A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side.
I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an empowered way, to stop seeing myself as simply a victim. The gist of what I came to understand can be summed up in the negotiating trope "The first person to name a number loses."
Emotional labor is a hot buzz word currently that seems to be the fashionable new way to say that doing women's work makes you a chump, a victim. But I think it is more complicated than that.
I don't like this trend that I see where modern women translate the stories of traditional women and are as derisive of the woman's role as men are, if not more so. The female slaves were executed, but so we're many men. This write up implies that the death of women has a unique horror to it that we need not feel over the more prosaic deaths of men.
At the time The Odyssey was written, life was generally harder than it is now. This was true for both men and women, rich and poor. Death was pretty common. It was not inherently more wonderful to be an executed male than an executed female.
I probably won't read Wilson's translation -- I recently read Fagles', and am not keen to re-read for sake of a new translation, although might be interested in a comparison of translation differences. But you are correct that Greek society was very, very different from "modern" society in many ways.
I was debating going into the ways it is different, but it seems that the political climate is too toxic, so I will instead link to a fantastic lecture series on the Odyssey that I personally found enlightening: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/odyssey-of-homer.htm...
The modern impulse to impose its cultural norms upon the past is deeply upsetting. Its a sign of a frail, unsure, and declining culture.
Things that are constant at any generation throughout history: the young always appear selfish and without morals; the past is not treated with enough respect; the overall culture is surely in decline. Athenians under Pericles were convinced of these, as were Romans under Augustus.
I don't mean to be unpleasant, but the idea that there has always been an oppositional libertine youth culture of selfishness is a modern canard.
It's not a modern impulse, it's pretty much an invariant aspect of culture.
Of course, so is the tendency to perceive invariant aspects of culture as both unique to the present culture and signs of decline.
What are you trying to say here? Invariant is not a verb, and it's definition of "never changing" doesn't make sense in the way you used it.
Its arguably even the case that it could be argued to be the sign of a particular kind of ascending culture, since being able to reinterpret the past and spread your own cultural norms could be said to give weight/momentum to a particular culture's propagation...
History is cyclic. Humans flip between freedom to oppression, and I think so much of those steps back come from the fact that we are encouraged to forget the mistakes and lifestyles of the past. You see this in communism, various cultural revolutions, and other horrible things, yet certain revisionists wish to look back at those horrifying events with rose-tinted glasses. No, we should be willing to accept and see the truth, for all it's glory and brutality.
We can "save" the women of literature, yet ignore the oppression in the modern day woman, ie. the gender-driven infanticide that still exists today. If written words from 3000 years ago offends our sensibilities, what hope to do we, as a culture, have to hold up a guiding light to the rest of the world?
Fortunately, in our era those regressive forces are a frail, unsure, and declining culture.
It's important to seek the truth before attempting to change it, and I'm glad Emily can separate her clear desire to inhabit a different world from (what I see as) the duty to accurately present the work. If I need a translation of the Odyssey for myself or someone else, I guess I'll be getting a copy of this one.
Yes, Penelope's maids come to a bad end. I think a lot of critics misread this as misogyny on Homer's part. However, it is meant to be balanced with the death of the suitors and also Odysseus' shipmates, leaving only the marriage at the end.