News Summary

• Emily Wilson's modern translations of Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have themselves been staging grounds for culture war consternation.
• Criticisms of Wilson’s Odyssey —the first major translation from a female scholar —followed their own predictable pattern.
• Her translation afforded sympathy to previously monstrous figures (like the dreaded cyclops) and dignity to slaves, swineherds, and the servant women summarily slaughtered.
• Wilson herself was called “ woke,” a “ feminist leftard,’ and worse.