Pretty much everybody I know has been sending me links to this Wyatt Mason profile for the NY Times Magazine of the classicist Emily Wilson and her new translation of the Odyssey, and I thank them all: it’s perfect LH material, and the only reason I haven’t posted it until today is that I’m an old-fashioned sort who likes to read the physical paper, so I’m reading the Sunday Times and its attendant magazine on Sunday. The rather silly title is “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English”; I don’t see how they can so confidently claim it’s “the first English rendering of the poem by a woman” (how could anyone possibly know?), but never mind, it sounds wonderful and she seems to be a very interesting person. Mason starts off with a crux in the very first line of the text, and so will I:
Late in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me through a line of Ancient Greek. “Polytropos,” Wilson said, in her deep, buoyant voice, pointing to the fifth word — πολuτροπον — of the 12,110-line epic poem that I had come to her office at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss. On the wall hung pictures of Wilson’s three young daughters; the windows behind her framed a gray sky that, as I arrived, was just beginning to dim. The poem lying open before us was Homer’s “Odyssey,” the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the “Iliad,” in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them. […]
“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack “polytropos,” the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.
“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.” […]
“So the question,” Wilson continued, “of whether he’s the turned or the turner: I played around with that a lot in terms of how much should I be explicit about going for one versus the other. I remember that being one of the big questions I had to start off with.” […]
You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by. Chapman starts things off, in his version, with “many a way/Wound with his wisdom”; John Ogilby counters with the terser “prudent”; Thomas Hobbes evades the word, just calling Odysseus “the man.” Quite a range, and we’ve barely started. [Mason quotes a bunch more renditions.]
“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”
Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:
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.
I like that a lot. For half a century I’ve been faithful to Robert Fitzgerald’s translation
“If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The fact that it’s possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something.” But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: “I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”
Anyway, by all means read the whole article, and here‘s a charming Paris Review piece in which Wilson remembers performing in a child’s production of the Odyssey as a girl in Oxford.
As Sayers said in her introduction to Hell: “The most one can do with passages like the one about Benaco, or the Last Voyage of Ulysses or the heart-breaking little vision of the brooks of the Casentino, and a fortiori with the first eight cantos of the Purgatorio or the ecstatic glories of the Paradiso, is to erect, as best one can, a kind of sign-post to indicate: ‘Here is beauty; make haste to learn Italian, so that you may read it for yourselves.'”
I am also struck by “tell the old story for our modern times”, with its echo of the Igor Tale. But then, what is not a source may very well be a parallel or an analogue instead.
Oh, and when the article says that the seventy translators of the Bible into Greek produced results identical “in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end,” surely that should or could be “in the very same verbs and the very same nouns”? Translations of stories about translation are as fraught as any others.
And I think I need to read it too.
Erewhon Butler famously held that the Odyssey was actually written by a woman, of course.
Yes, I was surprised neither Mason nor Wilson mentioned that.
Hmm. Looks like I could calque the whole ambiguity as einen Vieldreh-Mann without anyone being any wiser afterwards. 🙂
If by “render” they mean “translate the whole thing”, I’ll be happy to assume it’s accurate by an argument from probability. After all, not many people have so much as tried – 12,110 lines aren’t what you accidentally translate in an afternoon if you get carried away.
Argument from probability? How do you calculate odds on a thing like that? The odds against a given random person translating the Odyssey: immense. The odds against half the human population translating the Odyssey: not so immense. In fact, I’d say the odds are at least one woman (women study Greek too, you know) has translated it before; hence my remark.
“… the second-oldest text, after his earlier poem, the “Iliad,” in a Western tradition impossible to imagine without them.”
Do the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah not count for some reason? (Both were canonically written by women, too.)
I would think translations is elliptical for ‘published translations’, and sixty translations of anything, nemmind anything so long, is an awful lot. I doubt if a published translation by a woman would have slipped through the cracks, unless she concealed her gender.
(There are almost 80 available implementations of the Scheme programming language, and a few more seem to appear every year; at one time I had more than half of them running on my computer for comparison purposes. Most languages have either just one or a handful, not counting implementations for computers that aren’t made any more. None of them are principally by women.)
By the way, I see that Wilson also translated six tragedies by Seneca.
