Classicist Emily Wilson is “the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English,” according to this 2017 New York Times Magazine article. (The first woman to publish a translation in English, would be my guess.) Her translation is really, really different, and apparently if you know anything about Greek (I don’t), it sounds like Greek, but in English.
The task is difficult from the very first line, which includes a word describing Odysseus: polytropos. Poly means many, tropos means turn. Over the centuries, translators have rendered it into English in a startling number of ways, many of them awkward and not very English-sounding: by long experience tried, full of resources, much-versed, of many a turn, many-sided-man (I love this one), skilled in all ways of contending, of twists and turns. Simpler, less literal translations include prudent, crafty, deep, adventurous, shifty, ingenious, restless, clever, cunning.
Wilson wanted to convey something different: “I wanted there to be a sense that maybe there is something wrong with this guy.”
“Tell me about a complicated man” is how her version of the poem begins. That’s radical enough, but she could have gone further, since andra also means husband, she explains: Tell me about a straying husband. “And that’s a viable translation.”
I had never given translation much thought. Now I was intrigued.
This semester I’m in an MFA program for Writing for Children and Young Adults (I’m taking a leave of absence—don’t ask), so for one of my short critical essays I looked at translations of Green Eggs and Ham. I requested the French version, Les œufs verts au jambon (translated by Anne-Laure Fournier le Ray, 2009), and the Spanish version, Huevos verdes con jamón (translated by Aída E. Marcuse, 1992), from the Chicago Public Library. I would have preferred the German version, Grünes Ei mit Speck, since my Spanish is all but nonexistent, but apparently there is not much call for this at CPL.
Green Eggs and Ham, published in 1960, is a wonder. Three years earlier, Theodor Geisel had written The Cat in the Hat using just 236 words. His editor bet him $50 (about $500 today, so not a minor sum) that he couldn’t write a story with only 50.
An article on Snopes.com, confirming the 50-words legend, points out that 49 of them are monosyllabic. The only long word is anywhere, and many people, young or old, could recite the couplet that includes it: “I would not like them here or there / I would not like them anywhere.” It’s a quintessential English-language story, characterized by extreme brevity, simplicity, and rhythm.
The translator’s first problem is what to rhyme with ham. Huevos verdes con jamón solves this problem brilliantly by changing Sam’s name to Juan and adding the surname Ramón. The story now begins “Yo soy Juan. Yo soy Juan Ramón.” Sadly, although a Romance language can rhyme, it cannot approximate the driving Anglo-Saxon beat of Green Eggs and Ham—as relentless as Sam-I-Am’s demands for compliance. His question becomes the rhythmless “¿Te gustan los huevos verdes con jamón?”
French, the language that loves articles, poses an even greater challenge. With the required addition of Les, the title becomes yet clunkier: Les œufs verts au jambon. (The title page notes, interestingly, that the story was translated “de l’américain” rather than “de l’anglais.”) In the French version, Sam gets to keep his name: “C’est moi, Sam. Sam, c’est moi.” and the book’s first rhyme is moi and pas: “Ce Sam-c’est moi! Je n’aime pas / ce Sam-c’est moi!”
The first use of jambon rhymes with nothing—just dangles off by itself. But soon a perfect rhyme appears in the form of non, producing the pleasing couplet, “Je n’aime pas les œufs verts au jambon. / Quand je dis non, c’est non.”
When I say no, it’s no.
Carrie Golus 