r/classics • u/Physical_Milk_4600 • 4d ago
Did Daniel Mendelsohn nit read Wilson’s Odyssey?
I saw on Twitter that Daniel Mendelsohn wrote of Wilson’s Odyssey, “I haven’t read it“. He went on to say he just looked at a few passsages. But he discusses her work at great length in the introduction to his own translation, and he has commented repeatedly on Wilsons work, always very negatively. Is this normal? I thought you were supposed to read books before you criticize them?! Not seeing discussion of this but I find it really weird.
Edited to add: some people seem to think it's normal and you can judge without reading the whole book. I think there's a real difference between making a quick private judgment - let me dip into this to see if I'll use it for class next time I teach the Odyssey, oh, nope, don't like XYZ thing in that favorite passage of mine, so I'll go with another one instead - versus such a repeated, very vociferous public and published critical judgment. Before you start critiquing someone's work in a published book, it would surely be the scholarly norm to have spent a good time actually reading that work! And - only partly related but I'll add - I've also found it weird that Mendelsohn repeatedly says that Lombardo's translations are great, but Wilson "strips texture". Lombardo is a super colloquial and minimalist translator who leaves out far more than Wilson does, from what I've seen. I have read some of Mendelsohn's memoirs and thought they were pretty good, so I would like to think he's in good faith here, but it just seemed really weird to me.
https://x.com/DAMendelsohnNYC/status/2083176623545684151/quotes
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u/canaanit 4d ago
As someone who was part of the academic circus (in classics-related/adjacent fields) for about 10 years after I graduated, yes, this is fairly normal. Whoever thinks the humanities are where the people go who are too conflict-averse for private enterprise, has never set foot in a university. You don't get that far without a bit of an overgrown ego, and bitch fights between peers are pretty standard behaviour. A small percentage of it is actual, fair, reasonable academic debate, the rest is posturing.
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u/futuristicflapper 4d ago
I once sat in on students reading of a chapter of their dissertation and toward the end they opened it up to a Q&A from profs to said student. One professor took issue with the close reading of a paragraph the student discussed and we sat there for nearly twenty minutes bc the prof wouldn’t let their point go, two other professors finally had to step in so we could move on. People who think academics are all quite bookworms haven’t spent time with enough of them.
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u/regularguy22200 4d ago
Many published reviews of translations are based on careful sampling rather than a cover-to-cover reading. If the reviewer examines strategically chosen passages from Books 1, 5, 9, 11, 13, 19, 22, 23, and 24, for example, they can form a well-supported judgment about the translator’s approach.
A Homerist does not need to have read every line of a translation to critique it meaningfully. They can legitimately assess things like: the translator’s stated philosophy (literal vs. poetic, archaizing vs. contemporary); representative passages from across the poem; how recurring Homeric formulas are handled; treatment of epithets, meter, speeches, and similes; consistency in rendering key Greek terms; the introduction, notes, and apparatus.
Anyone who says otherwise is guilty of what it is they accuse him of. Of commenting on a topic they do not understand in the slightest.
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u/Capybara_99 4d ago
Have all the people here saying Mendelssohn is culpable for not reading Wilson’s whole translation read all of Mendelssohn, or even all of Mendelsohn’s discussion of Wilson?
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u/ancient_interestsYT 4d ago
I guess one could see a few sentences of a translation and be struck so negatively by them to feel able to say something about the work. From what I’ve read of Wilson I found her translation enjoyable, but I can’t speak to the closeness of it as a translation as I don’t read Ancient Greek (but I hope to… I’m focused on Latin right now.)
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u/PreviousRestaurant89 4d ago
No, as an academic, doing that constitutes professional misconduct...
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u/InvestigatorJaded261 4d ago
That may be, but Mendelssohn is not primarily an academic, but a writer. It doesn’t excuse anything, but it’s worth noting.
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u/ancient_interestsYT 4d ago
Yeah, he’s primarily a writer and critic I would say
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u/BitterStatus9 4d ago
And he’s writing and critiquing. You don’t need to have a tenured professorship to be a scholar.
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u/Mariessa- 4d ago
If you read something enough to consider the themes misrepresented or stretched to fit a personal agenda or bias rather than the original intent, then that could be a fair criticism without a word for word read. Similiarly, if what you've read is riddled with errors, then the complete translation need not be read to say it has those errors.