Oh, and when the article says that the seventy translators of the Bible into Greek produced results identical “in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end,” surely that should or could be “in the very same verbs and the very same nouns”? Translations of stories about translation are as fraught as any others.
As the wags say, that story is clearly untrue: whoever heard of two Jews, let alone seventy, agreeing with one another?
—What a wonderful translation! Modern without being needlessly colloquial. The meter adds to the readability, rather than trip it. I’ll have to get a copy.
— Funny about the ambiguity in the fifth word. It’s like the ambiguity in the first two words of Genesis, something the translator needs to confront right from the beginning.
— “and who he met”: Ha! Take that, peevers!
unless she concealed her gender.
Something that was, of course, commonly done for centuries.
Reverting to “polytropos”, surely it’s overwhelmingly probable that Homer (Nausicaa, whoever…) intended both meanings; both are amply borne out by the poem, after all.
Quite possible, even likely, yes, but I don’t think we can say “overwhelmingly probable” after lo these many centuries.
Far less than half the human population can translate Epic Greek into English.
True, but why would one assume that that portion of the population is exclusively male?
“Many-sided.”
I like “well-folded-up.”
Given that “complicated” was my first idea to solving the conundrum after about 5 seconds of thinking, it must be a wrong choice. Maybe troubled or restless? Of course, they lack a reference to “many”…
For fun, she might have chosen ambiguous.
As a woman who studied Greek, ahem, all I can say is that I’m looking forward very much to reading Wilson’s translation.
I’m probably being swayed by my knowledge of Modern Greek, but complicated seems a terrible translation for polytropos.
At least to my Modern Greek ears, the translation should be something like cunning, ingenious, wily or trickster.
How about “man with many issues”? A very modern take.
Access to tuition in ancient Greek was also distinctly gendered for a long time in much of the West. But I am bovinely content to read it as “the first published translation into English known to have been perpetrated by a woman of the female persuasion”. (What’s so special about Engleesh anyway, was my instinctivual reaction.)
I shall seize this opportunity to recommend The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason, wherein are set out 44 tropes of the archetypal ’Ανήρ Πολύτροποσ.
In Australia we just used “gone troppo.”
But I am bovinely content to read it as “the first published translation into English known to have been perpetrated by a woman of the female persuasion”.
Yeah, if they’d said “the first known translation by a woman” I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. As it is, it hits me the same way as “this word was invented by [the first person to be cited in the OED entry].”
Yeah, if they’d said “the first known translation by a woman” I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.
But that’s implied by any statement of the form “this is the first X”. Neil Armstrong was the first man known to have walked on the moon.
I strongly disagree.
You’d think there would have been room for at least a passing mention of Anne Dacier.
Madame Dacier, for those who (like me) were unaware of her.
Madame Dacier’s translation of πολύτροπος (‘Muse contez-moy les avantures de cet homme prudent …’) recalls that of John Ogilby (‘prudent’), mentioned in Wyatt Mason’s piece.
Exclusively? Of course not. But the bias was pretty bad for centuries, wasn’t it? How many men have translated the Odyssey into English? Fewer than 10, I guess?
Sure, and I would expect that the translators would be overwhelmingly male. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were exclusively male. I just don’t like asserting that they were as if it were established fact. Women’s contributions to pretty much everything have been largely covered up over the centuries and are still being excavated.
‘I asked Wilson why translation isn’t valued in the academy.
“Because there is no perception that it’s serious intellectually. It’s imagined as a subset of outreach. That you’re going to be communicating with the masses, which is less important than being innovative within your field.”‘
A sad commentary on the intellectual status of translation. Is it justified? Is the sort of stuff that academics turn out — “on a subject that your discipline has yet to exhaust” — really a greater intellectual enterprise than the all-round range of skills that are need to be brought to bear as a translator?
No, but it’s more easily measured and weighed in the balance of tenure decisions. I’m glad I got out of academia.
David M: The article says there are sixty.
Bathrobe: Translation may indeed be vulgarisation, but vulgarisation is to my mind one of the duties of an academic. If you can’t explain your subject to interested but uninformed laypeople, you don’t really understand it at all.
I wonder how many women translated the Iliad.
None I suspect – due to muscular masculinity of its style.
… but vulgarisation is to my mind one of the duties of an academic
Mr. Cowan, allow me to disagree. Popular science requires it’s own set of qualities, abilities, proclivities and such and is better done by professionals.
