06/01/2026
The seventh word of Homer's Odyssey is "polytropos."
It is the first thing Homer tells you about Odysseus. The first adjective. The opening description of the man whose ten-year journey home from Troy will fill the next twelve thousand lines.
For four centuries, male translators rendered this word as "resourceful." Or "versatile." Or "of many ways." Or "skilled in all ways of contending."
Admirable words. Heroic words. Words that set you up to root for the man who follows.
In 2017, Emily Wilson translated it as "complicated."
That one word unlocks something large.
Odysseus is not just clever. He is morally ambiguous. He lies when truth would serve equally well. He manipulates people he claims to love. He survives through cunning that sometimes shades into ruthlessness. He does what it takes and does not always examine what it costs.
Homer said all of this in the seventh word of his poem.
For four centuries, English readers did not know.
Emily Wilson grew up in England, studied classics at Oxford, and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She has spent her career studying how translation shapes meaning, how every choice a translator makes is also an act of interpretation, and how those interpretations accumulate across time into something that can look, from the outside, like the original text but is actually a portrait of every era that handled it.
When she decided to translate The Odyssey, she was walking into a four-hundred-year tradition in which every complete English translation had been done by men.
George Chapman in 1614. Alexander Pope in 1725. William Cowper. Robert Fitzgerald. Robert Fagles. Richmond Lattimore.
These were not bad translators. Many were brilliant scholars.
But they all worked within cultural assumptions they did not examine. Assumptions about what heroes should be. What women were for. What constituted proper language for certain kinds of people. What details required softening for a respectable audience.
Wilson examined those assumptions. Systematically.
She went back to the Greek and asked not what Victorian translators believed Homer meant, but what the words Homer actually used would have meant to Homer's audience.
What she found, example by example, changed the poem.
Consider the enslaved women in Odysseus's household.
After twenty years away at war and at sea, Odysseus returns home to find his palace occupied by suitors competing for his wife Penelope's hand. Some of the women who worked in his household had, during those twenty years of occupation, formed relationships with the men who had taken over their master's home, or been forced into them.
Odysseus and his son Telemachus execute these women. All of them.
It is one of the most brutal scenes in the poem, a mass hanging that Homer describes in visceral, specific detail.
The Greek word Homer uses for these women is "dmôai." It means enslaved women. People who are legally property, with no rights and no meaningful ability to refuse what is demanded of them.
English translators did not translate this word as "slaves."
Chapman in 1614: "maids disloyal." Pope in 1725: "guilty maids." Fitzgerald in 1961: "women who made love with suitors."
Look carefully at what happened in those translations.
The word "enslaved" disappeared. In its place are words that imply choice. Disloyalty. Guilt. Love. The women are no longer people without agency who were subjected to men with total power over them. They are women who made decisions and suffered consequences.
Wilson translated "dmôai" as "slaves."
The scene transforms entirely.
Odysseus is no longer executing disloyal servants who betrayed his household. He is executing enslaved women who were subjected to men who had invaded their master's home, women who had no power to refuse anything, on the grounds that their violation makes them unworthy of survival.
That is what Homer wrote.
English readers did not know for four centuries because translators kept changing the word.
Or consider Penelope, who waits twenty years for Odysseus to return.
Previous translators emphasized her faithfulness, her purity, her patient devotion. She became the ideal wife of whatever era was reading her. Victorian. Edwardian. Mid-century American. Passive in her virtue, sustained by love alone.
Homer's Greek describes her repeatedly as "periphron," a word that means something closer to circumspect, prudent, strategically shrewd.
Wilson's Penelope is not passive. She is working.
She is managing the suitors, buying time through a years-long deception involving a weaving project she unravels each night, gathering intelligence about what is happening in her own house, positioning herself politically in a situation where she has very little formal power and must use what she has with precision.
When Odysseus finally reveals himself, Wilson's Penelope does not collapse in grateful reunion. She tests him. She is suspicious. She requires proof.
She has spent twenty years being smarter than everyone around her. She is not going to stop because a man arrived claiming to be her husband.
Homer said she was shrewd.
Translators kept making her passive because passive women were easier to admire in the eras doing the translating.
Or consider Calypso, the goddess who holds Odysseus on her island.
The Greek verb Homer uses is "katechein," to hold back, to detain, to keep captive.
Many English translators wrote that Calypso loved Odysseus, that she wanted him to stay, that they shared a relationship characterized by desire on both sides. It was presented as a complicated romance rather than a captivity.
Wilson translates it as Calypso keeping him, holding him against his will, a captor with a captive.
The scene inverts in a way that illuminates something the poem had been doing all along.
Odysseus is imprisoned by a goddess who wants him. He cannot leave. He has no meaningful ability to refuse what she demands. The same dynamics the poem applies to enslaved women elsewhere in its pages apply here to the hero, and Homer applies them consistently.
Translators softened Calypso's captivity because it complicated the heroic narrative. A hero cannot be a captive. So the captivity became a love affair.
Homer did not make that choice. The translators did.
Wilson imposed on herself a rule that sounds simple and turned out to be radical: consistency.
If a Greek word means "slave," translate it as "slave" every time, not "slave" for men and "maid" for women. If a word means "complicated," do not change it to "versatile" because it sounds more flattering.
Translate what Homer said. Not what later cultures wished he had said.
She also chose to write in iambic pentameter, the rhythmic backbone of Shakespeare and English literary tradition, which gives her translation a propulsive quality that many earlier versions lack. It reads quickly. It sounds like poetry. It does not feel like a text preserved in amber.
But more than the rhythm, what readers encountered when Wilson's translation appeared in 2017 was a poem that felt genuinely strange in ways earlier translations had not.
Not strange because Wilson had added anything.
Strange because she had removed four centuries of cultural smoothing and left Homer's actual choices visible.
The violence in the poem is violence, not heroic triumph. The moral ambiguity is ambiguity, not hidden by language implying the hero was always right. The enslaved people are enslaved people. The captive is a captive. The shrewd woman is shrewd.
The translation became a New York Times bestseller. Classicists debated it seriously.
Some objected that Wilson was imposing contemporary values on an ancient text.
Her response: read the Greek.
Every choice she made is defensible from the original language. She was not adding a modern perspective. She was removing the accumulated perspectives of translators who had made their own choices, choices shaped by their own moments in history, and presented those choices as if they were Homer's.
What the Odyssey controversy reveals about translation extends well beyond this poem.
Every translation is an interpretation. Every word choice reflects the translator's cultural assumptions, conscious and otherwise.
When the same community of translators, shaped by similar educations, similar cultural norms, similar assumptions about gender and heroism and proper language, produces every translation of a foundational text for four centuries, those assumptions accumulate invisibly.
Readers believe they are reading Homer. They are reading Homer as understood by men working within particular cultural frameworks that no one asked them to examine.
Wilson examined them.
The Odyssey that emerged is not a different poem. The events are identical. The characters are the same characters.
But the moral landscape has shifted. It became more complex, more honest, more willing to sit with the questions the poem raises rather than quietly resolving them in the hero's favor.
Odysseus is complicated. Penelope is strategic. The enslaved women are enslaved. Calypso is a captor.
Homer said all of this.
It took four hundred years and one woman's willingness to translate exactly what he wrote for English readers to finally hear it.
The epic was always there.
Someone just had to stop editing it.