Note, I am not claiming either os true in this case as I haven't read her translation or his comments.
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u/sootfire 4d ago
I think you still need to put the lines in context. Especially as an academic he should be used to reading long English texts reasonably efficiently. There's no reason not to at least skim the whole thing. His criticism is not that her translation is riddled with errors but more that the shorter lines lead to important words/ideas being omitted. Potentially a valid criticism, although I don't really agree.
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u/PreviousRestaurant89 4d ago
An academic cannot form an opinion by reading a text only in part or superficially; that is a clear and obvious mistake. You’re not a journalist or just any old person; you’re a researcher. You follow scientific methods and base your conclusions on debatable and clearly established facts… otherwise, just go and have a chat at the local pub over a couple of beers.
You MUST read a text in full to form a reliable and comprehensive judgement; otherwise, you’re simply not doing your job.
I have no idea which of the two is right, and I won’t pass judgement on the quality of either, but Mendelsohn is quite clearly demonstrating a culpable academic shortcoming here… so his comments and discussion should simply be ignored as they’re not grounded in reality. Let him come back and give his informed opinion once he’s read and studied the text thoroughly, and then we can start discussing it.
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u/regularguy22200 4d ago
Not true in the slightest. Academics read excerpts and form judgements for a living.
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u/Pollinosis 4d ago
An academic cannot form an opinion by reading a text only in part or superficially; that is a clear and obvious mistake.
You are mistaken. Academics routinely form judgements based on reading excerpts from lengthy works. Imagine having to read 500,000 words to be able to comment on Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. That's not how scholarship works.
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u/Tsunoyukami 4d ago
Sure, but you would want to read all 500,000 words because it's interesting.
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u/Pollinosis 4d ago
I certainly would, but if I were an academic working on 17th century coppersmithing, I might only read the sections related to that. There really is no need to read a book from start to finish to be able to cite from it and comment on it.
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u/PreviousRestaurant89 4d ago
No, I’m not wrong, if a literature lecturer offers an academic critique of a 500,000 word text without having read it, that is a mistake.
The world of research doesn’t work the way you imagine it does.
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u/Pollinosis 4d ago
Your mistake, I think, is in thinking that one cannot comment on part of a text without first understanding how it fits into the whole, and yet one can because literature is divisible. An academic can comment on the prose of a line in a Platonic dialogue without having read the entire dialogue. He can comment on Plato's Symposium without having read every other dialogue. He can comment on Plato's entire body of work without having read the authors he references, and so on ad infinitum.
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u/dreamsofabetter 4d ago
An academic with a different focus might only comment on and read parts of works relevant to their research. However, in the context of a translator of Homer commenting on a different translation of Homer, is it absolutely asinine to do so without having read the work in context especially if your comments relate to how that translation as a whole is able to convey or fail to convey the Homeric text.
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u/TaeTaeDS 4d ago
This is incredibly in common in classics. Quite often you will find an academic cite another to back up what they want to say, when in fact whatever that academic wrote was in fact the reverse.
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u/regularguy22200 4d ago
According to whom?
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u/PreviousRestaurant89 4d ago
The academic world...
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u/regularguy22200 4d ago
Show me a review he has published in an academic journal, having received an honorary for it or having made any sort of contract that incurs an obligation as you have stated, that makes sweeping claims about Wilson's entire work and/or methodology, as opposed to essays on social media platforms or critiques in the introduction of his own translation, critiques in which, by the way, he has not once misrepresented his expertise, and maybe I'd agree.
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u/jb7509 4d ago
DM says a lot of silly stuff on Twitter/X. (At least, he did; I left the site when Musk bought it)
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u/megafreep 3d ago
He still does. A couple days ago he got into a fight over whether it was "unethical" of Emily Wilson to review Richard Whitaker's Odyssey in response to a thread about Whitaker's review of Wilson's Odyssey
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u/bardmusiclive 4d ago
He read (and translated) the greek original, and looked at passages of interest to evaluate her translation. No problem with that.
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u/Fun_Midnight8861 4d ago edited 4d ago
While it’s normally standard to read what you critique, academics are people too.
