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A Translator’s Reckoning With the Women of the Odyssey | The New Yorker

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Many readers of the poem want Penelope, Odysseus’ strong-willed wife, to fit the ideal of an empowered woman.

Since I completed my translation of the Odyssey, which is the first published version of Homer’s epic in English translated by a woman, readers have often assumed that I must sympathize above all with the story’s female characters. I am asked, in particular, about my interpretation of Penelope, Odysseus’ faithful wife. Penelope spends twenty years in tearful isolation, waiting for her man to come home from war—and also, as it happens, from the cave and bed of two beautiful goddesses—while caring for her son and warding off the advances of her abusive suitors. At the same time, she manages to…

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