Tuesday, September 12, 2023

How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern - The New Yorker - Translation

Annals of Literature

How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern

Her vitally urgent translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey strip away the “tarnish of centuries.”
Emily Wilson photographed by Hannah Whitaker.
“As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible,” Wilson said.Photograph by Hannah Whitaker for The New Yorker

Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means “hostage” is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us. The Iliad’s subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is survival. Both plumb the male psyche and women’s enthrallment to its bravado. “Tell the old story for our modern times,” Homer entreats his muse, in the Odyssey’s first stanza. The translator Emily Wilson took him at his word. Her radically plainspoken Odyssey, the first in English by a woman, was published six years ago. Her Iliad will be published in two weeks.

On a recent summer evening, Wilson surveyed the view from a precipice above Polis Bay, in the quiet village of Stavros, on the northwest coast of Ithaca. A shrine in the town square shows the floor plan of a ruin, not far away, that may be the palace of Odysseus. She pointed to a crescent beach five hundred feet below, slung like a hammock between two mountains. The cave at its far end was a site of Mycenaean goddess worship, and relics recovered from it include a set of bronze tripods which fit Homer’s description of gifts that Odysseus received from the Phaeacians. “We’ll swim there,” she said.

Wilson is fifty-one, with expressive features that radiate alertness, and a lithe, sinewy physique—more Hermes than Hera. She set a brisk pace on our hike down the mountain. As I watched from the deserted beach, she plunged into the water and headed for the cave with rhythmic strokes. The bay was glassy until a breeze ruffled its surface with purple shadows, suddenly making sense of Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” It was Wilson’s first visit to Ithaca. “I felt the presence in that sea of protective deities,” she told me later, though she hastened to add that, elsewhere in Greece, unprotected migrants were drowning in it.

On our way to Stavros, we’d passed cultivated valleys and hillsides terraced with vineyards and olive trees. But the landscape, like Homer’s prosody, is mostly rugged and austere. (Ithaca is “only fit for goats,” the poet tells us.) It wasn’t hard for Wilson to imagine the tar-blackened ships that Odysseus’ father beached in its secluded coves, and the treasure he plundered stowed in its mountain grottoes. “Old Laertes was basically a pirate,” she said fondly.

One of the grottoes is known as Eumaeus’ Cave, in honor of the faithful swineherd who tended Odysseus’ pigs and is said (improbably, given the terrain) to have fattened them on acorns there. Following Athena’s directions, we found it near the spring of Arethusa, whose black waters are alleged to be a mother’s tears for her dead son.

After a vertiginous climb through thorny underbrush, Wilson and I reached a keyhole of rock in the cliff and slid down the moss-slimed rocks at its entrance into a humid cavern that looks like a rotunda some Titan sheared in half. She had sprinted ahead of me, and when I caught up with her she was sitting on a boulder, dwarfed by her surroundings. The air hummed with birdsong, and with the bells of the mountain goats that forage in the highlands. “That sound takes you straight back to Homer,” she said.

In bringing Homer back from antiquity, Wilson also had to bridge the chasm of time that has elapsed in English literature since the first full translation of the Odyssey: George Chapman’s, in 1616. But, she cautioned, “you can’t and shouldn’t try to make all that history—layer upon layer—visible in the text. My goal was to evoke an experience like the original, using the language of the people who will read it.”

The epics were originally performed by itinerant singers who roamed ancient Greece, entertaining guests at social gatherings. Travel inflected their speech with a mixture of dialects that they patched into their recitals. In classical Athens, the singers were known as rhapsodes, from the verb meaning “to sew songs together.” Their diction was stately, but audiences of every class and age listened raptly to Homer’s graphic imagery and impassioned dialogue, scored to a propulsive beat. Wilson’s ambitious project of the past decade has been to re-democratize both the poetry and its audience. Her “folk poetics,” as she calls them, are a reproach to predecessors who have “turned a great poem into a hard one,” or into a poem of their own. She rejects historical reënactments that “archaicize” Homer’s diction—“he didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks”—and modern renovations that expand his footage. The opening of Robert Fagles’s widely admired Odyssey, she points out, uses two English words for every Greek one. Her own translation hews strictly to the original line count, and it retains the power of a storyteller’s voice to fix itself in your memory. “I write for the body,” she told me.

As a brotherhood of nomads, the bards must have imbued their songs with a yearning for nostos: the homecoming that crowns a hero’s journey. Homer keeps us in suspense about Odysseus’ nostos. He left Ithaca unwillingly to fight the Trojans and spent his youth at war. His return is disrupted by misfortunes, but “dreadful, beautiful, divine” Calypso rescues him from the sea. After seven years of captivity, her charms have palled. When Zeus finally orders her to set him free, she looks for him on her island’s shore:

His eyes were always
tearful; he wept his sweet life away, in longing
to go back home, since she no longer pleased him.

A jealous goddess is dangerous, as anyone would know who had languished for ten years at Troy:

So Odysseus, with tact,
said, “Do not be enraged at me, great goddess.
You are quite right. I know my modest wife
Penelope could never match your beauty. . . .
But even so, I want to go back home.”

Odysseus knows how to massage an ego; that was his role in the fractious Greek camp. He’s also the con man who thinks up the Trojan horse. Homer introduces him with the adjective polytropos—literally, “of many turns.” Previous translators have called him “shifty,” “cunning,” and a hundred other things. After grappling with the alternatives, Wilson chose “complicated,” hoping also to convey the sense of “problematic.” Her first sentence—“Tell me about a complicated man”—instantly makes him our familiar: that charismatic prince who’s too impossible to live with and too desirable to live without.

Part of Odysseus’ appeal, not least to modern writers, is that he redefines heroism as imagination. “You love fiction,” Athena teases him. The decade of his odyssey passes like a dream, as episodes of hardship and violence alternate with voluptuous idylls. And the mind games he plays to outwit his captors—lusty nymphs, ravenous cannibals, vengeful gods—have, Wilson notes, “a ‘meta’ element that’s about language and storytelling.”

