Good morning!

I've been reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and it's so good. The translation itself, but the introduction was also full of things I hadn't thought about and new ways to think about things I had. In a tribute to her work, this week's Fem Fri is about women who have translated the Classics.

Firstly, here's an interview with Emily Wilson that covers some of the things I've been enjoying in her work – the immediacy and, related I suppose, the desire to tell the story that she makes very felt throughout her work:

I used “modern times” for the Greek kai hemin “also for us.” So what does “also” mean, and who are “us?” I spent a huge amount of time grappling with how to deal with that. Because I could have just said “also for us,” but that doesn’t evoke anything particular. I wanted it to be clear that this—the conjunction kai, or “and” [denotes it]—has been something that has been told over and over again, but we, whoever we are, are going to get it. There have been other times this poem has been told, and now again for us, here is this time.

https://bookriot.com/emily-wilson-translation-the-odyssey/

Now here's Alice Oswald's Memorial, which is a translation of the Illiad that focuses on the less famous people from the Illiad. A lot of people die in that poem who are not (spoilers, I guess) Hector, Patroclus or Achilles!  her project is to foreground their stories. This is an interview but there's also some excerpts from the poem:

the passage of two millennia does nothing to soften the impact of all those lost lives, significant and unique and suddenly ended, which pile up as the poem progresses: "EPICLES a Southerner from sunlit Lycia" who was "knocked backwards by a rock/ And sank like a diver"; "AXYLUS son of Teuthras" who "so loved his friends" but "died side by side with Calesius/ In a daze of loneliness"; "POLYDORUS … who loved running/ Now somebody has to tell his father/ That exhausted man leaning on the wall/ Looking for his favourite son". The poem is structured like a lament, the soldiers' epitaphs interspersed with direct translations of Homer's extended similes

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/09/alice-oswald-homer-iliad-interview

Shadi Bartsch's translation of the Aeneid, like Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, uses only the number of lines in the original poem. This side by side shows the impact of that choice really nicely:

Take one popular and acclaimed translation, published by Robert Fagles in 2006. Fagles gives the epicʼs opening this way, making three lines into four:

Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,

he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,

destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil,

yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above

In contrast, Bartschʼs translation tracks with the lines of the original, and reads with a decided punch:

My song is of war and a man: a refugee by fate,

the first from Troy to Italyʼs Lavinian shores,

battered much on land and sea by blows from gods

https://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humanities/aeneid-our-time

There's also a good, longish article about Bartsch's translation here:

For all that pietas is a recurring word in the Aeneid, the clustering within these few lines of two instances of ‘piety’ and another of ‘pious’ is marked; our response to Aeneas’ actions and reactions is insistently framed by the word, the ideals it evokes, the way it may be mocked or exploited, and the question of whether virtue resides in character or is only realised through what someone does or doesn’t do.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/rebecca-armstrong/all-kinds-of-unlucky

Happy Friday, virtuous friends,

A xx.