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Translation of "essay" into Greek

δοκίμιο, έκθεση, πραγματεία are the top translations of "essay" into Greek. Sample translated sentence: I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. ↔ Μόλις έγραψα ένα δοκίμιο σχετικά με την ευτυχία, και υπήρξε μια αντιπαράθεση.

A written composition of moderate length exploring a particular issue or subject. [..]

English-Greek dictionary

written composition [..]

I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy.

Μόλις έγραψα ένα δοκίμιο σχετικά με την ευτυχία, και υπήρξε μια αντιπαράθεση.

We wrote an essay , solved a problem, and in the afternoon we took the aptitude test.

Γράψαμε μια έκθεση , λύσαμε ένα πρόβλημα, και το απόγευμα κάναμε τα ψυχολογικά τεστ.

written composition

It's quite a long essay , but perhaps if you could give Razumikhin the gist.

Είναι αρκετά μεγάλη η πραγματεία , αλλά θα μπορούσατε να αναθέσετε στον Ραζουμίκιν το νομικό μέρος της.

Less frequent translations

• αποπειρώμαι
• έκθεση ιδεών

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Automatic translations of " essay " into Greek

Translations with alternative spelling

"Essay" in English - Greek dictionary

Currently we have no translations for Essay in the dictionary, maybe you can add one? Make sure to check automatic translation, translation memory or indirect translations.

Phrases similar to "essay" with translations into Greek

• the Saturday essay η σαββατιάτικη επιφυλλίδα

Translations of "essay" into Greek in sentences, translation memory

Essay Translation

Resonate with readers of all linguistic backgrounds with a professional essay translation

Essays are considered a major literary work that is utilized towards the purpose of educational attainment and personal fulfillment. An essay is described as a literary piece of written work that presents an author’s ideas and arguments using specific evidence or explanations to support the claims being made in the paper. There are two distinct classification of essays recognized in literature. An academic or formal essay is a major part of a formal education that serves to provide a structured sequence of arguments that support the writer’s major thesis. Whereas, an informal essay can be characterized as a personal manifesto or fictional short story written by an author. Essays are typically written as a part of an individual’s academic studies, and are often requested by universities as part of their admissions process when selecting future applicants. Linguation Online Translation Agency is experienced in translating the contents of an essay in any number of language combinations. Skilled experts with the knowledge of the relevant subject matter will work to produce an accurate translation that resonate with audiences around the world.

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It is evident that essays are utilized towards a diverse range of objectives. At Linguation Online Translation Agency, we are committed to offering services dedicated to the professional translation of essays for all endeavours. We will delegate an expert in the field of academia to perform the translation service. They will collaborate with the client to produce a translation that accurately represents their ideas in a logical and clear manner. Our experts understand the importance of intellectual property and will work to preserve the author’s original words and message in the language of the target audience. They will find an equivalent translation for all specific terms used in the source document and adapt unclear statements in a way that can be understood by the recipient of the text. Our experts will be responsible for incorporating the appropriate industry standards and proper requirements that will ensure the successful outcome of the essay translation.

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An Instant Classic About Learning Ancient Greek

When Andrea Marcolongo’s book “ La Lingua Geniale ,” subtitled “9 ragioni per amare il greco” (“Nine Reasons to Love Greek”), came out in 2016, I bought it, in Italian, and took it with me to Greece. I flashed it at a meeting with some highly accomplished multilingual women. “You read Italian?” one of them asked. Slowly, at a very low level, without full comprehension, I should have said. I had brought the book with me to the island of Rhodes because I thought it would be good practice in both Italian and Greek. I was writing a book on Greek myself, and the difficulty of Greek made Italian seem transparent in comparison. I had made it to page 10 of the first essay, on aspect—a property of verbs by which the ancient Greeks distinguished between the “how” and the “when” of an action—when I got distracted by a sidebar on Greek wine and decided that I really ought to get out more: take a walk in the Old Town, with its streets named after Socrates and Plato, and check to see if that bar called Beer Paradise had opened for the season.