The Iliad feels suffocating by comparison. Its central protagonist, the demigod Achilles, is problematic without being complicated. His “cataclysmic wrath” fuels a story that begins in medias res—not with Paris’ abduction of Helen, or the massing of an invasion force, but at the end of a nine-year stalemate, with the demoralized Greeks camped on the Trojan coast and the Trojans trapped in their impregnable city. The action is compressed into about six weeks, whose grinding carnage would numb your senses if Homer’s poetry didn’t keep stirring them. Yet the Iliad’s greatness is inseparable from its claustrophobia. Against a background of blight and bleakness, the characters dazzle us with their vivid idiosyncrasy. Perhaps even more than Odysseus, they’re our familiars: beleaguered humans in tragically stressed relationships, at the mercy of fate.

“Well, these feelings are all perfectly normal.”
Cartoon by Paul Noth

Apollo sparks the conflict that will engulf them. One of his priests is a Trojan ally with a cherished daughter, “beautiful Chryseis.” Achilles captures her in a raid, and Agamemnon, the Greek commander, claims her as his war trophy. The priest offers to ransom her with a priceless treasure, which Agamemnon spurns rudely, and Apollo punishes this sacrilege with a plague. Only after the Greek armies have been decimated does their general relent and send Chryseis home. But then he consoles himself by mortally offending his greatest warrior: he confiscates Achilles’ trophy from an earlier looting spree, “fresh-faced Briseis.” And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.

While Wilson was contemplating the Greeks sickening in their camp, and the Trojans caged behind their city walls, the plague of Covid forced her family of five into lockdown. She didn’t want to push the analogy (“I never thought, ‘Oh, no—Achilles has to order online groceries’ ”), but she was conscious of both how volatile confinement can be and how primal the need for company becomes. “You can either rage at the people you’re stuck with or grow more devoted,” she said.

Wilson teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania and lives near the campus in a rambling old house that she shares with her partner of nine years, David Foreman, an administrator at Swarthmore, and her two school-age daughters, Psyche and Freya. (Her eldest daughter, Imogen, is now in college.) When we met last May, she greeted me at her door in running clothes. I was surprised first by her youthfulness, then by the luxuriance of her tattoos. “I didn’t used to read as a tattoo person,” she told me, as we settled on the deck outside her bedroom, which is painted Aegean blue. “When you get tattooed in places that show, it changes your identity.”

Wilson’s tattoos became visible as she worked on the Iliad. They inscribe her closest relationships: with her children; Foreman; her late mother; her younger sister Bee Wilson, the noted British food writer; plus a pantheon of Greek deities and creatures sacred to them. The birds and flowers are emblems of a tender heart, while the armory of spiky weapons—a spear and a bow on her calves, the thunderclouds of Zeus on her shoulder—are badges of a fighting spirit.

That afternoon, Wilson took me for a walk through a neighborhood of abandoned factories, then along the banks of the Schuylkill River, crossing wild meadows to a glade, a route she’d chosen for its “Iliadic contrast of beauty and desolation.” Her Iliad won’t be the first by a woman, but she considers “the first-woman thing” a sexist distraction: “It slights the many brilliant female scholars who’ve worked on the poems. And no one mentions the gender of the men.” What she didn’t say, though her followers do (the flaws and merits of her Odyssey have been vehemently debated on social media), is that it slights her translations’ real singularity.

“The ancient Greeks teach one to be modern,” the poet and classicist A. E. Stallings observed to me. “They taught that to me and to Emily. It was time to strip away all the mannered layers—the tarnish of centuries—and she does that. Her translations have the freshness of the sky after a storm. Their briskness and simplicity are faithful to the oral tradition, and she brings the poems to a new generation, which struggles to read harder texts and wants clarity.” Wilson feels an acute, almost maternal sense of duty to those lay readers: “They need to trust that I’m telling them the truth, both about the language and the psychology. There are no lazy ways to do it.”

On rare occasions in her Iliad, a word would jar me: “flirty,” “flabbergasted,” “inappropriate.” Or a slangy outburst made me laugh at a dramatic moment: “Stop! You are acting crazy, Menelaus!” But that line is worth pausing to consider precisely because none of Wilson’s predecessors would have written it. Among the notable translations of the past century—by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, Peter Green, Caroline Alexander, Stanley Lombardo, Robert Graves (who pivots from prose to poetry to highlight dramatic moments; there’s a lot of mansplaining in Homerdom)—each has its strengths. Their authors are united in presuming that readers will be “improved,” as pious critics used to say, by their encounter with Homer. But Wilson reminds us that a great storyteller conceived the poems as entertainment. Her language is so vitally urgent that even the Iliad’s endless battle scenes feel, to use an un-Homeric simile, like listening to the Super Bowl on car radio. Stallings said, “Does Emily’s clarity betray that element of the epic register that Matthew Arnold calls ‘nobility’? Some critics think a certain grandeur is missing. But every translation is a compromise, even a great one.”

Wilson’s mother, Katherine Duncan-Jones, was an eminent scholar of Elizabethan literature who died in October of complications from Alzheimer’s. Her father is A. N. Wilson, the prolific English writer whose subjects as a biographer include Jesus, Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton, Hitler, and Queen Victoria. When I spoke with him in June, at the British Library, he was researching a life of Goethe. His latest book, “Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises,” is the memoir of a writer’s triumphs and travails. Among the latter, his first marriage set the high-water mark.

The Wilsons met at Oxford. Katherine was a teaching fellow, and Andrew was an undergraduate of twenty, a decade her junior. They married hastily in 1971, when she got pregnant with Emily. “Mom did all the housework and cooking and was always apologetic about it,” Wilson said. Andrew Wilson told me that he found talking to his daughter difficult: “Sometimes she was completely mute, and sometimes she would burst into tears.” Even as a little girl, Emily was conscious of her father’s rage at his vassalage to a family, for which she felt he blamed her: “I was the one who had ruined his young life by being born.” For reasons that are a bit inscrutable under the circumstances, the couple had Bee when her sister was two.

The Wilsons lived in poisonous silence, beneath a veneer of civility. (“We had a fatal gift for politeness,” as Andrew put it.) Emily often locked herself in her room, from which she heard Bee sobbing through the wall. “My parents weren’t listeners,” she said, “so it was hard for me to imagine that I could be heard.” Encouraged by her mother, she took refuge in books, and excelled in school, though she refused to say a word in class. Her other sanctuary was a world of fantasy: “For a year or two, I pretended to be a gorilla. I would thrust my lower jaw out, even though it was painful to walk around that way.” Her other alter ego was an orangutan, which referred to itself in the third person. “It felt liberating to speak in another voice,” Wilson told me. “It drove my parents completely crazy, which is also why I did it.”

