I’ve been researching women and translation, particularly women who have translated the classics, and the relationship between rhetoric and translation (and where women fall into this). The idea of the rhetorical situation keeps coming up. As Peter France has written: “the translator… is in a rhetorical situation,” where translation “is not a scientific procedure but a personal initiative, akin to that of the orator situated between a subject and a public” (261). Like the orator, the translator must consider the audience before her and whether the audience will accept the translation as a reflection of the current belief system and values, or whether the audience will accept the translation as a reflection of values not included or recognized before. I am reflecting on my own rhetorical situation, the reasons for studying women and the rhetoric of translating the classics in the twenty-first century.
In 2018, Emily Wilson made history as the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English. The translation made the New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2018 and found a place on best seller lists. The ancient text gained popularity in the age of Instagram, iPhones and fake news, in part, because Wilson, as a translator, uses strategies that situate the epic in the current moment and that draw in new audiences. For Wilson, Odysseus is no longer a perfect hero, but a “complicated man,” in other words, a human man (105). She argues for her use of the word “complicated,” by providing many examples, from his own character, for why it is fitting to translate him as “complicated.” I read articles in which Wilson argued for this translation, but when I finally sat down to read the Odyssey in its entirety (which I only did for the first time in 2020, ten years after I graduated from college with a degree in Latin), the evidence was overwhelming. Odysseus is complicated.
Why does it matter that in 2018 Odysseus should be complicated? Here are some reasons:
- Complicated suggests something besides perfection. It suggests that a man is human. A complicated, human man can go on a journey that is far from perfect, get detained (sometimes he wants to be detained), and eventually make it home to his wife, after sleeping with a few other women along the way.
- This Odysseus, the wandering man, looks a lot like any other wandering refugee, who might not have a place to go, who might not be recognized to his full potential, or full capability, but who is still human despite these imperfections and shortcomings.
- Odysseus is a man who has fought in a war for ten years, and what we know now about how war shapes humanity and PTSD play a role in the way that we see Odysseus today. The experience of war is a part of his identity and traumatic experience can be read into this version of Odysseus. Even at home in Ithaca, he engages in brutal battles.
Inherent in Wilson’s translation is the idea of cultural interpretation. Accompanied by the interpretation is an argument – why she sees the epic this way, and why we should, too. In her Introduction to the text, she combines the obligatory information about Homer’s life and times (what little we know) with her own analysis and interpretation of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, providing textual evidence from the Greek. Other women have translated classical texts before Wilson. However, not many have translated these texts into English. Each of these translators makes a specific argument for her translation, and ultimately her interpretation, of the original, particularly by applying the lens of twenty-first century readers and making a case for the relevance of the story and its themes. But it was Wilson that made me realize this rhetorical connection: that her text was a rhetorical text and that translation was a rhetorical act.
My relationship to translation is as a teacher of Latin and a student of Latin and Greek. As a teacher, I read passages before leaving school at the end of the day, and again in the morning, right before I taught them and completed the same annotations that I asked of my students. No matter that I taught the same passages each year and had multiple sections of the same class – I read everything again. As a student translation took up much time, involved a (physical) dictionary and looking up the same word multiple times, it created discipline and was often very humbling. It was not easy. Even now, with a new text that I’ve never read or translated before, the process looks the same. After all this time, reading and rereading, I’ve never felt like I had any right to lay claim to these texts, never felt like they were mine, or that I could speak about translating in any significant way. This is certainly part of the problem that these women translators are beginning to dispel. Women, especially young women who are working at learning these languages, who have spent time translating these texts while they are young enough to still chew at the ends of their erasures, should feel that they have some small ownership over these texts and these stories, should feel empowered to question previous translations. Translation is a chance to take ownership and challenge the status quo.
Sources
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton. 2018.
France, Peter. “The Rhetoric of Translation.” The Modern Language Review. 100. 2005. 255-268. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3738167. Accessed 25 Feb. 2020.
Alexandra Sladky 