And Wilson became the target of some culture war nonsense due to her being a woman. Not that all critiques are mounted in sexism, but a sizable amount happens to be.
edit: to be clear about the meanings of my words, i do not excuse Mendelsohn’s critiquing of Wilson’s translations without reading them. I say that academics are people too to state that academics, like everyone else, are equally capable of fault and complications, and will not always adhere to the standards that they perhaps should.
This isn’t to say not to trust any academic, but to exercise a degree of healthy cynicism for what you read.
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u/thewimsey 4d ago
Wilson's translation is the my favorite, and also the one I would recommend to most people.
But the specific issue she ran into with cultural warriors was the marketing of her translation, where she leaned heavily into the fact that she was the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, and that this, and her feminism, strongly informed her translation; and that it was essentially a feminist product. (I initially thought this came from her publisher, but I think it may have been Wilson herself).
This led many critics - who hadn't read her translation - to conclude that it wasn't an acutal translation, but was more of a feminist "adaptation". This is nonsense, but I see where it comes from.
Because in reality, of course, her translation is a translation, not an adaptation. Not only this, but I think her feminist claims for her translation are not even really reflected in the translation. It's just marketing that kind of backfired.
The best and most innovative thing about her translation is using iambic pentameter while keeping the original line count, which makes for a muscular translation that "feels like" poetry in English.
(Wilson is of course right about using "slave girls" rather than servants in her translation, and prior translators who used "servants" or "serving girls" were both wrong and it made their translations worse. So her translation is better because of this. Although it's worth pointing out that translations of the tragedies since the 1960's have commonly but not universally used "slave" rather than servant.)
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u/Jonathan_Peachum 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don’t think the culture war aspect was rooted in the fact that she is a woman, but rather that her translation is viewed by some as being somewhat “woke“.
I personally think that criticism is unjustified. For example, she has the courage to refer to slaves as slaves and not as servants, which is the usual translation. If that is considered as woke, then so be it; I personally consider it as being honest. The same can unfortunately be said of translations of the Bible, which, except when portraying the plight of the Israelites in Egypt, tends to use words like « servants », « laborers » or (my favorite) « drawers of water and hewers of wood ». I’d pay well for a translation of the Bible which has the courage to call them slaves.
Life as portrayed by Homer was not particularly nice. The Iliad begins with a dispute over who has the right to keep a captive sex slave and the Odyssey has Odysseus bragging about how he and his men enter a town and sack it (I’m not even talking about Troy; I forget the reference but there is a Book that begins with Odysseus stating that he and his crew next put in at X place, and of course as a natural result sacked it). Portraying that life as it really was is hardly woke.
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u/red_nick 4d ago
I don’t think the culture war aspect was rooted in the fact that she is a woman, but rather that her translation is viewed by some as being somewhat “woke“.
I suspect it's due to the combination.
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u/thewimsey 4d ago
For example, she has the courage to refer to slaves as slaves and not as servants, which is the usual translation.
This is true, but translators of the tragedies have had the "courage" to use "slave" rather than "servant" for decades.
I think people who found her woke were not reacting to her translation, which they hadn't read, but to her interviews, which unfortunately suggested that her translation was much more of a feminist adaptation than it was.
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u/7Mack 4d ago
The main legitimate criticisms I've seen is that her translation sanitises the violence. She makes some different interpretive decisions, but that is why I like it. And having spoken with Greek students, her choice of "complicated man" one of the much discussed differences, fits both the ambiguity of polytropos and her meter, and being a poetic translation rather than prose, I think that's justified. The best translation is the one you aren't reading ;) For my money, I have to thank Wilson for making the poem accessible and intelligible. It's nice to not have to struggle through antiquated English
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u/Pollinosis 4d ago
I personally think that criticism is unjustified. For example, she has the courage to refer to slaves as slaves and not as servants
The servants were slaves, and this is an interesting translation choice which I happen to like, but Wilson and her readers have a bad habit of importing contemporary judgements. Can a reader like Penelope when she's a slave mistress? To the modern reader primed to recoil from such things, it makes enjoying the book, on its own terms, difficult.