When Emily was eight, a perceptive teacher saw through her camouflage and cast her as Athena in a school production of the Odyssey. (The headmaster played the Cyclops, and the children relished poking his eye out.) “It was a turning point in my life,” Wilson writes in the notes to her translation. The experience kindled a love of theatre shared by her mother; it also, she suggests, gave her a model of “human and nonhuman” shape-shifting. “Translators have to be chameleons,” she said, “leaping from a green leaf to a brown one.”

Both sisters told me that they were, at times, hostages to their mother’s depression, though they never doubted her devotion to them. Their father could be charming, but he played favorites capriciously. “One day you were the scapegoat, the next you were his chosen one,” Bee told me, over lunch in Cambridge. “It was a toxic game which served to teach us that love is conditional.” It also served to cast them as foils. In Bee’s telling, she was the “normal” one who loved comics and television, didn’t cause much trouble, and cleared her plate. Emily was the brooding “genius.” At around fourteen, she stopped eating, then coming to the table altogether, though neither parent commented on her blatant anorexia, even when she was living on apples. “As E got smaller, I got larger,” Bee wrote in a poignant essay on sisters and their eating disorders.

Unhappy families tend to spin conflicting narratives, and there would probably be no literature without them. “I found this when I was working on my memoir,” Andrew Wilson said. (His daughters are mentioned in it only in passing.) “It was my version of events, not theirs, about which I won’t comment, except to say that what they may tell you about me is true, or partially, because they felt it.” No one, however, took issue with Emily’s account of the bitter scene that took place on January 1, 1988, when she was sixteen. The Wilsons had gathered for a New Year’s lunch, and they went around the table announcing their resolutions. “My resolution,” their father told them, “is to get a divorce.”

Andrew Wilson decamped to London, where he eventually remarried and had a third daughter. Duncan-Jones went on to write “Ungentle Shakespeare,” a biography that reads the Bard’s work deeply but portrays the man as a cad. “Mom knew that great literature is written by imperfect humans,” Wilson said. Her father read “Ungentle Shakespeare” as a swipe at “Ungentle A.N.”

When Bee went to boarding school, then to Cambridge, Emily stayed in Oxford to support their mother, “who was devastated for a long time.” She read classics at Balliol and earned a master’s in English literature at Corpus Christi, but by then England “felt like the wrong place for my well-being.” In 1996, she took a blind leap. Knowing nothing about America or about Yale—“I hoped it was by the sea”—she arrived in New Haven to pursue a doctorate. Her marriage to a former fellow graduate student ended shortly after Imogen’s birth. A second union also foundered and was followed by the familiar trials of single motherhood.

Wilson’s thesis became a book: “Mocked with Death,” a treatise on the tragedy of “overliving”—a penal sentence, by age or loss, to the terminal privation of whatever made a life worthwhile. Her mother’s dementia hadn’t set in yet, but she was attracted to writers who have dramatized this “horror”: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Milton. “Most of us,” she wrote, “struggle in vain to outlive our own past selves.” That struggle may not be in vain, if the self that survives it is the authentic one. But, Wilson wondered to me, how do you recognize her? “I’m not sure I have a stable identity—or perhaps it only emerges through an engagement with language.”

At lunch, Bee had wanted to show me what one of Emily’s past selves looked like, so she’d brought a family album. In a grainy photograph from the nineteen-seventies, the Wilsons pose in an English garden. The parents—a dapper young fogy with ramrod posture and a soulful, slightly rumpled bluestocking—stand behind two tidy little girls in matching sailor suits. The taller one is refusing to smile. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Bee said. “Emily escaped to a world where people were free to express anger.”

She was thinking of ancient Greece, but her sister also escaped to an angry new country. Wilson became an American citizen last year, in order “to vote where I live,” and to engage with the political arguments raging around her. Had she not emigrated, she doubts that she would have seen the need for new Homer translations. “Being from two worlds is part of the story,” she said. In that respect, she’s also a dual national of two education systems. Her own élite schooling had come to seem cloistered, shielded by “walls of class” that also insulate some of her students. The ones who went to private schools “don’t doubt that they belong” in a classics program, even if “they have some unlearning to do,” she said. The public-school kids “need more nurturing to feel welcome. As a translator, I was determined to make the whole human experience of the poems accessible to them.”

My first visits with Wilson took place during graduation weekend at Penn, which happened to coincide with Taylor Swift concerts in Philadelphia, so the city was a zoo. Worried that I’d get stuck in traffic, she gave me strict instructions to take the trolley. I shared a car with Swifties in lamé, graduates in mortarboards, and their elders of three generations. Wilson’s chair had been endowed by the College for Women class of 1963 (Penn became coed a decade later), and the alumni who had gathered for their sixty-year reunion would celebrate her at a banquet. Many were the same age as her mother. “Today’s her birthday,” she said quietly. “She would have been eighty-two.”

When I asked Wilson about the evening’s dress code, she apologized for having “no idea.” But she typically wears something talismanic when she performs. For her readings of the Odyssey, it was often a sequinned owl T-shirt that channelled Athena. (Homer, she notes, has an eye “for things that sparkle.”) Athena is a shape-shifting goddess. She has the power to make herself invisible, and at luminous moments in Wilson’s translations, especially private ones between foes or lovers, so does Wilson. Those exchanges are often monosyllabic and charged with unspoken feeling. Her aim, she said, was “to give the characters breathing room for their ambiguities.”

That evening, her sandals paid homage to Achilles’ mother, “silver-footed Thetis”—a daughter of the sea god Nereus, who was forced to marry King Peleus of Phthia, after he had raped her with the gods’ connivance. Thetis is a tutelary spirit for Wilson: “I’ve come to see the Iliad as a poem about the pain of a goddess mother who adores her mortal child and can’t protect him. The theme of a mother’s tragic love structures the whole poem. But that anguish teaches you a hard truth: you can’t prevent your children from ever being hurt.”

