I have not read The Odyssey completely, and really can’t assess the accuracy of truthfulness of the following article, but I found it an interesting summation and perhaps worth some studious examination. In fact at this stage of my life, I’m not sure that I will ever get around to tackling Homer’s ‘poem’. As with Homer’s ‘The Iliad’, both books were purchased back in 2012, and while I did make a start in each case, other reading at the time proved more enticing!
The copy I have is presumably an example of one of many translations that Emily Wilson is revising. It is a translation by George Chapman [who also translated my copy of The Iliard]. Perhaps the comments made in the Introduction to my copy by Dr Adam Roberts of the University of London, give an indication of some of Wilson’s criticisms that follow. Roberts notes that “Chapman’s Odyssey has an unfortunate reputation as a relatively inaccurate rendering of Homer’s original…[but]..The consensus of most critics is that the tone and timbre of Chapman is more ornate, more quaint and more explicitly moral than Homer. Moreover, there are reputed to be many places where, according to critics, Chapman deliberately or otherwise shifts the emphasise, adds to or subtracts from, or flat-out mistranslates his source”.
This aspect of mistranslation, in reading the following article, appears to my mind, to be the major emphasise of Wilson’s translation In any case, for what it is worth, the following is her interpretation of the way Odyssey should be read, presumably the first interpretation by a woman.
For 400 years, every English translation of The Odyssey was done by a man. Then one woman translated it, and suddenly everyone realized how much had been quietly changed.
When Emily Wilson sat down to translate Homer’s Odyssey in 2017, she knew she was entering territory that had belonged exclusively to male scholars for centuries. Chapman in 1616. Pope in 1726. Fitzgerald in 1961. Fagles in 1996. Brilliant minds, all of them. Translators whose work had shaped how English speakers understood one of Western civilization’s foundational texts.
But Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to ask a question none of her predecessors had seriously considered: What if centuries of male translators had been quietly editing the story to match their own assumptions about heroes, women, and morality?
She started with the very first word Homer uses to describe Odysseus: “polytropos.”
Every major translator had rendered it as something flattering. “Resourceful.” “Versatile.” “The man of many ways.” Words that made Odysseus sound admirable, heroic, the kind of protagonist you’d want your children to emulate.
Wilson translated it as “complicated.”
One word. But it changes everything.
Suddenly Odysseus isn’t just clever—he’s morally ambiguous. A man who lies even when honesty would serve him better. A survivor who manipulates, deceives, and rationalizes violence. Still the protagonist, still fascinating, but no longer simply heroic.
That’s what “polytropos” actually means in Greek. But for four centuries, translators had smoothed it over because complicated heroes made readers uncomfortable.
Wilson realized she’d stumbled onto something bigger. If they’d changed the first word, what else had been altered?
She kept digging.
The answer was staggering: almost everything involving women.
Consider what happens when Odysseus finally returns home after 20 years. He discovers that enslaved women in his household were forced into sexual relationships with the suitors who had occupied his palace. He and his son Telemachus execute these women in a brutal mass hanging—strung up together, left to die slowly.
Homer’s Greek uses the word “dmôai,” which has a precise meaning: enslaved women. People who were property, who had no legal rights, no power to refuse, no agency over their own bodies.
But English translators wrote: “maids.” “Maidservants.” “Servant girls.” One even wrote “guilty maids who made love with suitors.”
Do you see what happened? The language made it sound like these women had chosen to betray Odysseus. That they were complicit. That they deserved execution.
Emily Wilson translated the word exactly as Homer wrote it: “slaves.”
Suddenly the entire scene shifts. This isn’t justice—it’s a powerful man murdering enslaved women who were raped by invaders. Women who had no choice, no power to resist, no way to protect themselves.
That’s what Homer wrote. But for 400 years, English readers never knew because translators couldn’t bring themselves to call slavery what it was.
Or take Penelope, Odysseus’s wife who waits 20 years for his return. Earlier translators portrayed her as the ideal patient wife—faithful, pure, suffering nobly, the perfect Victorian woman.
But Homer’s Greek describes her as “periphron.” The word means shrewd, strategic, prudent, circumspect—someone who thinks several moves ahead.
Wilson’s Penelope isn’t just waiting passively. She’s manipulating over a hundred suitors, buying herself time through elaborate schemes, gathering intelligence, positioning herself politically for survival. When Odysseus finally reveals himself, she doesn’t collapse in grateful tears. She tests him. She demands proof. She makes him work for her trust.
Because she’s smart. Homer said she was smart from the beginning. But translators kept making her passive because intelligent, strategic women made Victorian readers uncomfortable. So they emphasized her tears and her weaving, and downplayed her brilliance.
Then there’s Calypso, the goddess who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years. The Greek word Homer uses is “katechein”—to detain, to restrain, to hold captive against will.
But generations of translators wrote that Calypso “loved” him. That they had a “relationship.” That she “cared for” him.
Wilson translates it clearly: Calypso “kept” him as her captive. She “owned” him. She forced him to sleep with her.
Suddenly it’s obvious—this wasn’t a romance. It was imprisonment and sexual coercion. A goddess using her power to trap a mortal man who wanted to go home.
Homer said that explicitly. But translators softened it, romanticized it, because it complicated the heroic narrative they wanted to tell.
When Wilson’s translation was published, the literary world erupted. The book became a New York Times bestseller. Critics called it revelatory. Readers discovered they could finally hear Homer’s voice clearly, without centuries of editorial interference.
There was backlash, of course. Some scholars accused Wilson of imposing modern feminist values on an ancient text. Of “updating” Homer for contemporary audiences. Of distorting the original to make a political point.
Her response was devastatingly simple: Read the Greek.
Every single choice she made was defensible from the original language. She wasn’t adding feminism—she was removing centuries of anti-feminist bias that previous translators had inserted without acknowledging it.
Wilson imposed one iron rule on herself: consistency. If a Greek word means “slave,” translate it as “slave” every single time. Not “slave” when it’s a man and “maid” when it’s a woman. If a word indicates captivity, don’t call it love. If a character is described as intelligent, don’t emphasize their beauty instead.
Translate what Homer actually wrote, not what later cultures wished he’d written.
The result is an Odyssey that’s sharper, stranger, more morally complex—and more honest.
Odysseus isn’t a noble hero or a villain. He’s a complicated man who does both terrible and remarkable things, exactly as Homer presented him.
Penelope isn’t a passive wife waiting for rescue. She’s a strategic thinker navigating impossible political circumstances with intelligence and resolve.
The enslaved women aren’t guilty betrayers. They’re enslaved women murdered by the man who owned them, victims twice over.
Calypso isn’t a romantic interest. She’s a captor who abuses her power.
For 400 years, English-speaking readers thought they understood The Odyssey. But they were reading Homer filtered through Victorian morality, Edwardian gender assumptions, and translators who judged women more harshly than men while excusing male violence.
They were reading translations that reflected what those translators believed, not what Homer said.
Emily Wilson didn’t modernize The Odyssey. She de-Victorianized it. She stripped away four centuries of accumulated bias and let Homer’s Greek speak directly.
And it turns out The Odyssey is a better, more interesting, more morally challenging poem than we realized.
Not because Wilson added anything—but because she finally stopped letting centuries of male translators quietly edit the women out of their own story.
She became the first woman in 400 years to translate The Odyssey into English. And in doing so, she became the first translator in generations to simply tell the story Homer actually wrote.
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