I also disagree with Mr Cowan. Obfuscation is the duty of the academic.
Oh, in that case, I do expect a few women here and there statistically.
That should actually make it easier, because ways to express the cultural concepts around this muscular masculinity have always been available in English. It isn’t hard to talk about Klingons!
I agree. It’s just that nobody pays our costs of living in the meantime, and nobody other than trial & error teaches us how to do it.
Up to a point. Most science journalism is unmitigated crap, full of actively misleading claims, because just about each media outlet that has a science journalist has one science journalist who is expected to report on all of science but has studied at most one field, if we’re lucky. Even some narrow specialized books by science journalists contain glaring howlers that are obvious misunderstandings of the topic – obvious if, probably only if, you happen to work on that topic.
That’s not a duty, it’s a side effect: people write like their peers, and nobody stops them.
I’ll see your “If you can’t explain your subject to interested but uninformed laypeople, you don’t really understand it at all” and raise you a “Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” (J von Neumann).
I strongly disagree.
Why? Doesn’t any statement of something purporting to be fact obviously include an implied “as far as I know” on the part of the speaker? Maybe you have to make it explicit when it’s something about which you aren’t very confident, but the situtation here is that there are sixty known published English translations of the Odyssey, all by men. There are published translations of the Odyssey by women into other languages, but none into English until now. There are published translations of other things into English by women, but none of the Odyssey. All that combines to make it reasonably likely that this is in fact the first translation by a woman into English, so you don’t have to include an explicit “as far as I know”.
None I suspect – due to muscular masculinity of its style.
That’s just silly; it’s like saying women can’t play sports or run marathons or shoot guns or play jazz or serve in the military or run countries or do any of a host of other things that have been thought to be somehow imbued with “masculinity.” The Iliad is a poem, and it can be translated by anyone who can translate poetry.
Why? Doesn’t any statement of something purporting to be fact obviously include an implied “as far as I know” on the part of the speaker?
That’s casuistry. People who state X confidently, without qualifiers, don’t expect the hearer or reader to automatically supply the qualifiers; they expect to be taken at their word. Especially when it comes to something so problematic as asserting that women don’t or can’t do something (see above), it is imperative to say exactly what one means.
David Marjanović, ninety percent of everything is crap. The correct question is who does a good job.
Especially when it comes to something so problematic as asserting that women don’t or can’t do something (see above), it is imperative to say exactly what one means.
Right.
Except that the article didn’t actually assert that women don’t or can’t do the thing in question, it simply states that, up till last year or so, none had, and now one has. Stating that a woman has done a thing is literally the exact opposite of asserting that women don’t or can’t do that thing.
If you’ve got any reason for supposing that there is a published English translation of the Odyssey by a woman out there, well, let’s see it. At the moment all you’ve got, as far as I can see, is 1) “one of the ones by a man might actually have been by a woman writing under a pen name” and 2) “oh, come on, surely it must have happened at some point, there must have been loads and loads of women who were scholars of Ancient Greek”.
Again, I’m not saying “it must have happened”; that would be absurd. As I said above, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the translators were exclusively male. I just don’t like asserting that they were as if it were established fact.
Maybe you have to make it explicit when it’s something about which you aren’t very confident, but the situtation here is that there are sixty known published English translations of the Odyssey, all by men. There are published translations of the Odyssey by women into other languages, but none into English until now. There are published translations of other things into English by women, but none of the Odyssey. All that combines to make it reasonably likely that this is in fact the first translation by a woman into English, so you don’t have to include an explicit “as far as I know”.
To me, all that combines to make it reasonably likely that it isn’t the first, unless you assume that their list of “sixty known translations” is complete.
(Realistically, it could probably go either way.)
I agree.
Scientists who blog about research tend to do a very good job, often a better one than professional science journalists.
I love that a thread on translations of the Odyssey also has discussion of dialects of Scheme (and of course ‘Lisp’ as the top-level label has even more dialects and subdialects).
Scientists who blog about research tend to do a very good job, often a better one than professional science journalists.
Not for the lay audience though. You have to be very much into the thing to understand most of it. At least for the blogs I occasionally read. Comparing with average science journalism is not a very good idea, though. The average journalism sucks.
None I suspect
Rosa Calzecchi Onesti.
