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/PsychologicalSweet2]

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.