Women Who Weave
Reading Emily Wilson’s Translation of the Odyssey With Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad
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According to the press packet, Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey (W.W. Norton & Company, $30.73/£30.00) is the first rendering of the text into English by a woman. So what?
I mean that seriously, not sardonically: what does it matter that a woman has finally translated the Odyssey into English, Caroline Alexander having become the first woman to tackle the Iliad (in English) only a year before? That it’s largely uncharted territory, like the waters Odysseus traverses for a decade? You can already imagine, practically hear, the whining that Wilson is not, actually, the first woman to translate the Odyssey, just the first to do so into English — as if there’s room for only one woman within a boys’ club of Homer translators, as if the addition of another translation by a woman, especially into a language that reaches a wide audience, isn’t a stunning achievement.
And that rage alone should convince you that it is one.
There are many other stunning things about Wilson’s translation, from the five-beat lines to the straightforward speech, free from the elegant clunkiness that we usually see when scholars try to carry words over from one language to another. But one of them is certainly an awareness of her own daring. As the media excitement following the book has made clear, she knows that she’s raising a challenge to a cantankerous bulwark, and isn’t afraid to own it. She doesn’t act coy about the “first woman” tag — “Oh, am I the first?” — or dismiss it as incidental. She treats the fact of her gender and the event of her book as fundamental to one another even as they don’t totally consume each other.
She understands, I suspect, that a woman’s perspective changes things, and she’s not just thinking of her own. In her introduction to the Odyssey, Wilson — who is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania — notes that a “surprising slippage” takes place in the immediate aftermath of Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion and mutual recognition. The pertinent passage goes as follows (all translations are Wilson’s unless otherwise noted):
This made him want to cry. He held his love,
his faithful wife, and wept. As welcome as
the land to swimmers, when Poseidon wrecks
their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves
and driving winds; a few escape the sea
and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine.
Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land.
So glad she was to see her own dear husband,
and her white arms would not let go his neck.
The slippage “happens through the imagery, from the man’s to the woman’s point of view.” That is, we start off thinking that Odysseus is the one being compared to the shipwrecked swimmers, since he embraced Penelope and was recently shipwrecked himself. But when we emerge from the other side of the simile, we encounter the possibility that Penelope is a briny sailor while Odysseus is the land. The perspective shifts. A passage is no longer the same.
But sometimes Wilson does mean her own perspective, as evinced in the translator’s note that follows what is itself a substantial introduction:
To translate a domestic female slave, called in the original a dmoe (“female-house-slave”), as a “maid” or “domestic servant” would imply that she was free. I have often used “slave,” although it is less specific than many of the many terms for types of slaves in the original. […] I try to avoid importing contemporary types of sexism into this ancient poem, instead shining a clear light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that do exist in the text, which are partly familiar from our world. For instance, in the scene where Telemachus oversees the hanging of the slaves who have been sleeping with the suitors, most translations introduce derogatory language (“sluts” or “whores”), suggesting that these women are being punished for a genuinely objectionable pattern of behavior, as if their sexual history actually justified their deaths. The original Greek does not label these slaves with any derogatory language.
The slightest alterations in translation can turn a girl into maid with few choices, a slave with none at all, or a slut who only has herself to blame. And it took a woman to see, or perhaps just care about, those differences. As it is we learn so little about Penelope’s δμωαί, their joys, their fears, and — with one exception, Melantho — even their names. The girls are at the mercy of the men in and the translator of the Odyssey. Who will tell their stories for them?
Fortunately, someone else already did: Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale. Her 2005 novel The Penelopiad gives us a Penelope who is delighted to have her husband back, yet deeply troubled by how he didn’t hesitate to slaughter her slaves along with the suitors they slept with. As a result, her perspective shifts. Their marriage is no longer the same.
It makes sense, then, that we read Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey with The Penelopiad not too far from our minds, and doing so may even help us answer the question that I posed at the beginning. So what?
The Penelopiad is told mostly from Penelope’s perspective and in retrospect: she’s in the Underworld, reflecting on the life she once had. Atwood writes in the introduction that she doesn’t buy Homer’s version of events because “there are too many inconsistencies”: “I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.” She also weaves in the voices of the δμωαί in the form of a Chorus — like a Greek tragedy — that sings its side of the story across ten sporadically placed chapters.
Such a retelling enables Atwood to reach a verdict on one of the central ambiguities in the text — namely, the exact point at which Penelope recognizes Odysseus. Wilson addresses this in her introduction as well:
Some readers have argued that this clever woman may well have recognized her husband much earlier than she lets on, or at least half-recognized him. Perhaps she has; the text seems to allow for this possibility, although it gives us little evidence for it. But it is important to see what is at stake in the decision to interpret Penelope as either cognizant or ignorant of her husband’s identity.
