While the surviving Greek heroes of the Iliad return to their city states from the ten-year war without lengthy detours or wanderings, Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca takes a decade. The Odyssey has traditionally been seen as something of a continuation, or “Part B,” of the Iliad. So lay the suitors, heaped across each other.Īs Wilson writes in her introduction, “Homer’s music is quite different from mine, but my translation sings to its own regular and distinctive beat.” Tipped out upon the curving beach’s sand,
Out of the dark-grey sea in fine-mesh nets
Lying in blood and dust, like fish hauled up He saw them fallen, all of them, so many, The same lines translated by Emily Wilson: Thus were lying in heaps, piled one on the other, the suitors. While by the heat of the sun drawn forth is the life from their bodies.
Heaped on the sand, all gasping in vain for the salt sea water, On to the beach of a hollow recess in the shore, and they lie there Weltering there in the dust and in blood lay all of the suitors.įallen in many and many a heap, like fishes that boatmenĭrag in a strong-meshed net from the grey-green depths of the ocean Here are Cotterill’s lines from Book XXII when Odysseus and his son Telemachus slay Penelope’s suitors: Homer’s dactylic hexameters sound unusual and unnatural in English, a forced meter, as we see in H. Wilson’s iambic translation recreates the rapidity of the original and gives the lines an epic nobleness, but one not too alien to the modern reader. Matthew Arnold famously pointed to four characteristics that are vital to a good translation of Homer: plainness, directness, rapidity, and nobleness. Her choice of iambic pentameter as the basis for a twenty-first-century translation gives us a traditional meter familiar to us from narrative verse. In her newest translation of Homer’s Odyssey, Emily Wilson has turned the Greek dactylic hexameter into iambic pentameter, a remarkable feat and a well-considered strategy. In literary translation of works from other eras, there are always two basic tasks that a translator needs to achieve: translating from the writer’s language into a target language, the language of the reader, and also translating from the writer’s era and culture to the era and culture of the contemporary reader. Translated from the Greek by Emily Wilson
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