Show notes
He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms; designs or deceptions; reasons or identities. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck, making a 10-year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10-year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer’s classic, Wes & Erin try to figure out what Odysseus really wants, and whether the “lord of lies” can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others. Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Factor and The Inner Loop Radio. Head to factormeals.com/subtext50 and use code subtext50 to get 50 percent off. Subscribe to Inner Loop at https://www.theinnerlooplit.org/radio. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms, designs or deceptions, ruses or character tropes. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck making a 10 year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10 year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer's classic, we try to figure out what Odysseus really wants and whether the Lord of Lies can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others. This is Wes Alwan, this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So today we are discussing The Odyssey first 12 books and the first 12 books. And we're doing the Emily Wilson translation. And we've actually discussed this translation on my other podcast, the Partially Examined Life. We had her on to discuss it, which was, which was interesting. And you know, when I started reading this translation, I'm used to Fitzgerald, which is a very. There's a lot of license taken with that translation and I'd even memorize a little bit of that as a kid and then I'd memorize some of the Greek as well. Although looking at the Greek this time, it's like if I get a Loeb out and there's English on one side and there's Greek on the other, I can make some things out, but it's such difficult Greek to try to translate. You know, when I first encountered her translation, because it's so different and it's different because it's much simpler syntactically than most translations. And I was a little bit weirded out by that in the beginning. But then I found the translation to be so readable that it actually increased is the enjoyment of reading it a lot. It's much easier to read than say a Fitzgerald or many of these other translations. And you see the difference where these other translations are. They're often a little bit archaic, maybe a bit ornate or they're. Sometimes they're archaic just because they've been translated a long time ago. Sometimes they're archaic because they're trying to match syntactic formality of the Greek or something like that. Which is not to say, by the way, that she isn't herself taking license. She's taking a lot of license here and she's leaving things out. And it's quite a loose translation in some ways, but I think that's okay. She's trying to capture the essence of it. I'm Beginning this way, just because I was curious about what your history with the text is, what translations you've read and why you suggested this translation in particular and what you thought of her translation compared to the others. 2:45 Erin: You know, I had this translation on my reading list for the summer. It was suggested to me, you know, that I might try it out. I had been, I think the Fagles was my first translation. Maybe some combination of Fitzgerald and Fagles, but I really partial to the Fagles, I think, because that ended up being what I read in college. And it just had a big impression on me. I think it was. It maybe opened, you know, one of my freshman year literature courses with a really wonderful professor who, you know, we spent, I think, like, two weeks just. And we barely got through the first, like, hundred lines of book one. I loved the Fagles. I thought I would try this. I really came around on this at first. I was like, oh, this is so. I found it flat, I think, or like, I could really hear the iambic pentameter. It was like both flat and sing songy. I thought, I think that because of my familiarity with the Fagles or my partiality, I wasn't able to kind of get into the music of it. And so I had actually told a friend, like, oh, I'm reading the Emily Wilson translation, but I really want to switch back to the Fagles. And then, I don't know, something happened, like, around book four, maybe, like, as soon as you get it into the Odysseus stuff. I think, you know, Telemachus is always a little tiresome. But as soon as I got into it or it just took me. 4:00 Wes: He's such a baby. 4:01 Erin: He is. You know, maybe it just took me a little, you know, a few books to acclimate myself to the translation. But then I really started to love it. And I started to feel that the poetry has a really pristine, kind of stark beauty. And I appreciate the fact that the idiom is more contemporary. And. Yeah, I just. I really loved it. And at a certain point, I mean, you can actually sit and read this, you know, in a couple of days. I mean, only for sheer length, would you not be able to read it, like, in one sitting. Right. But, you know, it's really a page turner in this translation. 4:34 Wes: Yeah. So I had very, very similar experience to you. Everything you just described, and down to the whole book four, you know, and then page turner and all that stuff. 4:43 Erin: Yeah. I was even talking about it with a friend on the phone who was like, oh, I was thinking of Rereading the Odyssey this summer, it was like, don't read the Wilson. I'm not liking it. I had to text her and say, I take it back. You know, 4:55 Wes: I would never say it's the only. You know, I would recommend reading it and then. But I wouldn't recommend this be the only translation you read. Sure, if you want something which is a little bit truer to the Greek. 5:07 Erin: I was having lunch with a friend yesterday, and he wants to read Anna Karenina. He knows that's my favorite novel. So he said, you know, what translation would you recommend? You know, I know nothing about Russian, obviously, so I can't speak to that, but I have read several different translations, you know, and I know what my experience. 5:22 Wes: I hope we agree on this, because I'm very opinionated about this, but go ahead. 5:25 Erin: Oh, okay. I actually surprised myself because I said, the Pevear Volokhonsky translation. And I said, you know, I think that that is better for right now for, like, for someone just getting into it. I said, because I think that if you read something in a more contemporary idiom, you have more of the experience of there's more nakedness about the book or a kind of not nakedness, a kind of. There's less opacity and more clarity where you're having a more direct experience, I think. And I said that the Constance Garnett, you know, that has passages in it that I remember vividly, lines out of. Out of that Constance Garnett translation, and that was the one that I cut my teeth on. It reminds me of what you're talking about with memorizing the Fitzgerald, you know, So I revered the Constance Garnett translation, but now I find myself in this position of recommending the Pevear Volokhonsky as, like, a gateway for, you know, especially for an older reader, because the Garnett gives you this sense of, like, oh, this is a grand old novel. You know, this is a. Whatever. Shaggy, baggy monster, whatever the expression is. And that can be fun, you know, and it has a certain austerity or grandeur about it. But I think just recommending it to my friend in terms of, like, what would give him the experience of really coming to Anna Karenina, but just coming to it for the first time and experiencing it almost the way a contemporary would in a contemporary idiom, I think is maybe for me, at this point, worth more, which is why I recommended the Pevear Volokhonsky and why this Emily Wilson translation, maybe it affected my recommendation. 