Still, Marcolongo, a journalist who grew up in Livorno, Italy, and has a degree in classics, did something I had very much wanted to do: she wrote about classical Greek while she was young and freshly enamored of the beauty, economy, and subtlety of the language and passionate about how it can change your life. The book stayed in my luggage—it went to Texas, Auckland, Abu Dhabi, and Cambridge, England, and crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2, where I was sure I would get to it—and at last, three years later, it has been translated into English, by Will Schutt, as “ The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek ” (Europa Compass). The word “epic” in the subtitle may have been intended to clarify that we’re talking ancient Greek here, the language of epic poetry, and also to convey the excitement of the contemporary usage, as in, say, “an epic boxing match.” The Italian title, “La Lingua Geniale,” may have been inspired by “ L’Amica Geniale ,” the blockbuster novel by Elena Ferrante, translated into English by Ann Goldstein as “ My Brilliant Friend ” (also published by Europa).

One of the things I most admire about “The Ingenious Language” is that it doesn’t spoon-feed the reader. From the first chapter (though they are not really chapters but essays that can be read in any order), Marcolongo serves up healthy portions of Plato in raw Greek, without apology. She provides translations, of course, but insists that “it does not matter if you know ancient Greek or not.” In fact, if you don’t, “all the better”—you can still play with her at “thinking in ancient Greek.” A subject that I devoted the whole first chapter of my book to—the alphabet—Marcolongo dispenses with in less than a paragraph, in the penultimate essay. “The alphabet is a means of communicating a language, not the language,” she writes. “All it is is a writing system for getting the sounds of words down on the page.” Yet she acknowledges that “the alphabet barrier” seems “to cloud our view of resemblances between Greek and our own language.”

The nine reasons make for a spread worthy of a symposium. Besides aspect, they include gender, number (Greek famously has not just the singular and plural but also the dual, for things that come in pairs, such as twins or lovers), mood, and diacritical marks (Greek words tend to come front-loaded with flecks over their vowels). In “Cases, or an Orderly Anarchy of Words,” Marcolongo writes eloquently, “Capable of indicating the exact function of words without ambiguities, the ancient Greek case system makes for a formidable spectacle: word order doesn’t follow a logical pattern but an expressive and, therefore, personal pattern.” Marcolongo loves etymology and often uses it to approach and elucidate a subject. The chapter on case begins, “Inflected, from the Latin flectere , ‘to bend or curve.’ Meaning ‘to change direction.’ . . . The syntactic role of words is entrusted to changing, or bending , their case endings.” The chapter on the optative mood, which might be described as a refinement of the subjunctive—it is used to express wishes that may not come true—begins, “Desire. In French désir , in Spanish deseo , in Portuguese desejo . From Latin desiderium , from the phrase de + sidere , ‘from the stars.’ To gaze at some attractive person or thing as if gazing at the hieroglyphic stars at night.” Is it just me or is that kind of sexy?

Marcolongo, who looks more like a yoga teacher than a classics professor—she is in her early thirties, with straight blond hair, direct blue eyes, and tattoos, including one of the word “Sarajevsko,” for a brand of beer brewed in Sarajevo, on her left arm—is writing primarily for students of the classics. She tries to allay their fears by telling tales out of liceo classico , such as the one about the time she bungled a Latin exam by translating ratto in “Il Ratto Delle Sabine”—“The Rape of the Sabine Women”—as “rats.” (She was fifteen and did not know the story of how Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, carried off the Sabine women in order to populate their city. The memory still smarts.) In the chapter on gender, she describes the indignities of growing up with a man’s name. In Italy, “Andrea” is masculine and even comes from the Greek for “man” ( andros ); at eighteen, Andrea received a draft notice in the mail. In an essay on translation, she assures her students that their study will pay off: “The satisfaction, pride, frustration, and disappointment that learning this language entails make it easier to manage the joy and heartache of adulthood.” She mentions in passing that translating Greek may have saved the semicolon: the Greeks used it in the form of a raised dot; translating complex sentences requires it. The last essay, “Greek and Us: A History,” might well be read first. It traces Greek from its Indo-European prehistory through Homeric Greek, classical Greek, Koine (Greek after Alexander), and modern Greek. In a reversal of history, Marcolongo suggests that the Spartans could have learned a thing or two from the bitter, unending rivalry between Livorno and Pisa. The chapter culminates in the insight that “Greek is the only European language that never evolved into anything other than itself.”

