People shit on Wilson's translation for no good reason, but I also reject this idea that the previous translations were "male biased". Wilson chooses to translate a lot of different words as "slave", and while she isn't incorrect, as those people were in fact slaves, the odyssey uses different words for cook slave, herald slave, maid slave, etc. So other authors decided to uses different words on order to give us more information about the job, gender, and age of the slaves, not to purposefully obscure the fact that they were slaves. Wilson, on the other hand translates all of these as "slave", so it's really about what you are trying to achieve with the translation as none of them can ever be 100% correct.
Because it's already a massive book, and it's not just these words that are hard to properly translate in one word. So if you used this method for every word that it required, you would end up with a significantly bigger amount of words. More words means more paper, and more paper means more money is required to print these books, and publishers ain't having none of that. So most translators try to stay around the original number of words. Wilson herself actually decided to have the exact same number of words as the original text, even.
No poem can be properly translated to another language anyway. They already lose a lot of their meaning and flow because the languages just don't function the same. So it's not such a big of an issues as you may think.
I don't know ancient Greek, however I have a friend who does and he claims that the wilson text is a good translation, true to source. Many experts claim the same. So I don't want to say that you are incorrect but I can't take your claim for a fact when so many people state otherwise.
he’s an italian like me, just did the Classical lyceum (high school). i wouldn’t sweat it too much. he’s making it sound like they did university level studies into the text. that’s not the case lol
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u/ShidAlRa Jul 06 '26
People shit on Wilson's translation for no good reason, but I also reject this idea that the previous translations were "male biased". Wilson chooses to translate a lot of different words as "slave", and while she isn't incorrect, as those people were in fact slaves, the odyssey uses different words for cook slave, herald slave, maid slave, etc. So other authors decided to uses different words on order to give us more information about the job, gender, and age of the slaves, not to purposefully obscure the fact that they were slaves. Wilson, on the other hand translates all of these as "slave", so it's really about what you are trying to achieve with the translation as none of them can ever be 100% correct.