Translator’s Note to The Odyssey:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_wilson_odyssey.php
I’m rather surprised by the claim of her being the first woman to translated the Odyssey into English (presumably completely and published–my Greek teacher could translate parts on sight). My expectation is that there should have already been one (as there in French and Italian). But if they did their due diligence and found 60 previous translations, all by those with male names, I’m inclined to credit the claim without the disclaimer (until proven wrong of course).
Not in my experience, which is however limited to just a few blogs.
But how much of a lay audience are you?
Somewhat surprised that this thread seems not to have mentioned that what is widely alleged (and I don’t personally know of a counterexample to contradict the claim with) to be the first published English version of the Illiad by a female translator (Caroline Alexander) came off the presses just last year. I wonder how many people in recent centuries have (as Ms. Wilson has) done a translation of the Odyssey w/o having previously done one of the Illiad? Although there is the excellent example of W.S. Merwin who decided to get into the Dante-translation biz by just doing the oft-overlooked Purgatorio. And for all I know Wilson might have been working on the Illiad but switched paths on the advice of her publisher or agent after it became clear that she was going to be beaten to press by Ms. Alexander and thereby lose the PR/marketing advantage of being the first-female there.
I was idly curious about other oft-translated texts, so I inquired of Google whether there had been a female translator into English of the Tao Te Ching. And learned that there is indeed such a translation by a Famous Female Author, viz. Ursula le Guin. Whom I suspect has about as much reading ability in Classical Chinese as Ezra Pound had when he favored us with his interesting-if-idiosyncratic English versions of Confucius. (Although Ms. Le Guin did collaborate with an actual Sinological scholar, Jerome Seaton of UNC, who presumably was in charge of making sure that her English was not indefensible as a free translation of the original.)
There is also a version by a scholarly lady named Jane English (whose Ph.D. is apparently in particle physics rather than Sinology), done in collaboration with her ethnic-Chinesely-named husband.
By contrast I expect that Mmes Wilson & Alexander have sufficiently strong chops themselves in Homeric Greek as to have not needed that sort of collaborative assistance.
There are very good science blogs outside my immediate field, and one of them already had a lot of readers when it featured science much more often than it does now.
Whom I suspect has about as much reading ability in Classical Chinese as Ezra Pound had when he favored us with his interesting-if-idiosyncratic English versions of Confucius.
Indeed. She says forthrightly in the introduction: “This is not a translation. I do not know any Chinese.” She based her version on Paul Carus’s zi-by-zi glosses.
(Although Ms. Le Guin did collaborate with an actual Sinological scholar, Jerome Seaton of UNC, who presumably was in charge of making sure that her English was not indefensible as a free translation of the original.)
Again from the introduction:
Wise souls don’t hoard;
the more they do for others the more they have,
the more they give the richer they are.
Here are the other references to Seaton in the book:
J. P. Seaton comments [on 13]: “When Lao Tzu mentions ‘the Empire’ or ‘all under heaven’, he does so with the assumption that all of his readers know that it is a commonwealth where only the ruler who rules by virtue of virtue alone is legitimate.”
Explaining why she drops parts of 31, the stuff about the left and the right: “I consider these passages to be commentaries or marginal glosses that got copied into the text. J. P. Seaton says: ‘What were once supports by analogy to common ceremonial practice are now relevant only to the historian.’ Here they confuse the clear, powerful statement that culminates in the last four lines. The confusion already existed when the Ma wang tui version was written, and there seems to be no way of sorting it out now except by radical surgery.”
“Under J. P. Seaton’s guidance I finally came to feel that I had a handle on the [last line of 33], and that Lau’s rendition [“He who lives out his days has had a long life”] was the most useful.”
“The last stanza [of 42] is uncharacteristic in its didactic tone and in assimilating the teaching to a tradition. Lao Tzu usually cites “what others teach” only to dissociate himself from it. I was inclined to dismiss it as a marginal note by someone who was teaching and annotating the text. But J. P. Seaton, who does teach the text, persuaded me to keep it in the body of the poem, saying ‘It’s a message that for all its flat moralism does connect Taoism to Confucianism and even Buddhism with a single solid thread — averting a hundred holy wars, if nothing else.”
In Chapter 47: “J. P. Seaton reminded me that ‘doing without doing is doing, not not doing.'”
