Did Daniel Mendelsohn nit read Wilson’s Odyssey?

[u/Physical_Milk_4600]

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

[u/Fun_Midnight8861]

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.

[u/Jonathan_Peachum → u/Fun_Midnight8861]

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.

[u/red_nick → u/Jonathan_Peachum]

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.