The banquet was held at the Penn library, and we got there early, so that Wilson could review her notes in a quiet corner. As the guests drifted in for cocktails, a few came over to introduce themselves. One regretted that she’d never studied Greek. Another suggested that the Iliad was ripe material for “a rap musical like ‘Hamilton,’ ” and Wilson nodded politely. As a jazz group played oldies, her co-speaker, Stuart Weitzman, checked out her footwear. “I can see you’re a lady who’s into comfort,” he said. Weitzman, a Penn megadonor, is a ’63 graduate of Wharton who made a fortune in the shoe business. “I should really have planned a talk around various characters tying on their sandals,” Wilson told me later. “They abound. But I wanted to read a violent slaughter passage.”

Diffidence is Wilson’s default mode, the legacy of a childhood spent biting her tongue, but her ferocity emerges onstage. “I think there’s a tension,” she told me, “or at least for many people a surprise, in the gap between my mostly shy persona and the intensity of emotion I try to express in performance.” Her sonorous voice gives ancient Greek the rumble of a cataract, though she also brings an impious verve to passages of dialogue. In a video I watched online, Penelope might have been Lady Chatterley and gruff Odysseus her sexy gamekeeper.

Some of Wilson’s YouTube readings have an edge of zaniness; she pulls faces and changes character with comic props—a cardboard crown, cat ears, a dishevelled wig. But that night, dressed sombrely in black lace, she recited one of the Iliad’s most heartrending passages. The gods have been intriguing furiously. Thetis begs Zeus to avenge her son’s honor, although the plan he hatches will also fulfill the prophecy that torments her: Achilles can choose to either die young as a hero or live to an obscure old age.

As the story unfolds, Agamemnon is tricked into thinking that he can win the war without his greatest fighter. The Trojans’ champion—Hector, King Priam’s son—makes the most of this advantage, without knowing it’s a ploy. But a wary seer warns him to seek Athena’s favor, so he leaves the gory plain to organize a sacrifice. Back in the city (briefly, he hopes), he finds his wife, Andromache, watching the war from the battlements with a nurse cradling their infant. In the passage that Wilson read, she grasps his hand and implores him:

What are you doing, Hector? You strange man!
Your will to fight will kill you! Do you feel
no pity for your little baby son,
or my unhappiness, my life of loss?

Achilles, she reminds him, raided her father’s kingdom, killing him and her seven brothers and enslaving their mother. Hector is torn. If he stays behind on the walls, he can defend the citadel. But the supreme imperative of the noble warriors on both sides—Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, Aeneas, Sarpedon, Patroclus, and even foppish Paris—is, as Hector exhorts his fighters, to “be men.” A man is someone who courts death for glory, hoping that his deeds will be immortalized by a poet. (This worked out for all of the above.)

Hector tells Andromache, “No one matters more to me than you.” Yet he offers her no comfort:

One day some bronze-armed Greek will capture you,
and you will weep, deprived of all your freedom. . . .
But as for me, I hope I will be dead,
and lying underneath a pile of earth,
so that I do not have to hear your screams
or watch when they are dragging you away.

Hector routs the besiegers and sets fire to their ships. The desperate Greeks throw every man they have into the field. While Achilles sulks in his tent, his beloved comrade, Patroclus, who shares his bed, bravely joins the battle in Achilles’ armor. This imposture cows the enemy, but Hector slays Patroclus anyway, sealing everyone’s fate. Maddened by grief and rage, “the best of all the Greeks” butchers the Trojans and seizes twelve of their young boys to sacrifice on Patroclus’ funeral pyre. He spears Hector through his neck, then drags the corpse around the city walls until old King Priam abases himself to beg for its return. The poem ends with the laments of three royal women—Helen, Hecuba, and Andromache—whose losses, Wilson writes, “can never be recuperated,” except in the retelling.

Cartoon by Emily Bernstein

Wilson has spent the past decade contemplating her kinship with these warriors. “My childhood self was an Achilles,” she said, “holed up in protest, then emerging later to reveal his power. But I also had a dutiful Hector self, doomed by compliance.” I told her that I thought Hector’s speech to Andromache, with its vision of her degradation, was tinged with sadism, but she disagreed: “Brusqueness is often a mark of fear. You push people away when you worry that you need them too much.” And it rankles her that men whom she considers self-appointed guardians of the Western canon have questioned a woman’s fitness to do Homer justice. “Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.”

This insight, and the lucidity Wilson brings to it, may be the greatest revelation of her Iliad. The poem’s machismo has often bored or estranged me, and, in more grandiloquent translations, its heroes’ mindless bloodlust obscured the pathos of boys and men who are shamed literally to death by weaknesses that they’ve been bred to suppress. Her plainsong conveys the tragedy of their bravado, and, listening to her voice, I felt it for the first time.

I met Wilson in Athens before we left for Ithaca. The city, in late June, was more crowded than Philly had been, and considerably hotter. One morning, we hiked up to the Acropolis, but the wait for tickets was two hours in the sun, so we hiked back down. Over coffee in a little square, I told her about a vintage shop near my hotel. She was delighted by the prospect of taking her girls there. Finding a treasure in a thrift store, she said, gives her a sense of accomplishment akin to “what feels so satisfying in translation. Working within strict constraints like syntax and meter is like digging out the gem from a donation bin.”

Wilson translated Homer into Shakespeare’s meter—an iambic five-foot line, natural to an Anglophone’s ear. She tuned her text like an instrument by reciting it aloud. But she avoided reading her predecessors, who suffered, in her opinion, from reading one another. None of them, she said, felt “particularly sacred, beyond Pope and Chapman, and that’s because they are both in very different ways great poets.” In writing for the body, she searched not only for the most visceral equivalent of every Greek word but for the least slanted one. Toward the end of the Odyssey, the hero’s son, Telemachus, proves that he has become a man by hanging twelve of his mother’s serving women, who have slept with the suitors besieging her. Most translators, Wilson writes, describe them as “sluts” or “whores,” terms that don’t figure in the Greek. Instead, she calls them what Homer does: “slaves,” or, in an echo of plantation culture which felt apt to her, “house girls.”

Wilson’s translations are the first in English to jettison slurs or euphemisms that mask the abjection of women in a society where a goal of war, according to the Iliad, was to rob men of their women, and where female captives of every rank were trafficked for sex and domestic labor. (Boys were, too.) Yet she isn’t aiming to generate outrage at the sexual politics of a Bronze Age patriarchy: “It’s too easy.” To the degree that she’s outraged, it’s by the sexual politics of her vocation. “The ‘faithful’ translation,” she writes, is a “gendered metaphor.” It presupposes a wife-like helpmeet whose work is subordinate to that of “a male-authored original.” To some of her critics, especially the trolls on Twitter, Wilson’s “wokeness” perverts Homer’s world view. In her own view, the biases of previous translators have distorted Homer’s “experiential truth.”

