Women Who Translate
What Happens to Our Deeply Gendered Understanding of the Act of Translating a Text When the Translator is a Woman?
In the last decade, a number of classical texts have been translated by women into English — “big books,” as Johanna Hanink, echoing Mary Beard, calls them. Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation was published to near-universal praise, following Sarah Ruden’s Aeneid and Caroline Alexander’s Iliad. Most recently Hanink’s own translation of Thucydides’ speeches was published by Princeton University Press.
Metaphors of faithfulness have long been used to describe the act of literary translation and assess a translation’s quality. Translations, it has been said, are either beautiful or faithful, but not both, a paradox expressed by the phrase les belles infidèles.
Such metaphors cast the translation as a feminine subject which has tempted the traditionally masculine translator, causing him to be unfaithful to the “original” text he seeks to translate. In her translator’s note, Wilson makes the point that these metaphors paint the translation as “secondary to that of the male-authored original,” an implication that acquires “a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance.”
Now that women are translating classical texts traditionally read and translated by men, these metaphors of faithfulness sit uneasily. What happens to our deeply gendered understanding of the act of translating a classical text when the translator is a woman?
It seems that metaphors of beauty and fidelity have been replaced by metaphors of emotional intimacy. Unlike men, who must resist the lustful and decidedly embodied seduction of a beautiful-but-unfaithful translation, women translators are not to get too close to the text, too emotionally invested, lest the resulting translation contain too much of their (feminine) voice, and not enough of the imagined masculine voice of the author.
I hardly need to make the argument that misogyny and white supremacy have a comfortable home in the study of Classics, though there are many working to change this by addressing the oppressive history of the discipline. Of course, these systems of oppression influence who gets to translate classical texts and which classical texts they may choose. Wilson has been candid about the fact that translators require social, institutional, and economic support, and that she would not have been able to translate The Odyssey if she “hadn’t had a contract with a guaranteed publisher and paycheck.” But these systems also influence how translators and readers talk about the labor of translation, and how the resulting works are read.
When it comes to translating classical texts, women translators are constantly caught in a double bind. If they compose translations longer than the classical texts they translate, the results contain too much of the translator’s voice. But if the translations are more succinct than the original texts, the translations become sites of sacrifice and loss.
In an article for The Guardian, Wilson pointed out that the most famous and highly praised translators of classical texts “write with a confident exuberance, often expanding or adding to the original.” On the contrary, women translators “have tended to approach the original more gingerly, with more careful discipline.” Men who translate are permitted and even encouraged to add to and embellish in their translations because often, their voices are understood to be similar to that of the (masculine) classical author.
According to Elke Steinmeyer in a 2009 review of Anne Carson’s and Hanna Roisman’s respective translations of Sophocles’ Electra, Carson — a poet, essayist, translator, and scholar of Classics — had captured the intensity of emotion in Sophocles’ text, but the musicality and some of the details of the original work had been “compromised” in the process. (Here, a necessary nod to Karen Emmerich’s excellent book Literary Translation and the Making of Originals and the slippery concept of an original text.) Steinmeyer pointed out that Carson’s translation was considerably longer than Sophocles’ text, while Roisman’s translation — the one favored by the reviewer — had the same number of lines as the text she had translated. Carson had managed to compromise Sophocles’ text while simultaneously expanding it in the translation.
Steinmeyer explained that perhaps the “dilemma” of Carson’s translation of Electra “could be resolved simply by labeling Carson’s text a re-creation or ‘inspired by’ instead of a translation of Sophocles.” By contrast, Roisman’s translation was clear and fluent, “close enough for one to identify Sophocles’ text through hers,” and did “more justice to Sophocles than Carson’s more poetic re-creation.” Simply put, in Carson’s translation of Electra, there was “too much Carson and too little Sophocles.” While both translators are women, Roisman had toed the line, so to speak, and produced what was perceived as a faithful, conventional translation; Carson had not.
On the other hand, Garry Wills, in his review of Ruden’s Aeneid for The New York Review of Books, was impressed that Ruden had a one-to-one line ratio of Vergil’s text and her own translation. However, because Ruden translated into iambic pentameter, she gave herself “less space overall” than Vergil, and so had to “achieve her effects economically.” Even in his positive review, Wills lamented briefly that this economy meant that Ruden had to “sacrifice something” of Vergil’s poem.
Eleanor Johnson, like Wills, took issue with Wilson’s choice to translate the hexametric Odyssey into iambic pentameter, which “feels terser, more muscular, punchier than many hexametric translations.” Because the line count of Wilson’s translation matches that of Homer, but Wilson’s lines are shorter, Johnson supposed Wilson also must have had “to sacrifice something” of the original text in her translation.
