The Odyssey - tr. Emily Wilson

[troisoiseaux]

Lying Odysseus replied, I will
tell you the truth completely.

That's it, that's the book! Review over!

No, but seriously: I actually really, really enjoyed the Odyssey. This came as a bit of a surprise, honestly? Even with all the good things I'd heard about Emily Wilson's translation, there was a small suspicious part of me that remembered the one time I tried to read the Iliad in high school (I gave up almost immediately) and worried I might find the non-prose format too tedious; and given that I've read a couple of feminist, or at least female-centric, retellings of the Odyssey (Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Madeline Miller's Circe) in the past year, I also wondered if I would be too annoyed by the source material's treatment of its female characters* to enjoy it. Neither of these things turned out to be problems!

I found Wilson's translation really easy to read, while still being clearly not modern prose— one of the reviews quoted in the 'why you should read this book' summary bit (a review by Madeline Miller, in fact) described her language as "fresh, unpretentious, and lean... effortlessly easy to read and ... rigorously considered," which, yeah, that just about covers it. Clearly modern words/turns of phrase - kebab, tote bag, hustling - feel organic when they do appear. I was also delighted by Wilson's decision to slip in a few puns: "mercurial Hermes"; "Demeter with cornrows in her hair."


* I mean, it definitely was, you know, a story from Ancient Greece, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I've read 21st century books with a poorer gender balance in its characters of note— like, you have Athena, Calypso,** Circe, Penelope, Helen, the Phaeacian princess and queen, Odysseus' old nurse, Melantho... poor Melantho. :( The murder of the twelve slave girls was super upsetting, especially because I could picture them so, so easily, whenever they were mentioned— just, like, this group of giggly, snarky teenage girls making the best of their situation.

Honestly, the one thing I didn't expect - especially having recently read Circe, which paints him in a very positive light - was how patronizing and rude Telemachus was to his mother. Like, his issue with the suitors was less that they were attempting to intimidate his mother to marry one of them, than the fact they were doing it at the expense of his inheritance, as opposed to going about it properly, i.e. through her father?! And when Athena convinced him to go questing in search of information about his father, his excuse for sneaking off without telling his mother was that he didn't want her to cry and "ruin her skin" or "spoil her beauty"???!!! Telemachus isn't going to be winning "son of the year" anytime soon.***

** Who, frankly, I am surprised hasn't gotten her own feminist retelling already; when Hermes showed up like, hey, Zeus says you have to let Odysseus leave now, she's like, EXCUSE ME???? I think you GODS are just JEALOUS whenever we goddesses make love to mortal men even though its totally fine when YOU do it!!

*** WHICH REMINDS ME OF ANOTHER BANANAS THING: the fact that multiple characters brought up the story of Orestes as an example of the right way for Telemachus to handle his situation, because Orestes did the Honorable and Manly thing of killing the guy who murdered his father and dishonored his mother. Like, I guess we're just leaving out to whole "haunted by furies" thing, in this version??

I liked Athena more than I'd expected (again, based off having recently read Circe). I mean, Odysseus is probably Exhibit A for the fact that gods don't play nicely with their toys, but Athena had a number of moments of genuine kindness— the part where, disguised as a human, she prays to Poseidon for blessings on their host and then "made the prayer come true herself"; sending Penelope a dream-version of her sister, to comfort her when she was worried over Telemachus' disappearance. Also surprised by the amount of footwork she did, disguising herself as different people to arrange things on Odysseus' and Telemachus' behalf, or even to guide them directly.

Other notes:

- I was surprised by the amount of the plot that happened second-hand.
- The scene where we meet Helen and Menelaus— I was genuinely surprised by how normal they were.
- The amount of time that people - and in particular, men - spend crying in this book? It's a lot!
- Argos the dog is the real MVP of the Odyssey.