Homer’s goddesses are thrilling models of female power. Aphrodite takes her pleasure where she finds it (everywhere). Semi-divine Helen, Zeus’ daughter, has a witchy seventh sense, a ventriloquist’s voice, and a pharmacy of magic potions. In Wilson’s view, “Nothing beats Hera, dressing up with super-chic earrings and skin creams to mess with Zeus’ plans.” (Her craftiness evokes a conjugal eye roll: “She always thwarts whatever I decree.”) But the poems’ mortal women are subject to the dictates of their husbands and fathers, and even, like Penelope, of their barely postadolescent sons. None of them challenge that convention, yet Wilson is alert to the ambivalence in their stoicism. Where Andromache’s is explicit, Penelope’s is opaque. (Her name means “veil over the face.”) “Is Penelope really glad to see her husband after twenty years?” Wilson asked me. Yes, but her translation of their reunion gives us a moment to wonder:

She crossed the threshold
and sat across from him beside the wall,
in firelight. He sat beside the pillar,
and kept his eyes down, waiting to find out
whether the woman who had once shared his bed
would speak to him. She sat in silence, stunned.

After coffee, I went prospecting for gems at the National Archaeological Museum. Its most famous artifact is a funeral mask of hammered gold leaf that Heinrich Schliemann, the German archeologist, found in what he believed to be Agamemnon’s tomb at Mycenae. The mask, from the sixteenth century B.C.E., predates the war, if there was one, by about three hundred years, but it’s the haunting likeness of an old king with an archaic smile, and, whatever terrible crimes he succumbed to or committed, he seems to be at peace.

The ancient gold in the vitrines reminded me of a passage from Wilson’s introduction to the Odyssey. Helen and her husband, Menelaus, she notes wryly, “seem to have suffered no obvious ill effects from her escapade—beyond the fact that so many people . . . died as a result.” Their marriage, she concludes, might have been cemented by a mutual appreciation for “wonderful consumer goods.” They surely would have coveted the goods that were on display: exquisitely wrought diadems, tripods, wine cups, sword hilts, and jewelry, the likes of which Homer inventories with the concupiscence of a Sotheby’s catalogue.

If you learn one thing from the Iliad, it’s that the greed for stuff, the drive for sex, the fear of death, the bonds of love, the pull of home, the glamour of fame, plus all the insecurities—especially about virility—that generate violence in the world are still the same. I will confess that, in the next gallery, I tarried for longer than was strictly seemly at the statue of Paris—a monumental nude youth with surely the most beautiful face ever sculpted. Of course Helen eloped with him. Abduction, my foot.

When Odysseus at last reaches Ithaca, he doesn’t recognize the island. Athena has shrouded it in mist to buy him some time for plotting his revenge before he confronts the suitors. Once she unveils the landscape, Odysseus, elated, knows just where he is: in a bay like Polis, shaded by a wooded mountain. A “cave sacred to nymphs” lies at one end of the beach, and that is where they hide his treasure—the Phaeacians’ “heroic gifts of bronze.”

On Ithaca, Wilson and I often crossed paths with mountain goats, whose bleating kids rooted at their udders, but we never met a goatherd. “They’re all off composing poetry,” she said. We never met a soul, in fact. It was as if the gods had decided to reward her with a private tour of their haunts.

To reach the palace of Odysseus, we set out from Stavros a little before dusk, when the heat had abated. About a mile from the village, on a steep mountain road, we found a sign that vaguely pointed toward the “School of Homer.” Turning onto a rocky path, we climbed for another twenty minutes until an ancient flight of steps delivered us to a plateau that is one of the island’s strategic high points. In the distance, we could see Afáles Bay and, beyond it, the Ionian Sea shimmering in a violet haze.

Schliemann poked around this acropolis in the mid-nineteenth century, and many archeologists have followed him. The existence of the palace has been disputed for millennia, and alternative locations have been proposed in Cephalonia, Paxos, Sicily, the Baltic, southwestern Spain, and elsewhere on Ithaca, but the School of Homer is a contender. Its ruins were once a complex of buildings pieced together from massive blocks of limestone, and sited so that ships or strangers were visible as they approached. Whoever lived here would have given those strangers a cordial welcome, according to xenia—the sacred code of Greek hospitality, whose breach by Paris (it was bad form to run off with your hostess) led to the Trojan War.

If these are indeed the ruins of the palace, they don’t fit the Odyssey’s descriptions of a royal seat with a vast banquet hall, a storeroom secured by “dazzling double doors,” and an upper story where Penelope worked at her loom and hid herself from the rowdy suitors. A mosaic floor in one of the roofless chambers looked Roman. (Rome occupied Greece for hundreds of years.) In the seventeenth century, some of the stone was used to erect a church, dedicated to St. Athanasios. The School of Homer got its name in English some two hundred years ago, from a local priest who showed the site to a British classicist. He saw shards of pottery, perhaps Mycenaean, scattered in the rubble; Odysseus was unlikely to have been the first Achaean prince to live there.

The birds singing in this ruined choir might have told us its history, but there was no one to interpret their song. Wilson wandered off alone and spent a while looking out to sea. Later, she told me that she’d been thinking about her mother: “She was the home that I came back to.”

Nostos may also imply the yearning for a home that doesn’t exist, or no longer, or only as an ideal: a place where the people you love the most finally recognize and embrace you. “I often feel like an Odysseus,” Wilson said. “He was always reinventing himself and, like a translator, pretending to be someone else and telling that character’s story. But maybe a true self can emerge from the lies.”

When we got back to the road, a sudden apparition arrested us. The setting sun backlit a spider’s web. She hung like a dense onyx bead precisely at our eye level between a gnarly olive tree and a pine whose scent mingled in the warm air with jasmine and goat dung. Wilson whispered, “Athena is with us.” ♦

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Monday, September 11, 2023

R&R International Translation Specialists Celebrates Double-Digit Growth & Esteemed Award - Slator - Translation

[Montreal, September 11, 2023] – R&R International Translation Specialists, a leading provider of comprehensive translation solutions, is proud to announce an outstanding achievement in both financial performance and industry recognition. Demonstrating its commitment to excellence, R&R International Translation Specialists has achieved a remarkable 38% growth in sales and a notable 30% increase in EBITA for the fiscal year ending in March 2023. These impressive results not only highlight the company’s dedication to delivering exceptional translation services but also its ability to thrive within the ever-evolving language industry.