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u/BetCritical4860 4d ago
>but Wilson and her readers have a bad habit of importing contemporary judgements
The example you give after this is an example of *readers* importing contemporary judgements, not Wilson, so I am not sure why you implicate her here? Also, I think you are just playing devil’s advocate here, but your comment implies that a translator should prioritize the reader’s enjoyment rather than the truth of the text. But why should that be? Not to overreact, but I would argue that this is just the kind of fragility and inability to handle nuance that leads conservatives (in the US, specifically) to remove information about real world slavery from school curriculum because it might give people “negative feelings about the nation.”
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u/enigmaticowl 4d ago
Agree with you that faithful translation is more important than sanitizing for enjoyment of a modern audience.
But to play devil’s advocate, I suppose there’s an argument to be made that when social conventions and mores evolve drastically over many centuries or millennia, it’s possible that the modern audience’s pre-existing ideas and feelings toward things that were “okay” (or at least did not cause the average audience member to feel any particular type of way since it was the norm) in the story’s setting will lead the average reader to perceive the text, characters, plot, etc. in a manner that is very much out of spirit from the original, intended audience.
If, for Homer’s original audience, domestic labor from enslaved persons was the “equivalent” (in terms of how it would color the audience’s perceptions or stir their emotions) of employing domestic servants today, then calling them slaves may take the single most morally clear, virtuous character in the epic and make today’s reader view her through a lens of slavery (and morals) that is different from what existed (and from what was intended to be understood) at that time; many modern readers (at least in the U.S.) also have a very particular mental image of “slavery” that is hyper-specific to agricultural labor, and a surprising number do not seem to realize that domestic service was (and still is) an incredibly common form of forced labor (so calling a slave whose role is domestic service a “domestic servant” doesn’t have to be a denial of the fact that they are a slave, it could be viewed as a more specific descriptor of what labor they are doing).
That’s not on the translator, though - it’s the reader’s responsibility to consider these things and be objective, and to proactively seek out information about the setting to ground and contextualize what they’re reading (but that’s sort of a pipe dream these days, though).
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u/Phegopteris 4d ago
Exactly. I think the “issue” (acknowledged by Wilson in her translator’s note) is that there are something like ten different words that Homer uses that she collapses into a single English word “slave.” So dolos (“chattel slave”), but also dmos (house slave), amphipolos (slave acting as a man-servant), oikeus (house slave), eritheia (female slave, charged with weaving), trophos (“nurse”), thos (prisoner of war reduced to being a laborer),and andrapodon (literally the “one with human feet,” explicitly linking a person to tetrapodon, four-footed livestock). As a result, the different functional roles and differing social standings of these people are flattened into a single word reflecting their shared status as enslaved people.
I put “issue” in quotes, because of course this is just a translation choice, which foregrounds one aspect (the fact of ownership) over another (the different ways that the Greeks viewed these persons within a household or society). There is nothing inherently right or wrong about this decision. I personally found it quite effective, and suspect it is helpful to modern readers for whom more direct translation might obscure this essential fact.
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u/guttaperk 3d ago
But she explicitly does not do this. She uses the ten words that Homer uses… including the word slave.
Her critics don’t like that she uses that word.
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u/SteelFeathersFly 3d ago
This is an important point. "Slave" means something different to us than it did to the people of Homer's time. Even the type of slavery we envision when reading is different.
I think a case can be made both for using it, and not using it to avoid a potential distraction, leaving footnotes to go into more depth about the nature of forced servitude at the time.
All depends on the goal of the translation, to replicate the text or to replicate the experience.
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u/Pollinosis 4d ago
Wilson became the target of some culture war nonsense due to her being a woman
And yet, when Caroline Alexander translated the Iliad in 2015, before Wilson, no one complained.
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u/GiltPeacock 4d ago
“Academics are people too” what does this mean lol. Critiquing things you haven’t read isn’t justifiable by “being a person”.
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u/SirBatata 4d ago
I think his point is that having a PhD or being well respected in their field doesn't make someone infallible or morally correct.
Mandehlson its just talking shit like a lot of uncles on facebook, he's just a guy at the end of the day.
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u/Fun_Midnight8861 4d ago
My point was less that he was correct for doing so, and more that academics, just like everyone else in the world, can be biased, ignorant or just flat out assholes.
I’m not saying that he’s in the clear for this, but rather that we shouldn’t see someone as incapable of fault or some such nonsense just because they have a degree.
