Born: 1971, United Kingdom
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Though Anne Dacier translated The Iliad and The Odyssey into French hundreds of years earlier, Emily Wilson was the first female scholar to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English in 2017. Wilson’s translation differed in a few ways, not least that it gave more attention to the secondary characters—many of them women—beyond Odysseus himself. She lays bare the mistreatment of the women, not least the enslaved women that Odysseus orders his son to kill for having sex with (or, more likely, being raped by) the suitors that invaded his home to try and woo his wife Penelope. While this is part of the original text, it is the type of thing translators who have wanted to elevate or idealise the man have tended to gloss over. Even the fact of their enslavement is often hidden by referring to specific individuals as “nurse” or “chambermaid.” “It sort of stuns me when I look at other translations, how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible,” Wilson noted. “The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave.”