Who Shapes History? Emily Wilson's Odyssey and the Power of Translation

Last week, amid all the chatter about Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey film, one piece of news stood out and sharpened a point I’ve been making about a man-made and man-interpreted world:

In 2017, Emily Wilson, a Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, among other titles, completed and published the first complete English translation of The Odyssey by a woman.

She worked with great precision to translate Greek into modern English, matching the original tone more closely. Unsurprisingly (and predictably), her work strips away the glorifying nuances that did not exist in the original text but were added by translators.

Where earlier translations rendered Homer’s “andra” (literally: “man”) as “the ingenious hero” or “that resourceful man,” Emily preserves the ambiguity of a “complicated man,” avoiding the impulse to glorify Odysseus from the very first line.

Where previous translations called enslaved women “maids” or “serving girls,” she consistently names them according to their legal and social status: “slave women.”

Wilson peeled back layers of unnecessary glorification added by male translators who seemed intent on pleasing Homer and his heroes. She also removed biased and sexist language that was not in the original but had been introduced in later translations. Once those interpretive additions are stripped away, her Penelope is a proactive wife, not an idealized one; her Circe is direct rather than flirtatious; and her Calypso is not merely lovesick but genuinely loving, morally complex, and frustrated by the double standards among the gods.

This story is just a reminder to take with a grain of salt what we think we know—and how we were taught to feel about it.

Many of the books that have shaped civilization in ethics, politics, science, and everything in between have reached modern readers through long chains of translation. And every translator made choices about style, tone, ambiguity, and gender (Hebrew and Greek, for example, frequently use masculine grammar for generic statements).

On the bright side, although for centuries the overwhelming majority of translators were men—since education, literacy, and scholarly institutions were largely closed to women—they still produced translations that made original texts that shaped ethics, law, philosophy, education, and democracy accessible to the rest of the world. Without those translations, shaped by the realities of their time and society, many foundational works would never have reached new languages and cultures across time and place.

And today, with more complete manuscripts, advances in linguistics, archaeological discoveries, and broader scholarly perspectives, we welcome new translations for a new era.

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