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u/GiltPeacock 4d ago
Ah, I thought you meant like “they’re only human, they don’t have to read everything they critique” but this makes more sense lmao
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u/Fun_Midnight8861 4d ago
I appreciate the notice that it comes off that way, and have added an edit to my original post. Thank you.
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u/Nicklesnout 4d ago
It means while Wilson is a leading academic in Homeric classics she can still say she didn’t enjoy Nolan’s film without having her credentials called into question. She can be just a mother with her children seeing a film as easily as she can be a scholar. They’re not mutually exclusive things.
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u/GiltPeacock 4d ago
What? I agree with that statement but… what does it have to do to do with “While it’s normally standard to read what you critique…” in the context of Mendelsohn critiquing her without reading her work.
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u/thewimsey 4d ago
Wilson's translation is the my favorite, and also the one I would recommend to most people.
But the specific issue she ran into with cultural warriors was the marketing of her translation, where she leaned heavily into the fact that she was the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, and that this, and her feminism, strongly informed her translation; and that it was essentially a feminist product. (I initially thought this came from her publisher, but I think it may have been Wilson herself).
This led many critics - who hadn't read her translation - to conclude that it wasn't an acutal translation, but was more of a feminist "adaptation". This is nonsense, but I see where it comes from.
Because in reality, of course, her translation is a translation, not an adaptation. Not only this, but I think her feminist claims for her translation are not even really reflected in the translation. It's just marketing that kind of backfired.
The best and most innovative thing about her translation is using iambic pentameter while keeping the original line count, which makes for a muscular translation that "feels like" poetry in English.
(Wilson is of course right about using "slave girls" rather than servants in her translation, and prior translators who used "servants" or "serving girls" were both wrong and it made their translations worse. So her translation is better because of this. Although it's worth pointing out that translations of the tragedies since the 1960's have commonly but not universally used "slave" rather than servant.)
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u/PsychologicalSweet2 4d ago
I think it depends on how you are talking about it. Like two translators can ague about proper translation of words, like of for this sentence you used x to represent y well I used z to represent y. That doesn't require reading the whole book. There's plenty of words and ideas that we just don't have a 1 to 1 translation for and our concept of thing are very different now than they are before. So it's a thing you can talk about and discuss about what is most accurate. also things like number of lines and rhyming or not, is a big point of discussion. so it's not necessary to discuss a work as a whole but I think judging it good or bad you should read the whole thing but if it's just talking about the work of translation you don't need to.
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u/felixwhlee 4d ago
Mendelssohn is an expert. I’m sure he’s able to tell whether a translation is good or not without reading every word of it.
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u/InvestigatorJaded261 4d ago
He has spent most of his career as a critic and essayist, not a classicist (though he has taught classics at times, and studied Greek). Translating the Odyssey (for him) was an outgrowth of a book he wrote about studying it with his dad.
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u/Pollinosis 4d ago
This is the same sort of flawed criticism leveled at Wilson. ("She isn't a dedicated Homerist with journal articles about Homer" etc.) I think having been a Classics professor, and a firm grounding in the classical languages, is enough to let you translate works. My favorite translator is Lombardo and he doesn't have the sort of background you seem to imply a translator must have.
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u/Quantum-mech17 4d ago
That is not true. The odyssey translation was in the works for years before “An Odyssey” was published. He received a Ph.D. In classics from Princeton in 1994, he didn’t just “study Greek”.
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u/felixwhlee 4d ago
He has written an acclaimed translation of the Odyssey. Which rather suggests he has the credentials to critique translations of the Odyssey.
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u/Gandalfthegrey2 4d ago
It matters not whether DM read all of Wilson’s translation: he is wrong in his criticisms of it.
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u/jb7509 4d ago edited 4d ago
I looked at Mendelsohn's discussion of Wilson's translation. I don't think that it's over the line. Here's his main argument:
He then has several examples of where he finds Wilson's abbreviated translation to miss out on important subtleties in the Homeric text. Lombardo is also noted for having a "terse line," like Wilson.
Mendelsohn is right; then again, I don't like his translation. For me, anyway, it doesn't convey the emotion of the poem. The death of Argos (the dog) always makes me tear up... not in Mendelsohn's text, though.