I agree with most of the points but some of them turn my head a little…
In the original Odyssey, in the scene where Telemachus murders the slaves who were “sullied by” Penelope’s suiters, he refers to them with a word that roughly just means “the female ones”, however most translations will use words like “wh*res”, “sl*ts”, and “creatures”, these were all choices of the translators. The original text did not refer to them that way. Dr. Wilson refers to them instead as “girls”, to highlight their age and the brutality of the action.
I just went and checked the Lattimore translation (which seems to be the one I read in college) and the F*gles translation (ty automod), both of which indeed use that language. However, I think it’s important to mention that it’s Telemachus calling them these things, aka the guy who has spent years being very pissed at the suitors and the slaves who collaborated with them, and that it’s not a blanket condemnation of these women by the author or translator but rather an indicator of Telemachus’ extreme hatred and disgust for them. Remember, this is right before he denies them the “clean” death his father instructed and hangs them in a really gruesome way. Wilson’s translation is great in offering a different perspective, but I don’t think it’s inherently better.
Of Odysseus himself, the original epic calls him “polytropos” poly, meaning many, and tropos, meaning turn. Some male translators used this to say the story itself had twists and turns, others ignored the word completely to write in a way that made Odysseus seem as though a straight up hero, a man “skilled in all ways of contending”, but Dr. Wilson uses [polytropos] to mean “complicated”, because Odysseus isn’t a straight up hero, he does some really shitty things.
All of these interpretations make sense to me, and I think the OOP here does the second one a bit of a disservice—from my cursory research it’s less about being morally perfect but about being wily and adaptable, which is his whole schtick. I might say calling him “complicated” directly in the text is a bit on the nose, like a narrator reminding you that Travis Bickle “isn’t really a good guy, all things considered” in Taxi Driver, but you could also make that argument about the other interpretations so
I agree with most of the points but some of them turn my head a little…
I just went and checked the Lattimore translation (which seems to be the one I read in college) and the F*gles translation (ty automod), both of which indeed use that language. However, I think it’s important to mention that it’s Telemachus calling them these things, aka the guy who has spent years being very pissed at the suitors and the slaves who collaborated with them, and that it’s not a blanket condemnation of these women by the author or translator but rather an indicator of Telemachus’ extreme hatred and disgust for them. Remember, this is right before he denies them the “clean” death his father instructed and hangs them in a really gruesome way. Wilson’s translation is great in offering a different perspective, but I don’t think it’s inherently better.
All of these interpretations make sense to me, and I think the OOP here does the second one a bit of a disservice—from my cursory research it’s less about being morally perfect but about being wily and adaptable, which is his whole schtick. I might say calling him “complicated” directly in the text is a bit on the nose, like a narrator reminding you that Travis Bickle “isn’t really a good guy, all things considered” in Taxi Driver, but you could also make that argument about the other interpretations so