A Quantitative Look at Emily Wilson's Odyssey

With so much criticism of Wilson's translation in the air, perhaps data can help improve the discussion.

Critics have accused classicist Emily Wilson of twisting The Odyssey to suit her own needs, creating a “woke” version that shames the blind poet. The first woman to translate the epic into English, some say Wilson infuses her version with a social consciousness that is out of step with previous translations. Rather than jump heart-first into the fray, I propose a different tack. Let’s look at what quantitative data from the text reveal.

Size Matters

In terms of translation length, Wilson’s translation is significantly shorter than the others. Wilson’s translation, published in 2017, sits alongside three other popular English versions of the past century: Richmond Lattimore’s 1965 translation, Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version, and Robert Fagles’s 1996 work. By raw word count: Lattimore comes in at 138,945 words; Fagles at 122,931; Fitzgerald at 107,349; Wilson at just 97,302. That’s roughly seventy percent the length of Lattimore. Compression, not expansion, is the structural choice Wilson made. She chose to keep her poem to the same number of lines as the original, departing from her predecessors who took expansive liberties with their translations.

Wilson’s version is much shorter than others, keeping closer to the length of the original. This is interesting, but also presents a challenge. Given the wide range of translation lengths, I wanted to create an apples-to-apples comparison. So I focused on analyzing the relative frequencies of words across texts. Relative frequency just means that instead of tallying simple word counts, I divide those word counts by the total number of words per book per author.

Specifically, I was interested in pronouns. As far as parts of speech go, pronouns serve as a sound proxy for the role gender plays in a text. If Wilson is guilty of the offenses thrown her way on social media one would be sure to find telltale evidence in her pronoun usage.

Who Runs the World? “She” and “Her”

Take the relative frequency of “her” (the objective-case pronoun) across the four translations. Fitzgerald actually uses it most often, at 0.71% of his total words; Fagles at 0.66%; Lattimore at 0.60%; Wilson, the lowest, at 0.59%. So Wilson doesn’t amplify women as objects of action. She uses the word less often than any of the three men did over the course of the whole text.

What about “she,” the subjective pronoun? Here the picture flips: Wilson 0.52%; Fitzgerald 0.37%; Fagles roughly 0.32%; Lattimore 0.44%. So per word, Wilson uses “she” more often than any other translator.

Oh, No “He” Didn’t

Now the surprise. Wilson doesn’t only lead on “she.” She also leads on “he.” Just look at the relative frequency: Wilson 1.50%, Lattimore 1.23%, Fitzgerald 1.19%, Fagles 0.88%. Proportionally, Wilson uses male pronouns more than any of the men did.

This is where the “first female translator amplifies women” story breaks down. Wilson isn’t writing women into the Odyssey. She’s writing the individuality of characters in more directly.

The Pronouns Have It

The fact is that Wilson’s use of pronouns is layered and significant. First person: “I” appears at 1.69% relative frequency in Wilson, 1.28% in Fitzgerald, 1.25% in Lattimore, and just 1.05% in Fagles. Second person: “you” at 1.67% in Wilson, 1.35% in Lattimore, 1.27% in Fitzgerald, 1.25% in Fagles. First-person plural: “we” at 0.49% in Wilson, versus 0.36%, 0.32%, and 0.28% for the others. Possessive “my”: Wilson 0.92%, Fagles 0.88%, Fitzgerald 0.81%, Lattimore 0.72%.

Look at the shape of those numbers. Wilson leads on “I,” “you,” “we,” “they,” and “my.” She trails on “him,” “her,” and “them” (the objective case). She’s essentially tied with the men on “his” and “your.”

The pattern is not gendered. It’s grammatical.

Wilson’s translation prefers subjects to objects. Her Odyssey foregrounds who is speaking and acting, not who is being acted upon. That is a different kind of intervention than the one most readers assume she’s making.

The popular narrative that Wilson “adds” femininity to the text is a tired and unsubstantiated story. It might confirm what some already believe about gender and translation, but the data suggest something harder to summarize. Wilson’s Odyssey is more intimate, more direct, and more character-driven than the versions that came before. Women appear more often as subjects, because everyone does. The translation doesn’t rewrite Homer’s gender balance. It shifts the grammatical register in order to deepen the connection between reader and character.

Wilson’s Odyssey isn’t a radical feminist Odyssey in the way some critics suggest. It is a more personal Odyssey that celebrates the individual responsibility of its characters, male and female alike. At its core is an idea worth repeating with every new generation: individuals do not exist in a vacuum; they are accountable to others for their words and deeds. No wonder Homer’s story continues to resonate so powerfully today.