As far as I can make out, Gia-Fu Feng, who was indeed Chinese and a Taoist scholar (see Wikipedia), did the translation, and Jane English took the photographs, but then she revised the translation for the second posthumous edition, along with Lippe, the original editor. And as for Stephen Mitchell, the infamous pseudo-translator of not only the DDJ but Homer, Gilgamesh, Job, Genesis, Neruda, Psalms, and Rilke as well, Le Guin skewered his translation in two words: “not useful”.
The Unix Power Classic: A book about the Unix Way and its Power, woefully incomplete and scurvily advertised here by myself. I have based it on Jonathan Star’s zi-by-zi glosses, more accessible than Carus’s.
I guess it’s a good time to remind everyone that John Emerson is doing extensive work on the Daodejing at Haquelebac.
Whatever the merits of “complicated” as a rendering of polytropos, the unsettling jolt it delivers is a wonderful way to open a poem for “our modern times” (a phrase that Wilson slyly introduces into her translation, invoking the Muse not only in Homer’s name but also in her own).
In the discussion of versions of Homer by women, Alice Oswald’s Memorial perhaps deserves a mention, although this presents itself as an “excavation,” not a “translation” of the Iliad. (“My approach to translation is fairly irreverent. I work closely with the Greek, but instead of carrying the words over into English, I use them as openings through which to see what Homer was looking at.”)
“The man with many angles.”
She translated “The man with many angles” into “language of the Angles”….
Sorry, couldn’t resist
This went straight to my Christmas list, and I’ll enthusiastically second the recommendation for The Lost Books of the Odyssey as well.
But in a discussion of masculinity of style, since our host is a science fiction reader, I’m surprised no one mentioned the “ineluctable masculinity” of James Tiptree, Jr.
There is a fictional woman who published a translation of the Odyssey, in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. It’s said to be so amazing that the other Greek professors won’t use it because it would discourage the students.
But in a discussion of masculinity of style, since our host is a science fiction reader, I’m surprised no one mentioned the “ineluctable masculinity” of James Tiptree, Jr.
I’m glad you did. I laughed and laughed when the truth came out. (But I’m hesitating to read what’s said to be a splendid biography, because I’m afraid it will depress me.)
Googling “Tiptree” revealed the existence of the Tiptree Jam Museum.
I would respectfully like to challenge Emily Wilson’s translations as follows:
Polytropos would translate to “crafty” and not to “complicated”. “Poly” meaning “many” and “tropos” meaning “way”.
Andras translates to “man”, it does not translate to husband unless used in colloquial sense.
Direct translation of “husband” is “syzygos”
Only when used in context can “andras” mean husband. In its generic sense “andras” would imply “man” and not “husband”
Plato, in Lesser Hippias, attributes the meaning ‘wily, cunning’ to Homer’s πολύτροπος:
The exchange between Hippias and Socrates leaves little doubt as to the precise meaning inferred by Plato. But Ancient Greek πολύτροπος could also mean ‘much-wandering’, ‘versatile’, ‘manifold’, ‘diverse’ and whatever else can be semantically derived from a bahuvrihi compound like MANY-TURN ‘(having/taking) many ways/turns/directions’. As for Odysseus, ‘much-wandering’ looks like an apt epithet, but a deliberately πολύσημος figura etymologica is also likely here.
Andras translates to “man”, it does not translate to husband unless used in colloquial sense.
We’re talking about Ancient Greek here, so the nominative is ἀνήρ ane:r, not andras. And it can mean husband in Ancient Greek, even in the Ilias and Odyssey (although most likely not in the passage discussed), see meaning V here and the citations.
I agree with both Piotr and Hans. Especially in regards to “andras” its meaning is all in the context in which it is used as to whether it implies “man” or “husband”.
“Aner” without being used in context implies “man” http://www.bible-researcher.com/aner.html
To accurately have described “husband” one would use “syzigos” in place of “aner” as this was the term used in Ancient Greek which was derived from Proto Indo European.
The difficulty i am especially having is the translation of Polytropos meaning “complicated”. Common sense would have used the word “períplokos” if it was intended to mean “complicated”.
Can you tell me where syzigos is attested in Ancient Greek? Woodhouse doesn’t list it under “husband” and I also can’t find it in Liddell-Scott. And I while I don’t want to imply that ἀνήρ means something else in Homeric Greek, the usages discussed in the source you mention concerns Biblical Koine Greek, which is (depending when you assume the Odyssey was composed) 600-800 later than the Odyssey.
