[christudor]

I don’t agree with the Twitter thread, but I do think there are fair criticisms to be made of Wilson’s translation, one of which is that she stretches the meaning of the Greek – up to and including just ignoring certain lines – in order to present a particular view of Odysseus.

Richard Whitaker‘s review (published in Acta Classica 63 (2020), pp. 1-15) is quite good on this (as well as on other problems with Wilson’s translation): https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf

[davidivadavid]

There's fair criticism to be made of most translations.

The fallacy begins when one assumes that there is some kind of perfect ideal translation that exists somewhere, that translations can be compared to. Translation, especially literary translation, always involves some amount of arbitrary, artistic parti pris.

Wilson's translation involves a lot of formal (preservation of the number of lines, iambic pentameter) and rhetorical (modernization of the vocabulary) constraints that require sometimes wide deviation from the original. That's inevitable.

What's interesting however is to look at those deviations as an opportunity for conversation, not as an opportunity for correction, which is just nonsensical in the context of a translation that doesn't aim primarily at accuracy. Except for clear mistakes, most of the choices Wilson made were made in complete awareness of the trade-offs they involve.

The Twitter discussion fantasizes about a translation where no such trade-offs exist, which tells you enough about how much translation experience the authors have (none).

Whitaker's review is a good academic review that doesn't at least fall for those beginner misconceptions and recognizes trade-offs explicitly: "Both Green and Verity use a long, six-beat line. This has the advantage for them that they can translate almost every word of the Greek original. But it also, sometimes, leads to a wordiness, a certain turgidity in their versions that makes one sigh for the concision of Wilson."

[YeGoblynQueenne]

According to the review linked above (the one by Whitaker) Wilson's text is not so much a translation as a reinterpretation of the Odyssey, as far as I can tell intended to influence modern political debate:

>> The two great novelties of Wilson’s Odyssey are the way she represents a group of characters that we might term ‘underdogs’ – notably the Cyclops, and the suitors and their allies – in a sympathetic light,6 while representing Odysseus as, on balance, reprehensible. The big problem, however, with Wilson’s heterodox approach to the characters of the Odyssey is that she can sustain it only by distorting and misrepresenting what the Greek text says.

"Distorting and misrepresenting" an original text to make it sound like its author was saying what the translator wishes to say is not the result of a trade-off like the one you describe and there's no excuse to be found in the absence of a "perfect translation", when nobody ever claimed that absence is a surprise.