What Sort of a Man was Odysseus?

Well, according to an article in the Nov. 5, 2017, New York Times Sunday Magazine, there is little agreement on that.

The article reports on University of Pennsylvania professor Emily Wilson whose recent translation of Homer's "Odyssey" is the first by a woman. And, according to Wyatt Mason, the author of the article, Wilson renders Homer's work in a radically new voice compared with all that has gone on before -- and there have apparently been about 60 previous English language translations.





At the very beginning of the book, Odysseus is described by Homer as being polytropos, a compound world combining  poly (many) with tropos (turn). Sounds like he might be a ballet dancer (unlikely since that form of art arrived much, much later) or perhaps an expert in some form of martial arts (much more likely, but not his chief strength on the field of battle).

But according to Wilson, what Homer probably had in mind for Odysseus was "complicated." While that obviously isn't literal from a textual point of view, "all translations are interpretations,"
Wilson told Mason.

In his article, Mason provides 36 other translations of the same word in other English-language editions of the "Odyssey," none of which say it means "complicated."  For instance, Richard Lattimore's familiar version calls Odysseus a man "of many ways," which seems close. Others range far further afield: "of wide-ranging spirit," or "by long experience tried," or "skilled in expedients" --  just to cite a very few.

Wilson believes "complicated" is right because it best captures the ambiguity of Odysseus' nature, one aspect of which could be thought of as "unreliable." Think of those seven years he spent enjoying Calypso's sexual pleasures while his wife, Penelope, fended off an endless stream of suitors so as to remain ever-faithful to her long-absent husband.

"I wanted there to be a sense," Wilson told [Mason] that "maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about his character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded."

Why does this matter? Because our familiar culture -- the Western tradition -- is "impossible to imagine without them [Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey]."

That tradition is currently being tested in the country's intensifying culture wars.

Mason's article provides only a couple of short excerpts from Wilson's new translation, but it appears to be a lot more easily read than most if not all of what has gone before.

Another good read for those who don't want to struggle through often tortuous English translations of Greek poetry might want to get ahold of a copy of "Odysseus: A Life," by Charles Beye, a now-retired professor of Classics at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Boston University.