awesome awesome interview with Emily Wilson
Here's the thing: historical Western translations of Homer are objectively bad because of the ways they serve various projects of Western European patriarchal white supremacist empire and its cooptation of "Classics" as the exclusive and legitimating heritage of those several and often competing empires.
The simple fact is that an equitable, more objectively good translation of the text of Homer that respects both its original linguistic and cultural contexts and the linguistic and cultural usages of today's English-language audiences is not possible without some baseline commitment against Western patriarchal white supremacist empire and the ways it has abused "Classics."
It is not a new thing, today, that nationalistic fascists have claimed the putative and entirely whitewashed Classical Heritage of the West as the ground of their entirely selective Modern notions of virtue (in the sense of vir and virtus and virility).
But in the 17th through 19th centuries, they didn't have to be nationalistic fascists; they just had to be privileged, bigoted white men in positions of relative dominance in structures of violence and oppression that let them use the arts and academé in support of empire and its own constructions of virtue.
Every translation of the Classics is a cultural project.
And most of them, historically, let's be clear, have not been thinking very hard about it. You don't have to think critically about your culture to replicate its implicit and explicit structures in basically everything you do.
The only people, by and large, who think critically about the culture of their society, how it functions and what its real principles are, are those it is structured to harm—not those it is structured to benefit.
All advances in translation quality come from one of two things:
advances in our knowledge of and so speculation about the period and contexts of the work's origins; and
advances in our critical thinking about and so awareness of the cultural contexts into which we are attempting translation.
So I will certainly grant that Dr. Wilson is right; the bar is higher for actively, ideologically feminist translations, translations that seek to represent feminist principles. Or queer principles, or Womanist principles; we all doin' our own kinds of work here, and we must all, as James Baldwin said, do our first works over again:
"Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself, but know whence you came."
And Dr. Wilson has been clear, all along the way, that her project—which does not exist without the work of feminist movements fighting against misogyny, among other such movements—is not about representing ideology, whether that of patriarchal Western empire or that of any counter-movement to it.
It's about representing Homer, and scraping off and ripping out the accretions and insertions endemic to Western translations that do not for those reasons accurately represent Homer.
It's about setting the bar higher than it has ever been, historically, for telling the truth about Homer instead of making him support a cultural project.
But you can't get there without all of the critical thought and understanding about the cultural projects that have abused Homer to their own ends, without therefore understanding misogyny and racism and cisheterosexism and everything else bound up in there.
We cannot get to a point of seeing the garden Homer—whoever they actually were—planted here, without a solid field guide to the weeds that have grown up in it since.
