##In his 1816 poem 'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer', John Keats expresses the wonder of reading George Chapman's[1] early 17th century translations of Homer[2] for the first time and of feeling like a "watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken", or like the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés seeing the Pacific for the first time.[3]
I have just finished Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of The Odyssey and I can see what Keats meant. I felt I'd seldom read anything which more clearly supports the idea that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".[4]
I had studied The Iliad at university and of course I knew the story of the Trojan war from its prominence in everything from children's storybook versions of the classics to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, but what I knew about The Odyssey could have been written on a Post-It note, so I went into it with few preconceptions. In particular I had decided not to see the Christopher Nolan film which is currently in cinemas.
###Approach
Ms. Wilson[5] was educated in the UK but is now a Professor of classics at the University of Pennslvania. Her approach to the translation[6] is interesting - she matches the 12,000 lines of the original poem line for line, she rejects what she calls Alexander Pope's "grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated" language in his well-known 18th century translation, and she adopts iambic pentameter on the basis that it is a traditional form, familiar to readers of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and Keats.
Her translation has come in for some criticism, but it worked for me. It's important to understand that this story is truly ancient - it originally dates from the Bronze Age when the stories later attributed to Homer were part of an oral tradition, memorised and performed to an audience by a 'rhapsode'. If you had to memorise 12,000 lines then you would be grateful for anything which helped, including the regular poetic meter and the repetition of stock phrases - here the sea is always 'wine dark', ships are 'black' or 'swift', heroes are 'godlike'.
###Interfering gods
And the presence of the gods in every aspect of the lives of Odysseus and other characters is strikingly unmodern. Not only is Odysseus prevented from returning home from Troy by the nymph Calypso (daughter of Atlas the Titan), but when he is finally allowed to leave it is the result of negotiations conducted by the god Hermes. Those negotiations only began after the godess Athena petitioned Zeus on Odysseus' behalf, and even then his raft is destroyed by the god Poseidon, who hates him. Throughout the book very little happens, good or bad, which is not attributed directly to 'some god' or 'some spirit', which for the modern reader might make it appear to be a kind of fantasy, but which for a Bronze Age audience presumably reflected their commonplace understanding of reality.
###Come-uppance
Reaching home, Odysseus finds his home filled with suitors who, believing him long dead, are eager to win his wife's affection, but they are eating their way through his wealth, in violation of the ancient Greek principle of hospitality, xenia[7]. In the end natural justice, Bronze Age style, is achieved through significant blood-letting and the normal order of things is restored when the suitors get their just deserts, even if that justice seems unduly harsh to us as modern readers.
Given Odysseus' significant character flaws (he is described throughout the book as a trickster, cunning, a liar, and so on), and his role in the sacking of Troy, not to mention his 20 year absence from his family because 'a godess made me do it', I think it's reasonable as modern readers to question his fitness to judge or to administer justice of any kind. But then, where would literature be without morally ambiguous characters?
###Conclusion
Finally coming back to Emily Wilson's approach, the meter works as intended, and like another verse translation of an epic poem which comes to mind, Seamus Heaney's Beowulf[8][9], I find that it helps to read aloud or at least to imagine yourself reciting it to an audience, which may give a sense of how it would have felt to hear these stories brought to life in a pre-literate society. There are a few modern linguistic anachronisms, but unlike some critics I think the language does justice to the scale and importance of the story.
The Odyssey had been in my 'to be read' pile for a few years, and since finishing it I've bought the author's 'Crossing the Wine Dark Sea', in which she writes about the process of translating the classics. Her translation of The Iliad is on my list too, and as a prequel to The Odyssey I'm looking forward to it. She says she's going to write a second Odyssey, this time without the constraint of matching the original line for line, and that will be worth waiting for.
##References
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chapman
[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=chapman%2C+george
[3] Here Keats apparently erred, thinking perhaps of Vasco de Balboa, who led the first Europeans to Darien in what is now Panama, from where they saw the Pacific
[4] This famous quote is the first line of L.P. Hartley's 'The Go-Between' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Wilson_(classicist) and https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emily_Wilson_(classicist)
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(Emily_Wilson_translation)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia_(Greek)
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf:_A_New_Verse_Translation
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry