LyrArc Article Gist
The British, the Germans, the French, the Americans, all have translations of Homer's epic poem "Odyssey," written in Greek of the 8th century BC. It is part of the fabric of European culture and civilization. "Tell me about a complicated man," -so goes the starting line of Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's epic poem "Odyssey," nothing heroic. Wilson tries to tell Odysseus story in simple language of his return home to Ithaca from the Trojan War after ten years of struggle and adventures, a story of heroism against all odds against sea creatures and sirens, shipwrecked and in storms, and fighting his way to regain his home and family. But in a way that make him an ordinary person with different flaws and human characteristics not as a hero that previous versions depict him. She is also the first woman to do a translation into English of Homer. She sees it as a 20th century contemporary version with a woman Penelope, Odysseus's wife, at the heart of the story, and the language of simple prose that has emerged in poetry in the last one hundred years. The Paris Review gives the first passages of her unique translation as an Oxford historian with the courage to present a skeptical perspective. Compare this to "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," a poem by John Keats in 1816 which celebrates the first real widely read English translation of Homer's Odyssey by John Chapman in 1616.

"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

To understand this one has to feel the time and place 1616 was when the Armada of Charles V invasion of Britain had been defeated by Queen Elizabeth in 1588. The voyages of discovery of the Americas was beginning with the Mayflower leaving Britain by 1621, and the Dutch and the British struggling to fight for the Portuguese discovered lands in the East in Asia- India, China and Japan, with the same missionary zeal as the Spaniards. It is entirely from European eyes which is questioned in the decolonization of the post 1950's to 2025 period. Emily Wilson tries to give another perspective from a woman's point of view- pushing back from a men centric view- and this enriches our understanding, without taking anything away from the breathless manner in which Keats resonates even in Asian readers minds-

"then when I felt like some watcher of the skies 

When a new planet swims into his ken."

What the Asian reader sees is something entirely different. In India, China, Ceylon, and Indonesia, Japan it is acceptance that the science and technology, the openness of northern European civilization, the adventurous attitude, is what will open up boundless possibilities.  This is why there is no Gandhian or Mao-tse-tung/Deng protest at this. Rapid transformation and modernization through the same process as northern Europe is the goal. A very different perspective than Emily Wilson's or Christopher Nolan's, more like Chapman's and more of the wonder of John Keats of Britain at the voyages of discovery that left from Seville and from England to Australia under Captain Cook in the ship Endeavor. The metaphor here is of science and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, of the liberty to think and believe from one's own mind that came with the Mayflower, and the Declaration of Jefferson that "all men were created equal and were endowed by their Creator with some inalienable rights."