I put "NOT the first woman to publish a translation of the Odyssey" on my twitter-bio, after seeing it asserted for the gazillionth time. Here is why.
It's factually not true. Many women have published translations of the Odyssey (and Iliad) into modern languages: French, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Dutch, etc.. Anne Dacier did it into French prose 400 years ago.
This is a symptom of English-speakers' blindness to, and lack of interest in, anything that isn't in English: as if it doesn't exist unless it's English. Ugh.
The English-speaking media focus on the "FIRST WOMAN!" headline was good in that it drew much-needed attention to the fact that classicists, poets, translators & historians aren't all elderly men, & that all interpretative work is informed, not determined, by social identities.
Insofar as the headline encouraged more non-male people to be excited about engaging with pre-modern cultures, & with translation, language, poetry, myth & history, & invited more thought about translation, gender & ethically/socially complex literary texts, I'm all for it.
But... I don't want to be Smurfette. I don't want to be made to represent THE WOMAN'S PERSPECTIVE, as if there were only one woman in the universe, or even among classicists, or even among Homerists. I don't want to erase other women's work.
Let's not be simplistic about the relationship of gender either to social attitudes or scholarly and literary choices. I chose to use very regular iambic pentameter. Surprise: that was not predetermined by my use of she/her pronouns.
It's a big problem that only women writers/ translators/ scholars are imagined to have a gender. Nobody ever asked any male translators of Homer about their supposed interest in MALE characters, or told them it must have been a great challenge for a MAN to translate an epic...
The real story is that the world of English translations of GR classics is so extraordinarily male dominated -- despite the facts that other languages aren't that way, & there are plenty of female English-speaking classicists. That's the story I want told & addressed.
I have many thoughts about how to explain and maybe solve that puzzle, which I am trying to articulate in longer-than-tweet form.
A big element in my discomfort is that the narrative of "woman breaks into boy's club" risks erasing my privilege. I'm a white person, in a field that is extremely white. I'm a tenured professor at an Ivy League. I want to acknowledge and be conscious of my privilege.
I'm sorry, this should have said, "English-speakers' tendency to ignore anything that isn't in English". I shouldn't have used the ableist language.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