The exceptional sales growth achieved by R&R International Translation Specialists is a testament to the strategic vision, customer-centric approach, and unwavering commitment to quality exhibited by the company’s management team and employees. By consistently exceeding clients’ expectations and delivering exceptional translation solutions across various industries, R&R International Translation Specialists has further solidified its position as a preferred translation service partner.

Acknowledging the outstanding contributions of R&R International Translation Specialists, Corporate Vision Magazine has presented the company with the prestigious Canadian Business Award for Translation Specialists of the Year. Corporate Vision’s awards program recognizes private
businesses from diverse sectors that demonstrate a strategic approach to enhancing performance and achieving extraordinary goals. Selected through a rigorous evaluation process, R&R International Translation Specialists emerged as the clear frontrunner within the translation service realm, standing out for its exceptional business practices, customer satisfaction, and unrivaled success.

Committed to maintaining their trajectory of growth, R&R International Translation Specialists is significantly expanding its team. The company understands that exceptional growth calls for exceptional talent, and they are determined to continue providing their esteemed clientele with unparalleled translation services and unrivaled client service. The strategic expansion of their team will not only ensure seamless project execution but also enable them to accommodate the increasing demands of their ever-growing client base.

“We are thrilled to see our efforts being recognized and rewarded with such remarkable financial growth and this prestigious award,” said Patrice Rousso, President at R&R International Translation Specialists. “These achievements are a testament to the tireless dedication of our team members and their unwavering commitment to providing the highest quality translation services to our clients. By focusing on innovation, customer satisfaction, and operational excellence, we have not only achieved remarkable year-over-year growth but have also solidified our position as industry leaders.”

With an exceptional year behind them, R&R International Translation Specialists is well-positioned to further strengthen its market presence within the translation solutions industry. The company remains committed to serving its clients with the utmost professionalism, accuracy, and efficiency, leveraging cutting-edge technology and a talented team of linguists to provide unparalleled translation services.

About R&R International Translation Specialists:

R&R International Translation Specialists is a prominent industry leader providing an extensive range of translation services tailored to fit the diverse needs of their clients in various sectors such as finance, technology, legal, healthcare, and more. With over 20 years of experience, a team of over 150 skilled language professionals, and cutting-edge translation technologies, the company offers a comprehensive array of translation services, including specialized document translation, localization, interpretation, transcription, and more. With a commitment to excellence and a customer-centric approach, R&R International Translation Specialists ensures that every client’s translation requirements are not only met but exceeded.

For more information, please contact:

Marlie Rousso
Director of Business Development
514-549-6789
Marlie@rr-translations.com
R&R International Translation Specialists Inc. 

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A guide to new dictionary.com words, from nepo baby to biohacking and climate criminal - The National - Dictionary

More than 500 new words have been added to www.dictionary.com this week.

Phrases from different cultures, countries and generations, words that originated online, and terms that were once the province of certain industries like tech, wellness and finance, have been added to the mainstream lexicon, proving how far and fast language moves these days.

Familiar terms like biohacking and intermittent fasting have been included, as have lesser known words such as bloatware and unsee, along with an array of downright obscure references: Orange shower, anyone?

And for anyone who has ever sent a text they regret, unsend has also been legitimised.

Here are some of the most fun and interesting words added to the dictionary.

Nepo baby enters the mainstream

Actress Lily-Rose Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, is a nepo baby. Reuters

Among the words making the biggest headlines for their debut in the dictionary, nepo baby sits at the top.

The term was coined by X user Meriem Derradji in early 2022. After watching TV show Euphoria, Derradji tweeted her astonishment that one of its stars, Maude Apatow, was the daughter of writer-director Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann, dubbing her a “nepo baby”.

The term was quickly picked up by Gen Z as they discovered that some of their favourite stars were the offspring of other celebrities.

The phrase was then cemented in pop culture when New York magazine ran a cover story featuring Dakota Johnson, Jack Quaid, Lily-Rose Depp, Zoe Kravitz and more, under the headline: “She has her mother’s eyes. And her agent.”

While Eve Hewson, actress and daughter of U2 frontman Bono claimed the term was driven by “jealousy”, Girls actress Allison Williams, daughter of US newsreader Brian Williams, owned her privilege, telling Vulture: “To not acknowledge that me getting started as an actress versus someone with zero connections isn’t the same – it’s ludicrous.”

New words in tech, social media and money

The fast pace of today’s technology has seen many words in the tech sphere enter the everyday lexicon. Digital nomad makes its debut in reference to the post-pandemic rise in people working from anywhere around the world, as does algo, short for algorithm and bloatware, the term used to describe unwanted software that is preinstalled on new devices.

Pessimise was introduced as the opposite of optimise, referring to technology that is created to become less efficient over time, forcing users to buy new ones.

Chatbot and GPT (generative pre-trained) were also included in the wake of the headline-making technology ChatGPT, along with the concerning verb hallucinate that describes when a machine-learning programme, such as AI, “produces false information contrary to the intent of the user and presents it as if true and factual.”

Big pharma collectivises the power and influence held by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, albeit with negative connotations, while information pollution gives a name to the dilution or suppression of facts by way of irrelevance, bias and sensationalism.

New pop culture slang

Orange shower has been included in the dictionary, meaning to eat an orange in the shower. Unsplash / Chang Duong

Two sections, slang and pop culture, had the largest increase of words. Unsee and unsend entered the mainstrea – having both often been used in social media and text messaging parlance for years to refer to things you wish you hadn't seen or sent.

Work to rule refers to the Gen Z-driven approach to employment of never going above or beyond what the job description entails, while jawn moves beyond the borders of Philadelphia - where it has long referred to something you don't know the name of - to the rest of the world. Example: "Hey, can you hand me that jawn over there.”

Niche additions include orange shower, the act of unpeeling an orange in the shower. The term first appeared in a thread on social media platform Reddit in 2016, with the idea being that the steam from the shower and the unpeeled orange combined to create a soothing citrus shower experience.

