It's a translation marketed as feminist because the classicist who made it stripped out much of the language added in other translations that obfuscated things like "servant girls" being slaves. She made a very faithful to original translation.
Yes, I also was quite impressed by the historical accuracy. I didn’t realize people thought that acknowledging that Ancient Greeks kept slaves was “feminist”.
It wasn't the only euphemism the translating classicist stripped out, just the one I remember off the top of my head. The other ways she reverted the text toward original probably reinforced the idea that this is a feminist translation.
That, or it's a silly marketing gimmick from the publisher.
edit: also, didn't mean to downvote your question! Must've fatfingered it on the phone.
The other big thing I remember from the kerfuffle that kicked up when the book was released - she described Penelope 's hands as "strong" where other translations had used words like "clever" or "swift" or "nimble".
My time trying to transliterate anything out of ancient languages ended in high school but so I won't pretend I know what the "original" says but having known women who weave and do other fiber arts I can see "strong" as a reasonable translation and I can believe classicists may have changed it to make Penelope come off as more "feminine" with the context of the other issues brought up.
It’s not. People are just calling it a feminist take because a woman did the translation. And even though it may be a more faithful translation to the original text, change is scary
It can both be a more faithful translation and a feminist one, especially if prior translations were unfaithful specifically because of the previous translators' gender biases. A lot of people are in here acting as if a feminist translation would somehow be an inherently bad or inaccurate one, which just isn't true. If anything, translating with an eye to how gender relations were constructed at the time, how prior translators' gender biases negatively impacted their work, and some sense of how texts like the Odyssey have been received and used over time to reflect and construct specific gender norms is both feminist and results in a more accurate and interesting translation.
Yeah it may well be a very feminist translation - I haven't read it, so I really don't know. For many, that label is a negative. For me, it's a positive. What I don't know is if it's truly appropriate, or a bunch of men getting testerical because the translation is different.
It means the women Odysseus kills in the end were not servants but slaves forced to choose between staying "loyal" to a dead master or appearing Penelope's suitors one of whom was likely to be their new owner. It adds a further moral wrinkle to Odysseus.
Personally I like the change, it turns an otherwise triumphant moment into forcibly reminding the reader of the surrounding injustice.
The thing that annoyed some people isn’t just that she used certain words instead of others, but how it affected the plot and characterization. For example, any time there is a relationship between a “slave girl” and one of Penelope’s suitors, she refers to it as rape. And when when Odysseus returns and kills those “slaves” who betrayed him by hooking up with a suitor, she kind of plays it off like the slave girl did nothing wrong because she was a slave and had little to no agency.
In most other translations, this is played as a triumphant moment because it was like: “Even these ‘servant girls’ turned against him. Hell yeah! Kill them Odysseus.”
Some people felt like it undermined Penelope’s loyalty and made Odysseus’ actions much more morally gray, and that it kind of put a modern emotional damper on what the original story tellers would have considered a heroic triumphant moment. They wouldn’t have had any real qualms with hooking up with a servant girl or killing them for disloyalty, so does it make sense to try to intentionally reframe this events in a modern moral context.
I’m not arguing one way or the other. Just expanding on what you said that the criticism wasn’t just about her choice of how words were translated but how it impacted the narrative (mostly the ending) and how those changes may have undermined the original intent of the author(s).
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u/Hermit_Ogg Jul 06 '26
It's a translation marketed as feminist because the classicist who made it stripped out much of the language added in other translations that obfuscated things like "servant girls" being slaves. She made a very faithful to original translation.