Those of us who live in the United States and speak English are a step further removed from Greek than citizens of Europe, because Latin and the Romance languages absorbed a lot of Greek vocabulary, and English acquired its Greek-derived words through them. Still, the influence of the Greeks is all around us. I have only to go outside to see a truck emblazoned with “Hermes Waste” or “Hercules Laundry” and take a train to midtown to see a show called “Hadestown.” The impeachment drama unfolding in Washington invokes the Framers of the Constitution, who thought long and hard about democracy—rule ( kratia ) of, by, and for the people ( demos )—an invention of the Greeks.

It can’t have been easy to translate an Italian book on Greek into English, and Will Schutt deserves a medal for valor. For the quotations from ancient Greek (I assume Marcolongo did her own translations into Italian), Schutt (or his editors) made the sensible decision to rely on the Loeb Classical Library’s dual-language editions. My little bit of Italian made me curious about some of the translator’s other choices. The word “weird” crops up a lot, which is . . . weird. The original has “ strano ” (strange, peculiar), “ curioso ” (odd, curious), and “ strambo ” (eccentric). The phrase “to deal the killshot” also sent me back to the original, where I found “ dar loro il colpo di grazia. ” In this case, French would have been more idiomatic than English for an American reader: “deliver the coup de grâce.”

While checking the translation against the original, I made the happy discovery that my Italian seems to have improved during the three years that I carried around “La Lingua Geniale.” I can read the sidebars—digressions, as in a travel book, on topics such as animal sounds, taboo words, the color blue—and even get a flavor of Marcolongo’s prose: she is charming in Italian. (In a sidebar on “Liceo Classico,” added expressly for the English edition, she mentions that one of the heroines of Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” studies the classics and knows that “the one way to gain independence—as an individual and from your social class—is an education.”) Marcolongo’s “La Lingua Geniale” was a best-seller in Europe, and the author, who now lives in Paris, has since written two more books, the latest on etymology (“ Alla Fonte delle Parole ”—“At the Source of Words”). Of course, it’s possible that my ease of reading in Italian is a side effect of having studied the translation: once you know what it means, it’s easier to see what it says. So Schutt’s translation does exactly what a trot, or literal translation, does for students of classical Greek: it helps them read—and fall in love with—the original.

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Looking at Medea: Essays and a Translation of Euripides’ Tragedy

N.j. sewell-rutter , oxford tutorial college. [email protected].

David Stuttard’s Looking at Medea presents twelve essays on Euripides’ tragedy, newly commissioned from a variety of respected scholars, together with an editor’s introduction and Stuttard’s own translation of the text, which is modestly printed last.

Edited volumes intended as companions frequently imply rather than expressly limit their audience. Stuttard states his intention to ‘cover a wide range of issues’ and allow his contributors the latitude to present a ‘diversity of views’ at the cost of an occasional ‘small degree of overlap’ (Foreword, x). The volume as a whole assumes no knowledge of Greek and little or no prior knowledge of Attic tragedy in its readership. Endnotes are kept to a minimum, and the bibliography (205–11) heavily emphasises the last thirty years of work on the play. Reflective theatre professionals with minimal classical training are a large part of the implied audience, and the essays and translation could certainly be used, among other things, as the basis for an informed and successful English language production of Medea.

