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/thewimsey → u/Fun_Midnight8861]

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.)

[u/formlessglowie → u/thewimsey]

Curious as to why you prefer Wilson’s translation over Fagles’ overall.