Lost in translation / The Odyssey, Book 9

preface-adjacent

THE SAME EIGHT songs are on shuffle. I don’t realize for about half-an-hour; then I realize I'm not being absentminded, but rather the playlist is only half-an-hour long. 쿵쾅쿵쾅 밤의 술래/빛을 잃고 날 찾네, sings SILICA GEL. Thump thump thump the tagger of the night/He’s looking for me. The words feel elementary to me: crunchy, but not in the way Ferrero Rochers tend to be – crunchy in the way cartilage is when you gnaw off too much chicken meat. Sometimes this roughness is romantic, but sometimes I recognize the scent of translation within it a little too much, like someone’s made a perfect clay sphere then dropped it and failed to recreate its roundness. Sometimes, the music itself is enough to make me understand. But I know I’m missing something. I know I’m missing something.

This is not dissimilar to how I felt reading Book 9 of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles. Of course, comparing a respected academic like Fagles's translation of a Greek epic to choppy lyrics pulled off of a dodgy website isn't a perfect analogy, but there exists a consistency with the knowledge that the text I was reading wasn't in the original language and thus couldn't fully convey the original intent. I was haunted by English's failure to understand Silica Gel; I was haunted by the fact that the translation was littered with biases that did not belong to Homer – or whoever the original author is.

the translator / 

I recently came across an article about Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English – in 2018, a depressing five years ago. So there’s slavery and there’s terrible marriage, in her translation. The opening line is, “Tell me about a complicated man.” It’s not a gendered telling, she says. It’s just the truth. 

Wilson, I learn, has worked towards removing the layers of misogyny and cushioning packed onto the epic by previous male translators: where there's language regarding women who were raped ("female ones"), the words "whores," "sluts," and "creatures" crop up; descriptions of slavery are glossed over with the implementation of "housemaids;" Penelope's thick hands become palatable to Western beauty standards and are instead described as "steady." Wilson, to her ability, exposes the author’s original intent by scraping away at these terms, instead using “girls” (to highlight the victims’ youth and brutalization); “slaves;” and “firm, muscular hands.”

Of Polyphemus himself, Odysseus deems "a monster built like no mortal...a man-mountain rearing head and shoulders over the world" (9.210-214). At first glance, such a narration appears dehumanizing, which it certainly is – comparing Polyphemus to a man elucidates that he is very much not one – but I'd argue that what is equally as important is Odysseus's use of height. By claiming that Polyphemus "[rears] head and shoulders over the world," he is intrinsically implementing a power play, as though to say, "There is absolutely no way I could beat this monster, who has the power to scare even the world itself." Of course, Odysseus knows that he, ultimately, defeats Polyphemus – but to simply defeat the Cyclops is not enough. For the Phaecians to truly be impressed, Odysseus must frame Polyphemus as both an evil being deserving of a gruesome demise and an intensely impressive opponent.