I understand that when you already have dozens and dozens of earlier translations of the Odyssey into English, it’s quite difficult to come up with something really new. Wilson doesn’t really convince me.
First of, her handling of the epithet πολύτροπος. Here’s how she translates the first lines:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
I don’t think this is bad, quite the contrary. I especially like “tell the old story for our modern times”. “Find the beginning” though is a just a little bit off the mark, in my opinion, but not bad either. (τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν).
English isn’t my native language, so I don’t necessarily catch all the nuances the words has. Maybe I can accept translating πολύτροπος “complicated”, but I can’t accept her rationale for that choice:
“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”
Homer (or whatever you want to call the poet) certainly didn’t wan’t to start his poem by suggesting that there might be “something wrong with this guy”. It’s epic poetry, after all! Heroes are tall, handsome and brave, heroines tall, beautiful and smart - not to mention the gods! This is epic, not comedy, and Odysseus isn’t some sort of anxious Woody Allen character; the genre requires the hero to presented in the first line in most positive terms. If there’s a negative hint at all in πολύτροπος, that must be that the word just might suggest some degree of unscrupulousness. But that again just shows how dangerous the man is to his enemies, that he can and will do anything to get where he’s going; it certainly doesn’t mean that he’s tormented by internal anxieties.
I’d like to comment about her views on the slaying of the maidens as well. No time now, so I’ll come back to that later.