Emily Wilson's Odyssey

The problem of Wilson’s translation begins with the single most-discussed word in the Odyssey. Homer introduces Odysseus as polytropos: many-turning, much-turned, versatile, elusive. Wilson renders it as ‘complicated’. Her choice catches something of Odysseus’s difficulty as a man, but loses the semantic echoes of turning that recur throughout the poem and, in my view, is fundamental to it: in his wanderings and reversals, his disguises and stories, Penelope’s weaving and unweaving, and finally the return to Ithaca.

The Greek ‘tropos’ carries senses of turning, direction, way and manner (I came across it first in High School Biology, learning about plant phototropism). Odysseus is the ‘man of many turnings’. His route home is a succession of deviations, reversals and return. Circumstances turn him from his course; his mind turns to new devices; his speech turns with his audience; he turns himself into strangers, beggars and fictitious Cretans. Wilson, an expert in the Ancient Greek and in this text, knows the word’s meanings perfectly well. She has suggested the unusual epithet was probably ‘programmatic’, an early statement of the Odyssey’s concerns, applying not only to Odysseus but to his journey and to the poem itself, each full of turns. And she did consider ‘a man of many turns’ but rejected it, partly because she thought it clunky to an English reader, partly because it damaged the pace and metre she had imposed upon herself with her translation.

Her defence makes the criticism of ‘complicated’ more interesting. Wilson understands the Greek perfectly well; the question lies in her judgement about which of its meanings could be sacrificed in English. Her version treats turning as merely one thematic strand among many, available for sacrifice when weighed against other concerns like immediate intelligibility, regular iambic pentameter and a line count matching the Greek. But the question for me is whether tropos really is only one of many equally-weighted strands. Across the Odyssey, ‘turning’ seems more like the driving figure that holds everything else together.

Odysseus’s geography is the obvious place to start. His desired journey couldn’t be much simpler: Troy to Ithaca; but the poem makes it anything but simple. Courses bend, destinations recede, apparent progress is reversed. After Aeolus, Ithaca is actually visible when the bag of winds is opened and the ships are blown back to where they began. The whole Odyssey briefly appears in miniature: movement towards home, reversal, wandering resumed. Even successful movement is rarely straight. Odysseus survives because he can change direction, accept diversion, conceal his destination and find another route.

The same figure of turning governs his own identity. Odysseus becomes Nobody in the Cyclops cave and a beggar in his own house. Between those transformations come invented biographies, false names, calculated disclosures and stories adapted to whoever happens to be listening. His return requires him to be almost everything except Odysseus until the moment at which being Odysseus is safe again.

The poem turns, too. It begins near the end of his absence, moves away through Telemachus’s search, finds its hero, and then doubles backwards when Odysseus narrates his earlier adventures to the Phaeacians. Events become stories; the chronological past re-enters the narrative present. The poem that calls its hero polytropos proceeds by becoming polytropic itself.

Penelope enlarges the pattern beyond the character of Odysseus, and here ‘complicated’ begins to seem seriously inadequate. She scarcely travels at all. Her movement takes place at the loom. The shuttle passes backwards and forwards while Laertes’s shroud advances by day and retreats at night. Weaving becomes unweaving; apparent progress is repeatedly cancelled. Penelope remains physically fixed while producing reversal, just as Odysseus moves incessantly while keeping his intention fixed upon Ithaca. Their different kinds of movement serve the same end. His wanderings preserve the possibility of return; her reversals preserve the possibility of his marriage.

Penelope’s final test for the wandering hero turns upon whether the bed can be moved. Odysseus knows that it cannot simply be picked up and carried elsewhere, because he built it around the trunk of a living olive tree. The recognition scene brings the poem’s long history of movement into collision with rootedness. The many-turning man has returned to the fixed point that made all his turning intelligible. Ithaca, household, marriage and identity have survived because Odysseus and Penelope possessed extraordinary capacities for change without losing the thing towards which those changes were directed.

This is where the semantic loss in ‘complicated’ occurs. For a modern English reader, ‘a complicated man’ suggests a man whose character or motives are difficult to understand, which is part of Wilson’s case for it. We hear of complexity of personality, motives, relationships and moral status. Wilson also points to folding and layering in the etymology of the word as analogues for turning. Yet an etymological possibility available to someone who investigates ‘complicated’ cannot perform the work of an image active in the reader’s mind. If ‘a man of many turns’ initially feels odd, the Odyssey could make it progressively intelligible. Aeolus adds to it. The disguises add to it. The retrospective narrative adds to it. Penelope’s loom changes it again, and the rooted bed finally tells us what all the turning has been for. Poetry is allowed to give readers a word whose meaning is revealed as the poem progresses.

There is a further reason why Wilson’s choice deserves scrutiny. Her translation openly belongs to a critical project. She has written about feminist translation, about making slavery visible where earlier versions converted slaves into servants, and about resisting inherited language that imports misogyny into passages where the Greek supplies none. She wants readers to see the ethical and social difficulties of Homer’s world, and she has explicitly welcomed a reading of Odysseus that encourages discomfort as well as admiration. These are serious purposes, and in many places they correct real distortions in the English tradition.

‘Complicated’ is unusually congenial to that project, for her. The phrase places Odysseus before us as a man to be interpreted and judged. It sounds contemporary because contemporary English often uses ‘complicated’ when simple admiration has become impossible: a brilliant man, perhaps, a formidable one, but complicated. We might be thankful she didn’t choose ‘problematic’. Wilson says she does not intend the word negatively, and while there is no reason to doubt her the effect remains. The first line directs attention towards the hero’s moral and psychological multiplicity, even duplicity, while the physical metaphor of Homer disappears.

That doesn’t establish that Wilson deliberately suppressed the poem’s central image in order to conduct a twenty-first-century prosecution of Odysseus. But it does leave an awkward pair of possibilities. Wilson may have recognised the turnings of hero, journey and narrative without seeing how much further the pattern extends through Penelope, weaving, reversal, return and the bed. Or she may have seen enough of that architecture and still judged the loss of ‘turning’ an acceptable price for the gains she wanted elsewhere. Either possibility makes her choice of ‘complicated’ a very expensive sacrifice. Wilson’s own defence rests heavily on the demand that the first line should work immediately in English. Homer may be asking something more interesting of his first adjective. Polytropos can begin as a description and become, over the course of the poem, a discovery. By the time Penelope tests the returned wanderer with the impossible movement of their rooted bed, the adjective from the opening has acquired a resonance no dictionary could ever have supplied in advance.

‘Complicated’ gives the reader an intelligible Odysseus immediately, at the loss of the slow recognition that Homer’s stranger word permits: the many-turning man, the woman who weaves and unweaves, the narrative that doubles back, the journey whose purpose is return, and at the end of them all the rooted thing that does not move. Wilson’s ‘complicated’ replaces Homer’s governing poetic image with a character judgement and loses the network of echoes and resonances Homer allowed.