels in the ordinary and is deliberately contemporaneous in the use of phrases and terms.

For example, in her translation of the Odyssey, she turns the “polytropos” Odysseus into a complicated man where others before her have called him, among other things, a man of many twists and turns, shrewd and wise or just “the man”. In the essay “Translating the Odyssey”, Wilson offers an explanation for some of her choices. The aim was to stay as close to the intent and form of the original work. Choosing to call Odysseus complicated meant relaying the sense of unspoken, unimagined possibilities about the character, just as Homer would have intended. She believes that Christopher Nolan, who has said that he based his movie on Wilson’s translation, completely misunderstood Homer’s intentions and thereby has spectacularly failed at breathing new life into the Odyssey.

Wilson is the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. In an interview in 2017 with the  New York Times Magazine, she outlined her translation philosophy thus: “If you’re going to admit that stories matter, then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? The whole question of ‘What is that story?’ is going to depend on the language, the words that you use.”

The essays in this book deal with various aspects of ancient storytelling; threading their way through the possibilities and prejudices that early authors, or as is more likely, the bards and storytellers contended with. In the final chapter (Afterword) she says that translation is reading of the most intense kind. It is also writing of the most intense kind and it is difficult. But it is also immensely satisfying, to bring old texts to life “in new ways for new generations”.

A good translation does not try to join all the dots and also retains the moral or ideological tensions of the original text. This is elaborated upon in the essay “Slut-shaming Helen of Troy”. Most ancient writers crafted the then prevalent misogynistic worldview on to their women characters.

Wilson writes, “Heterosexual male desire for a woman who is perceived to be exceptionally attractive is projected onto the woman herself, who is then presented as particularly lustful.”

Across the ancient world, outspoken, attractive women were considered disruptive forces who often used their beauty as a weapon. Pandora, Helen, Clytemnestra and Penelope; all strikingly beautiful and strong characters in the classical world, but they are not to be trusted. Helen is easily overcome by her passions, Pandora is overly curious, Clytemnestra murders her war-hero husband and Penelope leads the suitors on. They further the trope about beautiful women being untrustworthy or promiscuous or the source of despair and destruction. How must modern translations engage with such writing?

A good translation does not remove the original biases. The aim is not to deny or eliminate the male gaze, but engage with how it has shaped female characterisation and perhaps, help readers find new echoes of the old myths in the modern world.

The reviewer writes on mythology and culture and is cofounder of The Mythology Project