Johnson also illustrates this change in metaphor from cautioning translators against lustful infidelity to warning them of the danger of emotional intimacy. She lumped Wilson’s Odyssey, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, and Madeline Miller’s Circe together and referred to them as “Homeric adaptations” — which is telling, considering Barker’s and Miller’s respective texts are fictional retellings, while Wilson’s text is a translation — and referred to them (affectionately?) as “piratic feminist manifestos.” Johnson took issue with these texts because they all reveal a “strong impulse to shut down the moral undecidability that typifies Homer’s art.”
While Wilson’s Odyssey is “a marvel,” and Johnson “would have loved it, full stop” if she had just been reading it for her own edification, the translation became a point of frustration when Johnson considered how she would teach it to first-year students at Columbia.
The reason for this frustration? “Because Wilson’s Odyssey really is Wilson’s odyssey,” and the “poem is not just a rendering of the Odyssey, but a reading — her reading — of the Odyssey.” In other words, for Johnson, the translation contained too much Emily Wilson, and not enough Homer.
The names of famous translators of classical texts often become part of the scholastic lexicon: as an undergraduate, I was instructed to read “the Fitzgerald Odyssey” and “Fagles’ Iliad.” Referring to the translations in this way equates the translator and the author.
When asked about his translation process, Robert Fagles explained how, to translate The Odyssey, he would read the Greek out loud until he began “to feel or find some English lurking between the Greek words, between the Greek lines,” and he would “keep on mumbling like a maniac” until the English words came to him. His process, namely “to work from the Greek lines some English cadence of my own, trying over and over,” sounds not unlike the Homeric narrator invoking the muse to speak through him. And although this process “would consume about three hours every morning,” this account of his labor sounds very little like labor at all, and instead resembles a kind of spiritual state, like the divine mania of the Delphic oracle.
Wilson’s account of her translation process differs greatly from Fagles’ version. She has explored the topic of translation extensively in interviews and on Twitter, including in a particularly compelling thread concerning the translation of the first two lines of The Odyssey, and has described her translation process in the following way:
I usually do a lot of reading and rereading the original, and then I usually write a draft of a little bit out in a notebook. I do a lot of looking up different words in different dictionaries and trying to figure out connotations. I read my drafts out loud to myself before I read them out loud to anyone else. Then I fix things and change things and try and change things that didn’t sound right. Then I change them again.
Then, after I’ve tinkered with it for a long time myself, once I’ve got a whole complete book, I send the complete book to my lovely editor at Norton, Pete Simon. He doesn’t know Greek, but he looks at it next to other translations and thinks about, “Does this sentence work as an English sentence?”
Then he sends it back, and then I reread it again, and I fix lots of things, including things he hadn’t commented on. Then eventually I share it with other people as well. I go through multiple stages of revisions.
This sounds like labor, and rightly so. Rather than describing how she channeled the muse of translation, Wilson acknowledged the time and effort that translating takes.
I’m not suggesting we toss out Robert Fagles’ translations. We often have a particular affection for the first translations of Homer we encounter, and I encountered Fagles’ Iliad and Odyssey in my first year of college. When I think of how Homer sounds in English I still think of Fagles’ translations.
I’m also not suggesting that Fagles worked any less hard on his translations than Wilson has on hers. What is significant here is the way these two translators have talked about the labor of translating. Fagles crafted a narrative of his process that sounds like divine inspiration, as though both he and Homer channeled the same muse and spoke in the same voice. Wilson’s account highlights the fact that the work of translation is just that — work.
These accounts make more sense if we return to the metaphors used to describe the act of translation. Fagles had to resist the siren song of the beautiful-but-unfaithful translation while channeling the Homeric muse in order to produce a “faithful” translation, and the disparity between his voice and that of Homer doesn’t seem to be an issue. However, Wilson was required to maintain emotional distance from Homer’s words to prevent the translation from sounding too much like her.
Even if neither translator consciously considered how metaphors that describe the act of translation influenced their respective practices, one assumption is foundational for both of these accounts: Fagles didn’t have to work to sound like Homer, and Wilson did.
Obviously, not every translation of a classical text by a man is met with overwhelming praise. Of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad, Dana Burgess assessed that, “in rendering the epic palatable to the contemporary undergraduate Mr. Lombardo sacrifices the austere diction of Homer’s verse.” However, unlike in many reviews of the work of women translators, Burgess never implies that this defect has something to do with Lombardo’s identity. In fact, he says that the “language of the translator never overshadows the events of the story.” So even if he disliked the translation, it is not because the translation contains too much of Lombardo’s own voice. Or perhaps Lombardo’s voice doesn’t overshadow because the translator’s voice is assumed to be similar to that of Homer.