6:57 Wes: Yeah, all right, well, we're going to have to fight about that when we do the Anna Karenina or some other Russian, because I consider Constance Garnett far superior. And I don't like Pevear Volokhonsky. And I'll send you some. We had a big fight about this on PEL, and we were doing the Brothers Karamazov, and because Dylan preferred, you know, Pevear Volokhonsky to Constance Garnett. And then I tried to convince everyone with very. With specific passage comparisons. And then I found. I went out and I found someone who written this very angry polemic in which they crapped all over Pevear and showed how Garnett was better. And then I was very. 7:37 Erin: Because of the Russian. 7:38 Wes: But. Well, both in a way, because Garnett is rhythmically in the way. She's just a better writer than these guys in English. And the way those two do it, you know, one of them, you know, he knows Russian, but he's, you know, his wife is fluent in Russian. He's fluent in English, and, you know, he does a rough translation and then she corrects things based on. Anyway, I just find it. I find it very confusing to read them, but I find it much harder, actually, to read. And some of the passages are not even. They don't even capture the meaning correctly. But I'll send that article. We don't, unfortunately. 8:11 Erin: Sorry, we already had a. 8:15 Wes: But we will. We will have this. 8:16 Erin: Pardon the word. We already had a Herculean task ahead of us covering the Odyssey or just the first 12 books. And now I've gotten us off course. 8:23 Wes: But back to this question of translation. So she is as far as the meaning sometimes, and then just as far as the way, the sound of the language. She's quite different than the original. And not that you can capture the sound of the original exactly, but just the syntactic complexity. So, for instance, in the beginning. Shall we read the stanza by stanza, by the way? 8:45 Erin: Yeah, right. We'll be done sometime in 2030. 8:49 Wes: I'll read a little bit of the first stanza. Tell me about a complicated man, Muse. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe, poor fools. They ate the sun God's cattle and the God kept them from home. Now, goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning. 9:18 Erin: Spoiler alert. 9:19 Wes: I'll give you first. Yeah, seriously. So let me give you this old Loeb translation, I forget the name of the translator, but some of it is quite archaic. But it's also much truer to the Greek. So tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, ay, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. I want to read the rest of it. And then the original Greek. 9:50 Erin: Oh, that's actually nice. 9:52 Wes: Yeah, yeah, the original Greek. Andromoianipa musa. Polutropon haus mala polyplankthe epetroyes hieron tole ethron epe epperson polon de anthropon iden astea kaino on engno. That's the comparison just at the level of how things sound and then just getting a little bit into the meaning. So this word complicated, this is like a famous. This could be a discussion for the whole episode, and maybe it will be. But that word translates polytropon, like polytropos, many ways is the way that Fitzgerald translates it. And the man of many devices is the way I had it in the Loeb translation. And I was just thinking about, well, how would I go about this as a translator? How would I try to capture that one word? Because it has several different connotations. One of them is just about the fact that he knows a lot of different things and that he's resourceful, that he can get himself out of a scrape in a way, like being a Renaissance man or a Jack of all trades. The other thing is his ability to be. To disguise his ability to trick his cunningness, that he's a little bit slick, you know, he's willing to lie. And I couldn't think of actually got the thesaurus out and thought about it. And the words multifaceted or many sided, I thought might work because, you know, many ways I like what Fitzgerald did there, but it's not idiomatic. Right. In our language. How do you capture it in English in a way that captures the most of the connotations. So Wilson with complicated is interesting, right? Because what do we mean when we say someone is complicated? 11:45 Erin: First of all, polytropon. I'm guessing that's, you know, the way that trope we get from that. 11:51 Wes: The man of many tropes. 11:53 Erin: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I like that. I mean, polytropon is, you know, that's almost been directly imported into our Language. And I like the idea of, like, there's something about talkiness in that, or talking your way around something, you know, using different tropes to express meaning in different ways. I like Many Ways because it also captures the wandering in itself. Complicated. I'm trying to think about. So what? That's Latin. So, like, to fold together. Right. That's off the top of my head. If I'm getting that wrong, then I'm sorry. 12:30 Wes: What does plicated come from? 12:34 Erin: It's plicare. To fold. This is. My goodness. If I have this right. I'm so proud of myself because it's been since junior year of high school that I had Latin. But. Yeah. So folded together, complicated maybe works actually for me. 12:49 Wes: I think you're right. Yeah. 12:51 Erin: You know, so that has what? That has entanglement, etymologically speaking? If that's correct, then it has entanglement. It has a folded togetherness that almost reminds me of the Trojan horse itself. Right. I like anything that emphasizes the craftiness as well, because crafty also kind of has this multivalent sense in which you're sly, but you're also, like, crafty, like, physically handy. And what I like in Odysseus is the fact that these things come together. So anything that emphasizes the various threads of his personality or that captures as many of them together, I think I'm convincing myself that complicated works, even if it is a Latin origin rather than something else. 13:35 Wes: My only beef with it is that the connotation in English often has something to do with someone being conflicted or brooding or something like that. I was actually watching Bottle Rocket last night, if you've seen that movie. And, yeah, it had been a long time for me, and I didn't. I hate most Wes Anderson movies, actually. But I enjoyed this. I enjoyed it a lot when I saw it. I enjoyed it less this time. But there's a point in the movie where the Luke Wilson character, who's recently been in a mental hospital, he's being asked by a pretty young woman about that experience. And he doesn't lie about it, as y…
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