What is at stake is that, depending on the interpretation, Penelope has agency and schemes of her own or is a mere pawn in Athena and Odysseus’ scheming. She has limited power that she exercises in a covert way or she is weak. These stakes become clear in Book 19, where the couple has technically reunited but Penelope has not yet recognized Odysseus — or so it seems. Penelope asks Odysseus, who is dressed as a beggar, to interpret a dream (19.539–554):
…Now how do you interpret
this dream of mine? I dreamed that twenty geese
came from the river to my house, and they
were eating grain and I was glad to see them.
Then a huge eagle with a pointed beak
swooped from the mountain, broke their necks, and killed them.
I wept and wailed, inside the dream; the women
gathered around me, and I cried because
the eagle killed my geese. Then he came back
and sitting on the jutting roof-beam, spoke
in human language, to restrain my grief.
‘Penelope, great queen, cheer up. This is
no dream; it will come true. It is a vision.
The geese are suitors; I was once an eagle,
but now I am your husband. I have come
back home to put a cruel end to them.’
Odysseus takes the dream as a sign that Penelope’s husband will return and bring “ruin for all the suitors.” He conveniently ignores the detail that is least flattering to him: that Penelope “wept and wailed” because the eagle (Odysseus) killed her geese (the suitors). But what if he hadn’t? Does Penelope not want him to kill the suitors? Does she not know what she wants?
Atwood, twelve years ago, took full advantage of the possibility that Penelope knows more than she lets on — not to mention the freedom that a novelist has but a classicist does not. In The Penelopiad, Penelope recognizes Odysseus almost immediately but stays quiet so that he can keep his manly pride:
His disguise was well enough done — I hoped the wrinkles and the baldness were part of the act, and not real — but as soon as I saw that barrel chest and those short legs I had a deep suspicion, which became a certainty when I heard he’d broken the neck of a belligerent fellow panhandler. […] I didn’t let on that I knew. It would have been dangerous for him. Also, if a man takes pride in his disguising skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognize him: it’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.
So when we get to the equivalent of Book 19, it is clear that Penelope relates the dream to Odysseus while aware of who he is. He gives the same answer as he does in the original poem, but The Penelopiad has a twist, one of many:
In the event, Odysseus was wrong about the dream. He was indeed the eagle, but the geese were not the Suitors. The geese were my twelve maids, as I was soon to learn to my unending sorrow.
Odysseus is, in Wilson’s translation, complicated; Penelope is ambiguous. But Atwood arguably gives Penelope more credit than even the ambiguities of the text afford her. Penelope, in The Penelopiad, tells the “beggar” how much she has suffered and misses her husband to make Odysseus believe her later. She sets up the axes on purpose, knowing Odysseus is the only one who can shoot an arrow through them and he’s there to do just that. She instructs Eurycleia to wash Odysseus’ feet so that she’ll appear to recognize him first.
Similarly, another important twist is that Penelope plots with her δμωαί to keep the suitors at bay. She picks twelve girls to help her undo by night the shroud that she weaves for her father-in-law by day, and orders them to spend time with and spy on the suitors for her. This proves to be a mistake on several fronts: the suitors rape some of the girls, a few fall in love, and one betrays Penelope’s secret, forcing her to finish weaving the shroud as soon as possible.
So it’s unsurprising that, in the Underworld, the girls blame Penelope for their untimely end and — as shades, and thus as the equals in death that they never were in life — they torture her and Odysseus for it. They wonder whether they should have drowned Telemachus as a child, before he had a chance to hang them. Penelope, for her part, laments the role that she played in their deaths: “‘The ones who’d been raped,’ I said. ‘The youngest. The most beautiful.’”
Yes, it’s one word — but it’s fascinating how some translations of δμωαί open up the text for this version of events, while others close off possibilities.
Much fuss has also been made about Wilson’s translation of κυνώπις, which means “dog-faced” but in a fairly capacious way. Helen uses it in reference to herself in Book 4, when Telemachus stops by Sparta while searching for news of his father. Robert Fagles makes Helen call herself a “shameless whore.” Richard Lattimore and Walter Shewring both opt for “shameless me.” Martin Hammond goes simple with just “whore” and Anthony Verity settles on the more colorful “shameless bitch.” This is Wilson’s version of the passage:
I never saw two people so alike
as this boy and Telemachus, the son
of spirited Odysseus, the child
he left behind, a little newborn baby,
the day the Greeks marched off to Troy, their minds
fixated on the war and violence.
