Rosy Fingered Dawn Odyssey Quote

Magazine | New Sentences: From Emily Wilson'south Translation of the 'Odyssey'

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/magazine/new-sentences-from-emily-wilsons-translation-of-the-odyssey.html

New Sentences

New Sentences: From Emily Wilson's Translation of the 'Odyssey'

March 15, 2018

'Presently Dawn appeared and touched the heaven with roses.'

— From Emily Wilson'due south translation of Homer's "Odyssey" (W.W. Norton & Visitor, 2017, Page 220). The British classicist'south rendering is the beginning published English translation of Homer's epic by a woman.

The work of Homer is, among all its wonderful qualities, as well extremely repetitive. Every time a character turns around, he has to drink sugariness wine and get his feet washed with oil and cede a bull to a fickle god. On the level of language, as well, sure phrases recur similar waves: "the wine-night sea," "hollow boats," "bright-eyed Athena" and so on. Scholars say such repetition is a signature of oral storytelling; the familiar phrases are convenient memory handles for the storyteller and the listener alike.

Probably the most famous of those repetitions is the arrival, every morning, of "rosy-fingered dawn." I've always found the image strangely surreal: a cosmic pink mitt slowly creeping over the horizon, lightening the heaven.

In her new translation of the "Odyssey," Emily Wilson allows herself some creative freedom with Homer'due south formulaic phrases. "I take used the opportunity offered past the repetitions," she writes in her introduction, "to explore the multiple dissimilar connotations of each epithet."

Rosy-fingered dawn, in this new version, takes on many small variations. "When early Dawn revealed her rose-red hands." "The early Dawn was built-in; her fingers bloomed." My favorite rendering is "Soon Dawn appeared and touched the sky with roses." It is so wonderfully frail. It evokes, beautifully, the heaven'southward subtle changes at first lite: how the colors phase in mildly, near imperceptibly, the way a piece of white paper might blush if yous rubbed it with a flower. And it is a perfect instance of creative translation. "Easily" and "fingers" are not named here, as they are in most other versions. But they are implied, with the subtlety of a breaking dawn, in the give-and-take "touched."