It’s syzygos.
@MMcM: Thanks, I should have checked under that spelling additionally. Funny thing is, according to the Liddell-Scott lemma you quote, it does not mean “husband” in Classical Greek (but it can mean “wife”).
syzygos : how about “spouse”?
All very valid points. I will not argue that.
Again, it’s all in the context in which it used.
But still, here we are, the title of this thread, “polytropos” which does not translate to “complicated”. “Crafty”, perhaps, “wily” maybe, but “complicated” it does not mean, for another word already exists for this.
May also be time for Woodhouse and Liddell-Scott to make a revision or footnote. Seems perhaps direct reference to words used out of context is where Emily Wilson may have erred.
I think the story of The Odyssey deserves better than this, it’s really not that “complicated”.
syzygos : how about “spouse”?
If you look at the entry in Liddell-Scott MMcM linked to, you’ll see that syzygos is not used like that: it’s either an adjective meaning “yoked together, paired, united, esp. by marriage”, or, of fish, “swimming in pairs”. So you could translate it “paired” or “married”. If it’s used as a noun, it’s “wife”, designating male persons it means “yoke-fellow, comrade, brother, a gladiator’s adversary”. So it seems that it never means “husband” and never is used as a gender-neutral designation for a partner in marriage like English “spouse”.
@languagehat, you should absolutely read the Tiptree biography. Alice Sheldon had a much longer and more varied life than her characters — can there be any other biography where the title character doesn’t actually appear until halfway through the book? Even as I watch her running full-tilt at six (count ’em) different careers only to drop out, I have the perspective of knowing that in the end she found a voice to speak with that let her be heard and join, as she never had before, a conversation and a community: Tiptree was a writer’s writer, with serious letter-friendships with Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Harlan Ellison, etc., starting out in-character but continuing as herself after she was outed. She did have many periods of despair, but I found it much easier to read about them in third person, compared to feeling them portrayed in fiction. Put it on your wish list if you don’t already have it.
Thanks, I just did so (the Kindle edition is only eight bucks!). How can I resist a rave like that?
The issue of how to translate a word in an epic poem like The Odyssey presents additional issues beyond those found in the translation of other kinds of texts—even other shapes of poetry. Because the epic as a genre is natively a spoken, recited form, there are many repeated formulas, especially in descriptions of characters; these serve both as memory aids for the bard and narrative anchor points for the listeners—who get to know Odysseus as a sacker of cities, master mariner, and (in a translation from Wikipedia for the title of this post, which I think really conveys the meaning well, even if not in just one word) a man of twists and turns. In translating another genre, one might be inclined to include some elegant variation instead of a single repeated word, but that may be undesirable in an epic in a way that it might not be in a different kind of work.
As I was reminded of this thread, another issue related to repetitive wording was also on my mind (and there is a direct relationship to The Odyssey through the works of one author/translator). As I have been going through, reading and rereading a lot of seminal fantasy works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I have noticed that many fantasy authors from that time period make particular efforts to give their writings distinctly archaic feels. One way they do this is by using words that are archaic, dialectical, or both. I have no problems with this, most of the time. However, it does often bother me when an author picks a selection of archaic vocabulary and then uses it exclusively in place of more common, modern, or standard terms. For example, William Morris uses the word carle (as well as the even more obscure carline) with great frequency in The Well at the World’s End, in both narration dialogue, to such a degree that it is distracting that he practically never uses more conventional synonyms. If you compare his translation of The Odyssey, he still uses carle, but most of the time in the particular compounds “house-carle” (which is enough of a fixed form to have its own OED entry) and “staff-carle”; so this choice of usage was not just an expression of Morris’s natural Scots dialect. Similarly, he uses gossip (etymologically, apparently “god sib,” with “sib” in the same sense found in “sibling”—so meaning “a relative before god”) to the exclusion of “godmother,” among other distracting examples.
