As Wyatt Mason wrote in the New York Times Magazine: “Wilson, in her introduction, reminds us that these palace women—‘maidservants’ has often been put forward as a ‘correct’ translation of the Greek δμωαι, dmoai, which Wilson calls ‘an entirely misleading and also not at all literal translation,’ the root of the Greek meaning ‘to overpower, to tame, to subdue’—weren’t free. Rather, they were slaves, and if women, only barely. Young female slaves in a palace would have had little agency to resist the demands of powerful men. Where Fagles wrote ‘whores’ and ‘the likes of them’ … the original Greek, Wilson explained, is just a feminine definite article meaning ‘female ones.’ To call them ‘whores’ and ‘creatures’ reflects, for Wilson, ‘a misogynistic agenda’: their translators’ interpretation of how these females would be defined.” W. Mason, “The First Woman to Translate The Odyssey into English,” New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2017.
Robert Fagles’s translation of Telemachus’s echoing his father’s command to kill: “No clean death for the likes of them, by god!/Not from me — they showered abuse on my head, my mother’s too!/You sluts—the suitors’ whores!” By contrast, Emily Wilson’s translation: “I refuse to grant these girls a clean death, since they poured down shame on me and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.” At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar, stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground. As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap—they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime; just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”
For more on translation and power see, for example, Translation, History and Culture. eds. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Continuum, 1998); Translation and Power, eds. Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
With thanks to the journal editorial staff and larger team at e-flux for generative reads and comments.