They made my face the cause that hounded them.
By choosing “hounded” — an English idiom — Wilson is essentially claiming that the “dog” aspect is more important than the precise pitch of the Greek, and, in the introduction, she draws a connection between the “dog” aspect and the “woman” aspect. “The idea that women or goddesses, especially desirable ones who sleep with men outside marriage, are like dogs, or have doglike faces, recurs at several moments in the poem: Hephaestus uses the same term of his unfaithful, divinely beautiful wife, Aphrodite; the dead Agamemnon calls his murderous wife a ‘she-dog’; and the pretty slave girl Melantho is called a ‘dog’ by both Penelope and Odysseus,” she points out.
Granted — as Wilson herself acknowledges — κυνώπις is not exclusively reserved for women; in that sense, it is not the exact equivalent of “bitch,” which she says “would be a misleading translation.” But the association nevertheless persists: “Women, more than men, are like dogs, because they are put low on the social hierarchy, and because they might be scarily capable of seeing through social conventions, and might refuse to stay in their place,” Wilson argues. “But the idea that it is not the woman or goddess herself, but her face, that is like a dog suggests that it might be male perceptions of women, rather than female desires themselves, that threaten the social fabric.” (For those interested, Cristiana Franco has a book on this subject.)
So the problem is not that Homer is misogynist in using κυνώπις for Helen any more than the solution is for Wilson to neutralize the word (“hounded” does lose the often pejorative force). The problem is that many of the pre-Wilson translations betray a tendency to cave to (modern) misogynist impulses.
On that note, I want to return to another word that is heavy with centuries of male interpretation: δμωαί. Chapter 26 of The Penelopiad is called “The Trial of Odysseus, as Videotaped by the Maids” and was clearly inspired by The Eumenides, complete with the appearance of Furies at the end — one of the several ways that Atwood turns an epic into a tragedy. Odysseus is on trial for murdering the suitors, and when the Judge is about to dismiss the case on the grounds that he acted in self-defense, he is interrupted by a chorus of shouts:
The Maids: You’ve forgotten about us! What about our case? You can’t let him off! He hanged us in cold blood! Twelve of us! Twelve young girls! For nothing!
Odysseus’ attorney first tries to argue his case on the grounds that the girls were his slaves and, therefore, he had a right to do as he pleased with them. But when the Judge demands a reason, the attorney says, “They’d had sex without permission.” Although everybody ends up acknowledging that the suitors, in fact, raped the girls, the Judge decides that the standards of Odysseus’ time were different and that it’d be a shame “if this regrettable but minor incident were allowed to stand as a blot on an otherwise exceedingly distinguished career.” No justice for young girls, so the Furies descend.
It’s a startling scene that encapsulates the problem with most translations of δμωαί. “Maid” belies the total control that Odysseus had over their lives, even in ending them. The implication of “sluts” or “whores” is that “they’d had sex without permission,” by their own volition. The Furies must right the wrongs.
I refuse to grant these girls
a clean death, since they poured down shame on me
and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.
So goes Wilson’s translation of Telemachus’ declaration, once the girls clean up the bloodshed, that he will hang them for sleeping with the suitors (22.463–465). The passage is sickening no matter how we translate δμωαί; in no way a feminist one. But there is a difference between Telemachus, who is constantly trying to prove himself as a man, deciding that the girls deserve to die for what he perceives as shameful behavior and us doing the work for him when the Greek doesn’t demand it. Wilson’s choice of “girls” is glass but not mirror: it shows us the sexism of the times without implicating us too.
Could a man have written The Penelopiad? Or have done what Wilson did in her translation? Maybe. But men had a monopoly on Homer translations for a long time, so they’ve had plenty of chances. And it hasn’t happened so far.
The Odyssey deals extensively with change: coming home and discovering the ways that you’ve changed and it hasn’t (and vice versa), growing up, growing old. Women who translate and retell the Odyssey make its history one of change as well, with Wilson perhaps opening a chapter where we reckon with centuries of bias — some built-in, others gratuitous — and again debate the extent to which we can stretch the words. In the end, how could it not matter who tells the story, when the story changes depending on who’s telling it?
As Wilson says in her New York Times profile, “all translations are interpretations.” To translate is not to dig for the One Rendering buried under the crusty layers of the original language. It is to peer at a cloth made during the day, unravel the fabric, then discover a way to weave it back together under a different light.
Yung In Chae is the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She has an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
