Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson

Author:Rebecca May Johnson [Johnson, Rebecca May]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The first English translation of the Odyssey was published in c. 1615, and there have been around sixty English translations since, but none published in full by a woman until Emily Wilson’s translation in 2017 (to my knowledge). A key differentiating aspect of Wilson’s ‘reception’ of the Odyssey is that she translates the women who work in Odysseus’s house as ‘slaves’ instead of ‘maids’. ‘Slaves’ is closer to the Greek text than earlier translations, which generally use the idealized term ‘maid’. Wilson’s translation draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the women’s domestic labour is not consensual, not a choice. The use of the word ‘maid’ to refer to enslaved domestic workers in earlier translations does several things. Unlike ‘slave’, which describes the legal status of a person in a slave-owning society, the word ‘maid’ is connivingly ambiguous.

I am reminded of ‘lovely’ and its use to refer to cooking and recipes when I think of ‘maid’, for several reasons. First, like ‘lovely’, ‘maid’ occupies a position in a binary and misogynistic moral discourse in which women are either virgins or whores who may, according to that logic, be punished if they acknowledge their sexuality. In the translations of the Odyssey that precede Wilson’s, the moral justification for killing the ‘maids’ when Odysseus returns home is that they had sex with the men who want to marry Penelope after Odysseus is given up for dead. These men want to take ownership of Odysseus’s possessions, which includes the ‘maids’. Wilson highlights how earlier translators have used this misogynistic binary to transform the women from ‘maids’ to ‘sluts’ in a long Twitter thread from 2018. Here’s a bit of it –

Many translations import misogynistic language when it isn’t there in the Greek. In Fagles’ best-selling version, ‘You sluts – the suitors’ whores!’ Lombardo: ‘Sluts’. Lattimore: ‘Creatures’. Fitzgerald: ‘Sluts’. Pope’s is the best: ‘nightly prostitutes to shame’.

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