![]() ![]() ![]() There is a scene near the end of the text, where a group of women who work in the home of the hero Odysseus are hung for sleeping with the suitors who had occupied it in his absence. ![]() Her translation choices also diverge from more commonly accepted wording. The text is punchy and clear, owing to her purposefully translating it with the same number of lines as the original. Wilson’s translation is groundbreaking in more ways than just her gender. While her gender is an important fact, given that only one of the 70-odd English versions available was translated by a woman, in Wilson’s words: “That happened to be the case, but that’s not why I did it.” When a journalist asked her to give the media a new way to refer to her – something that didn’t involve the words ‘first female translator of the Odyssey’ – Wilson gave this neat, sidestepping answer. It was the last day of the Sydney Writer’s Festival, and Professor Wilson’s talk on her translation of the second oldest text in the Western literary canon, the Odyssey, was drawing to a close. “One shouldn’t think of their own epithet,” said Emily Wilson, on Sunday night. This piece is from our coverage of Sydney Writers’ Festival this year. ![]()
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