On the other hand, John Byron Kuhner, in a review for the conservative Russell Kirk Center of Cultural Renewal — we’ll save discussion of the organization’s title for another day — directly addressed issues of identity in his review of Wilson’s Odyssey. According to Kuhner, Wilson’s translation is “readable,” and this is its downfall. He echoed Johnson when he said that Wilson makes “all the judgements” about the text on behalf of her readers, “eliminating ambiguity wherever she sees fit.”
Kuhner is skeptical of Wilson’s claim in her introduction that the concept of faithfulness is gendered in the context of translation, calling this “an obvious lie.” It is not that “faithfulness” is gendered, as though gender has been placed onto the concept of being faithful by some outside force; instead, when we talk about what makes a good translation, and whether fidelity should be taken into account, this “fidelity” inherently connotes something different when talking about a man translator or a woman translator.
Kuhner further lamented the fact that the “press has made some effort to ‘gender’ the act of translation itself,” and he looks “forward to the day when there are so many translations by every sort of person that every reviewer will have to resort to appraising their content, but we are not there yet.” Setting aside what he means by “press” — is this another way of saying “liberal media”? — this argument resembles equally fallacious claims such as “I don’t see color” or “I just want to hire the best person for the job.”
So why aren’t there translations of classical texts by “every sort of person,” and what can we do about it? As Wilson noted, translation requires institutional support. The 2018 SCS Placement Report indicates that job-seekers in Classics are overwhelmingly white; as Dan-el Padilla Peralta articulated at the 2019 SCS Annual Meeting, major journals in the field replicate and reinforce this “hegemony of whiteness”; and Djesika Bèl Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, Sportula co-creators, have spoken openly about how Classics remains a predominantly white field of study because, in Watson’s words, “no radical space has been carved into it such that it may more thoroughly and visibly represent something beyond that of status quo.”
It should be no surprise, then, that every translator I have cited in this article enjoys the privilege of whiteness. While it is a welcome change that there are more translations of classical texts by women, the “white men and women” demographics hardly scratch the surface of the range of ethnic, racial, and gender identities not yet represented among classical translators.
As Padilla Peralta has said, there are some who believe that “depersonalized objective scholarship” is the ideal, and while it’s not necessary or desirable to “center the voice of the ego on every single page,” he maintains that the voice of the ego is always present, as are the “histories behind that voice.” It is only because whiteness and masculinity are seen as default identities that Lombardo’s voice doesn’t overshadow Homer’s, but Carson’s does Sophocles’. These default identities are what allow Kuhner to assess Wilson’s Odyssey translation as most appropriate for younger readers “and the casual ‘Book of the Month Club’ type consumer of print,” but remain oblivious to the misogynist overtones of his own review.
When we assign and read classical translations, let’s not imagine that the material conditions that allow for their production are irrelevant. Classical translation is labor, and this labor is more valued and seen as somehow more authentic when men perform it. The reality is that translators who are men are no more at risk of being seduced by the beautiful, unfaithful translation than translators who are women are of starting emotional affairs with their texts.
When classical translations get reviewed, those reviews should consider the identity of the translator, and not just when that identity is marked as “not white” or “not masculine.” Wilson has emphasized that men who translate “are never asked about their gender, and this omission is seriously distorting,” because “It’s very clear gender has an impact on men’s work.” Investigating how identity can affect the way we read and interpret texts helps to resist the narrative that we live in a world without gender and color, a narrative which only further allows those with privilege to avoid their own biases.
Let’s instead explicitly address these material concerns and biases, especially when we assign translations of classical texts to students. I’ve now taught Alexander’s Iliad and Ruden’s Aeneid and Lysistrata translations, and on the first day of class I explain why I have chosen these specific translations: both for their aesthetic value and, unapologetically, for the identities of their translators. I make it clear to my students that the identity of the translator does not somehow shield the translation from criticism, but that it may change the way that we read and talk about the translation. With this acknowledgement, I also aim to demystify the labor the translator performed, which in turn changes how students think about, talk about, and value that labor.
In a response to David van Schoor’s vitriolic review of her translation of Augustine’s Confessions, Ruden wrote that he had expressed “the same male paranoia that bleats warnings of annihilation or castration” when a woman dares to achieve anything, and that the reviewer was only able to praise a woman translator if she directed her “efforts toward bowing to centuries of male mediocrity.” For better or worse, Classics has millennia of such mediocrity to reckon with. There’s no need for us to be faithful to it.
Bess Myers holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and is an Instructor of English and Assistant Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Memphis. She can usually be found reminiscing about South Jersey and researching all things funerary alongside her cat, Ezra.