Dunsany does the same kind of thing, but he manages to capture the feel of epic poetry better, I think. The King of Elfland’s Daughter makes no pretense at being written with natural phrasing or diction (and Dunsany’s mythologizing vignettes are structured even less like normal prose). This is, again, somewhat distracting, but I think he does a better job of conveying an epic-like quality through his odd word choices and frequent repetitions than most other authors from the period. William Hope Hodgson was capable of keeping his peculiar word choices from becoming a serious problem, in a work like The House on the Borderland. However, in The Night Land, he ups the faux-archaic style of the language to an absurd degree. This includes a consistent oddity in diction, like always referring to the protagonists supply pouch as a “scrip,” but compared to the mock-antiquated grammar he forces on the reader, the word choices are hardly noticeable.
Le Guin said somewhere that Dunsany’s style was a cross between the KJV and the speech of his tenants — a narrow vein to mine, but all his own.
I realize that, last year, I had some further comments about the word carline that I never got around to posting. Looking at Eric Brighteyes reminded me of it.
The OED gives two sub-senses for carline:
The most recent citation for sense a is Morris’s The Earthly Paradise: Part IV (1870): “Goodwife.. Thou art a sturdy carline yet.” This is consistent with Morris’s use in other works (such as The Well at the World’s End), where he uses the word to mean a woman of the laboring class; in his conception, the term would probably be considered offensive if used to refer to a lady of the gentry or nobility (as with woman or female here).
In Eric Brighteyes (1890), the word carline is much more freighted with connotations. It is used in a relatively neutral fashion to describe older women; the first appearance of the word in reference to an otherwise anonymous “old wife.” However, it also carries a definite pejorative taint when it is used to describe Groa. Eric himself has this to say to her:
After Groa falls out with the local magnate and priest in Middalhof, Asmund Asmundson—with whom she has never made any pretense that she was not a witch—Groa calls herself “carline” derisively:
However, she is here attempting to win sympathy from Asmund, with whom she has been cohabiting for many years (in partial violation of an oath Asmund swore to his dead wife, although he has kept the oath to the extent of not actually marrying Groa; and before their estrangement, he had normally addressed her as “housekeeper,” rather than any term of endearment, in spite of their longstanding sexual relationship.)
The OED also lists a compound, carline’s pet, as an obsolete Scottish “term of abuse for a person in satirical poetry and flytings in 16th-cent. Scotland.” The earliest citation is to a poem by William Dunbar:
and the OED adjudges that the later uses are references to Dunbar’s. However, interpreters of Dunbar’s work have apparently differed whether Dunbar’s pet refers derisively to an old woman’s favorite (perhaps by equation to a witch’s familiar) or to the woman’s flatulence (the oldest sense of pet—and the one from which we get petard for a small explosive).
“The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie”; this is one of Dunbar’s sections.
Mauch muttoun, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous;
Rank beggar, ostir dregar, foule fleggar in the flet;
Chittirlilling, ruch lilling, lik schilling in the milhous;
Baird rehator, theif of natur, fals tratour, feyindis gett;
Filling of tauch, rak suach, cry crauch, thow art oursett;
Muttoun dryver, girnall ryver, yadswywar, fowll fell the;
Herretyk, lunatyk, puspyk, carlingis pet,
Rottin crok, dirtin drok, cry cok, or I sall quell the.
A glossary I looked at claims that pett is ‘fart’.
That word before “carlingis pet” should be “purspyk”—an extremely rare variant of pickpurse or purse-picker. The OED has only three total quotations with the “purspyk” spelling, two by Dunbar and another in an obvious reference to Dunbar (“An heretyk, a purspyk, A lumbard, a lolard”). There is one further quotation with the modernized spelling “pursepick,” from Joseph Wambaugh’s 1978 novel The Black Marble.
Google Books searches show the word is almost exclusively associated with Dunbar in the corpus. It pretty much only appears in Dunbar’s writings and other references thereto. A more general Google search for “purspyk” is dominated by references to an Internet user who uses the handle “PurSpyk” (which is presumably unrelated and supposed to be pronounced like “pure spike”) on multiple sites.
lik schilling in the milhous
*has Watergate flashback*
Quite belatedly, I realize what the first line of Ms. Wilson’s Englishing of the Odyssey evokes (intentionally or otherwise) from the pre-existing corpus of Anglophone verse:
“He’s a complicated man
But no one understands him but his woman”
https://genius.com/Isaac-hayes-theme-from-shaft-lyrics
SHAFT! Can you dig it?
With a Spade, perhaps.
Funny, I thought that somebody else had already mentioned that connection to the work of maestro Hayes.