awesome awesome interview with Emily Wilson
paywall-free version
Transcript:
Interviewer: There is something stereotypically masculine about the kind of chest-pumping, overly stylish translations of your predecessors.
Wilson: I’m really skeptical about any gender essentialism on that. Other women have published translations of Homer into Italian and into other languages I can’t read. I’ve read some of the French translation by Anne Dacier from the 17th century, and it’s fairly loquacious. Could you pick the translations of The Odyssey by a woman out of a lineup? Absolutely not. But journalists wanted it to be about that. I get that you’re trying to create a story, but I just don’t believe it.
Interviewer: Have you followed the online discourse about the film so far?
Wilson: It’s made-up controversy. Nobody’s seen this movie. It’s just the usual triggers about race and gender, and I just find it very tedious.
Interviewer: curious about what it would look like to make a feminist version of The Odyssey. It seems that could be a helpful framework to have ahead of Nolan’s movie.
Wilson: I’ve been watching a lot of Nolan movies in preparation for all of this, and it seems to me that we don’t know what the script’s going to be like. If it’s the usual Nolan plot of “A guy is on a quest far from home and struggling to get back to an objectified female character,” then I’m not sure I see that plot as inherently particularly feminist.
Interviewer: Looking at those two changes, it seems to me that your translation has a feminist function, whether it’s intentional or not.
Wilson: I think the bar should be higher for feminist translation. There are people whose project that is.
End Transcript.