An even more esoteric choice is agelast, referring to someone who never laughs, while sonder is the word for the realisation that you are merely a minor or secondary character in the lives of others.

Health, happiness and the environment

Kylie Jenner has often been branded a climate criminal, due to the number of private jet trips she takes. AFP

Biohacking, in which people attempt to find (and then post on social media) shortcuts to optimum health was introduced among the new words, along with intermittent fasting, which has become a popular method for weightloss.

Decision fatigue makes its debut as a modern lament usually associated with the overabundance of choice on streamers making it difficult to decide what to watch.

Environmental words include greenwashing, “the practice of promoting or affiliating a brand, campaign, mission, etc, with environmentalism as a ploy to divert attention from policies and activities that are in fact anti-environmentalist.”

Reality TV star and beauty mogul Kylie Jenner will be familiar with the inclusion of climate criminal as she was branded one for the number of private jet trips she takes, with the phrase referring to people “whose actions or activities are considered particularly destructive to the environment.”

Updated: September 10, 2023, 10:24 AM

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'Lost in Translation' at 20: A Tokyo perspective - The Japan Times - Translation

In the autumn of 2003, Japan was having a bit of a moment at the movies. That October, cinema audiences were treated to the spectacle of Uma Thurman clashing with the Crazy 88 yakuza gang in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1.” A few weeks later, Tom Cruise could be seen getting in touch with his warrior spirit in Edward Zwick’s period epic, “The Last Samurai.”

But first out of the blocks was “Lost in Translation,” the sophomore feature by Sofia Coppola — a celebrity kid already well on her way to becoming a celebrated filmmaker in her own right.

Released in U.S. theaters on Sept. 12, this tale of a brief encounter between two lonely souls at a luxury hotel in Tokyo was a resounding critical and commercial success. Produced on a modest $4 million budget, it went on to pick up four Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, with Coppola taking home the Oscar for best original screenplay.

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Philologists, pedants and obsessives: how crowd-sourcing created the Oxford English Dictionary - The Conversation - Dictionary

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary is a celebration of words and word-people: authors, editors, publishers, linguists, lexicographers, philologists, obsessives, pedants. Its author, Sarah Ogilvie, was formerly an Oxford English Dictionary editor and wrote the 2013 book Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary.


Review: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus)


Ogilvie’s focus in The Dictionary People is on editor James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915), who orchestrated a collective, pre-digital mode of crowd-sourcing to produce the first edition of the dictionary.

An unlikely lexical prodigy, Murray had left school at 14. He had worked on a dairy farm, then as a teacher and a bank clerk. In between those and other jobs, he developed a broad knowledge of foreign languages – including Tongan and classical Greek – and became a serious student of etymology and philology. On that basis he was enlisted to help with the dictionary.

For his work, Murray built a large iron shed in his garden that was called, grandly, “the Scriptorium”. On cold days, which were many, Murray’s editorial assistants would wrap their legs in newspaper to stay warm.

Lacking a university education, Murray was alert to status and perceptions. He gifted himself the names “Augustus” and “Henry” to impart gravity and distinction to his otherwise humble-sounding name. After he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1874, he wore his scholar’s cap every day.

Murray’s OED was to be much more than a list of words and their definitions. It would also be a philological document, providing examples of how words had appeared in books and newspapers. That goal was well beyond the capacity of an editor and a small team of shivering assistants. Hence the crowd-sourcing. A vast network of people would join the project, sending in paper slips showing examples of English words in context.

There were so many contributors sending so many slips that the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box outside Murray’s home. Many of the contributors (nearly 500) were women, and some of those were among the OED’s super-contributors, sending in thousands of slips over many years.

When it was finally published in 1928 after Murray’s death, his edition of the OED contained 414,825 entries, with 1.8 million illustrative quotations.

Allusions and anecdotes

The catalyst for The Dictionary People was Ogilvie’s rediscovery of Murray’s ribbon-tied address books in a “dusty box” in the basement archive of Oxford University Press.

The address books revealed an extraordinary collection of contributors, including Virginia Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen, Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, the American army surgeon William Chester Minor, and Sir John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist on John Franklin’s first voyage in search of the Northwest Passage.

William Chester Minor (1834-1920). Public domain

Like Murray’s OED, The Dictionary People is a collective exercise. In addition to other supporters and sources, Ogilvie has assembled the book with the assistance of ten student researchers at Stanford University, with an eye for fascinating allusions and anecdotes.

We learn from The Dictionary People that Jane Austen was the first to write the word “outsider” and that a cousin of Eleanor Marx hallucinated that she had written Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

We also learn that the OED entry for ruffle – “to rumple, to destroy the smoothness or evenness of something” – took an illustrative quotation from Eleanor’s 1886 translation of Madame Bovary, and that, at the age of 27, a not-yet-famous J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the OED as an editorial assistant with the lexicographer Charles Onions, whose family referred to Tolkien as “Jirt”, short for J.R.R.T.

Yet another delightful detail: 18 words from the science-fiction novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), including “dimensionable” and “nondimensionable”, made it in to the dictionary. Written by mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott under the pseudonym “A. Square”, Flatland is the story of a square who visits Pointland, Lineland and Spaceland “to explore the possibility of other dimensions”.

A book with Austen, Woolf, Tolkien and sci-fi? The Dictionary People is irresistible.


Read more: Youse wouldn't believe it: a new book charts the 11-year making of a 'people's dictionary' for Australia


Public domain

Gonzoesque

The Dictionary People is a good example of a newish genre of gonzoesque bibliographic history. Other examples include Denis Duncan’s equally excellent Index: A History of the (2022), Emma Smith’s Portable Magic (2022) and my book The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders (2017).

This genre aims to tackle potentially dry, bookish topics in an engaging way. It analyses serious subjects diligently but informally, blending high and low culture, respectable and disreputable content.

Compared to Duncan, Ogilvie is more relaxed with the informality and the edgy terrain. The Dictionary People lacks rock’n’roll, but there is plenty of sex and drugs. Ogilvie devotes a chapter to the erotomaniac Henry Spencer Ashbee, whom Duncan left out of his book, despite the lurid splendour of the index to Ashbee’s anonymously published erotic memoir My Secret Life (1888).

Some parts of The Dictionary People are possibly too gonzoesque, even for me – such as when William Minor takes a paper-knife and a tourniquet and cuts off his own penis.

Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx (1913) Public domain

In the midst of this symphony of words and colour, there are inevitably some wrong notes. To bring Murray’s list of contributors to life, Ogilvie has assembled a series of biographical portraits. These provide the book with its structure and narrative drama, but some of the biographical entries are stronger than others.

Towards the start of The Dictionary People, Ogilvie confesses to being “thrilled” that the list of OED contributors includes “not one but three murderers, a pornography collector [and] a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station lavatory”.

The addict is Eustace Frederick Bright, the focus of Chapter J. Unfortunately, it is one of the weaker chapters in The Dictionary People. Parts of it read like a Tinder profile, or perhaps the formulaic obituary of the died-young Oxbridge scholar. “Bright by name and bright by nature”, Eustace was

a top student […] passing all his examinations with flying colours […] A good-looking young man, he had an engaging and outgoing personality, and many friends.

There are some unhelpful speculations, such as “if heroin had existed in Bright’s day […] he probably would have tried it”. We learn that Bright died after drinking a phial of liquid cocaine, then taking several tablets, along with morphine. “He began to vomit, then collapsed and, lying on the toilet floor, he died.”

Ogilvie speculates about Murray’s reaction to Bright’s death:

Murray, as a teetotaller, would have been shocked and saddened by the demise of one of his most promising students and volunteers. News of Bright’s overdose came at a difficult time for him. Life in the Scriptorium was particularly stressful […] because of the successful publication [in America] of the Century Dictionary and the generously funded progress of […] Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language.

The chapter towards the end on Chris Collier, however, is one of the strongest: a highlight of the book. Collier was a naturist from Brisbane who, like Murray, left school at 14. He began contributing to the OED in the 1970s, sending 100,000 slips over a period of 35 years.

For his contributions, Collier pulled numerous quotes from the Courier Mail. He sent bundles of slips “eccentrically wrapped in old Corn Flakes packets with pieces of cereal and dog hair stuck to them”. As a result, Brisbane’s main newspaper is proportionally over-represented in the OED.

Ogilvie describes meeting Collier in a Brisbane park in 2006, when Collier was around 70 years old. Dressed Don Dunstan-style in a t-shirt and “very short shorts”, he was reading – of course – the Courier Mail.

James Murray’s edition of the OED contained 414,825 entries and 1.8 million illustrative quotations. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Ogilvie refers regularly to “word nerds”. She is a natural connoisseur, who delights in words such as fritillaria (a type of flowering plant), eweleaze (an upland pasture for feeding sheep), absquatulate (to leave abruptly), apheliotropic and apogeotropic (botanical terms for plants that, respectively, turn away from the sun and bend away from the earth), agamogenetic (asexual reproduction), zoopraxiscope and zoogyroscope (two early forms of movie projector), aophiolaters (people who worship snakes), and cephaleonomancy (“divination by placing a donkey’s head on coals, and watching the jaws move at the name of a guilty person”).

But Ogilvie (or her editor) is not a textbook word nerd. She suggests, for example, that the New Zealand katipo and the Australian redback are the same species of spider; though related, they are not. And do we really need to be told that “non-conformably” means “in a manner that is not conformable”?

Writing about Eustace Bright, Ogilvie remarks that the word junkie “seems the closest adjective beginning with j to describe Murray’s former student”. Rather than “adjective” here, a more punctilious word nerd would have said “word” or “noun”.


Read more: Giving back to English: how Nigerian words made it into the Oxford English Dictionary


The bigger picture

The overarching claim of The Dictionary People is that it shines a light on the “unacknowledged” and “unsung heroes” of the OED. The claim is made in the subtitle and repeated throughout the book. Ogilvie states that she has “uncovered lives that have not necessarily been written about in the history books”.

I’m not sure what Ogilvie means by “necessarily” here, but the claim of unsungness is doubtful. Other works have covered similar ground. Quite a few of the people profiled in the book have been written about extensively. Simon Winchester’s bestselling The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998), for example, focused on William Chester Minor and was turned into a (not very successful) Hollywood film with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.

Many books have been written on the search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin. There are numerous biographies of Leslie Stephen, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Marxes. OED contributor Edward Sugden was profiled in a book by his daughter, as well as in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the centenary history of Melbourne University Publishing. Henry Spencer Ashbee is the subject of Ian Gibson’s book The Erotomaniac (2001). Ogilvie’s previous book covers some of the same ground as The Dictionary People (it contains the Jirt anecdote, for example) and she wrote about Chris Collier for the Australian Book Review in June 2012.

Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900). Public domain

I think Ogilvie would agree that the “unsung” claim is in many instances an unnecessary overstatement. Her main contribution with The Dictionary People is to put all the biographical portraits together to reveal a new and bigger picture.

What does this bigger picture reveal? In a compelling way, Ogilvie’s mosaic of contributors disrupts the assumptions we make when we see a copy of the OED. She tends to write from a British perspective, but she highlights that other countries and cultures have strong stakes in the OED. She describes how the dictionary was an English project and a British project, but also an empire project and a global project.

The OED was not solely an English enterprise in another sense, too. In the field of dictionary production, as Ogilvie shows, continental Europeans had the jump on England, producing dictionaries with similar methods and ambitions. Murray and other OED editors took a lot from European (and American) precedents and competitors.

What else can we see anew by grouping the contributors together? Murray’s OED was ostensibly a conservative academic project, but it was also a radical and democratic one. It contains countless neologisms. It drew input from people of all genders and classes. Many of the contributors lived far outside the academy, on the margins and fringes of Victorian and Edwardian society. A significant proportion were probably neurodiverse, and a large number were politically, socially and sexually diverse.

This is a cliché of course, but the OED took strength from this diversity. The power and richness of the dictionary depended on reaching into distant places and fields, including literature, commerce, medicine and science. The OED transcended disciplines and it transcended, literally, the walls of institutions such as prisons and asylums. William Minor, the fourth most prolific contributor to the dictionary, worked from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

Ogilvie’s bigger picture reveals that the English language is not owned by a club or a committee or a university or by people from a particular social class or place. It is a global language in its sources, its reach and its ownership. The language, and the literary and scholarly traditions that were built with it, belong to all of us.

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The Dictionary People — a homage to the eclectic lexicographers of the OED - Financial Times - Dictionary

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