The editor’s introduction emphasises the play’s context both within the dramatic festivals and on the cusp of the Peloponnesian War. Stuttard does not introduce interpretative issues himself or situate the individual contributions within wider scholarly debates, conformably to his editorial principle of lightness of touch. One might take issue in an otherwise informative and helpful introduction with the argument on p. 4 that the ‘Athenians’ shamefully misogynistic view of women, especially clever women’ is a clincher for an all-male audience at the Dionysia. This begs more than one question. Is a volume of essays on Euripides’ Medea best introduced with a paragraph on monolithic and reprehensible Athenian misogyny?

Stuttard’s translation, first written in 1996 and scrutinised by Kenneth Dover (x–xi), published here with minor revisions, succeeds admirably in its stated aims of accuracy and friendliness to the performer. I have detected no serious mistranslations. Some indications of Greek line numbering, either bracketed within the translation or given as ranges in page headers or footers, would be useful for reference and comparison and would not detract seriously from the translation’s accessibility.

The translation’s one fault is that it gives little indication that high poetry is being translated: the register is dramatic but largely prosaic. An example of Stuttard at his best is to be found at the start of the First Episode (173–4) when Medea laments the lot of women to the Chorus: the translation of her rhesis evokes impressively the reasoning of this persuasive speech and the passion underlying its gnomic rationality. Medea’s qualms about murdering her children (193) are also very successfully captured. But the translator is too free with colloquial contractions, of which there are three examples in the first two paragraphs (169), including the unlovely ‘Argo’d’ for ‘Argo had’ in the first sentence. There is another jarring over-colloquialism at the end of the second episode (183, lines 625–6, translating in 626 the reading of the codices, not Dodds’s emendation), when Medea says: ‘And maybe, if my words find favour with the gods, in marrying her you’ll lose all chance you ever had of marriage.’ Does this sentence translate poetry or prose? However, one of the strengths of this volume as a whole is that it makes the drama vivid, and Stuttard’s choice of register furthers accessibility.

1. Griffin emphasises Euripides’ modifications of the Medea myth, tracing the darkening of an originally ‘romantic’ and ‘upbeat’ (13) love story into one of horrific infanticide. He is the first of several contributors to note the crucial point that the children’s death at the hands of their mother, not the Corinthians, may well be original to Euripides. His ‘little polemical point’ (17) that the play need not be a warning to the Athenians about contemporary Corinthian hostility is a salutary reminder that Medea is not necessarily a political work.

2. McCallum-Barry treats earlier and contemporary versions of the Medea myth, and ventures ‘a little after’ Euripides’ production of 431. Like Griffin, she correctly sees the infanticide as one of Euripides’ ‘startling innovations’, possibly ‘unwelcome’ and ‘unsettling’ to his audience (34). The play is of course unsettling, but Euripides was repeatedly granted choruses throughout his career, however subversive his oeuvre, and in the dangerous public life of Athens he never incurred a fine like Phrynichus (Hdt. 6.21.2, mentioned in Stuttard’s introduction, 5).

3. Karamanou persuasively argues that all three tragedies in the tetralogy of 431, Medea , Philoctetes and Dictys , explore marginalisation and otherness: the entire production, not only Medea, evokes sympathy for the vulnerable and comparatively defenceless. She applies Aristotle’s criteria for sympathy and identification, citing Poetics 1453a4-6 (44), but does not actually cite his judgement that Euripides is ‘the most tragic’ (1453a30) of the poets, which supports her case. She handles the fragments deftly and soundly and concludes, perhaps diffidently, that tragedy appeals both to emotion and intellect and that staging is integral to the impact of drama.

4. Wyles’ consideration of the original performance’s staging is one of the most useful contributions for the volume’s implied audience of theatre practitioners. She emphasises striking and disquieting theatrical elements in Medea — cries off in the parodos, Medea costumed as a barbarian, serpents in the exodos that evoke, appropriate and question Athenian iconography, and theatrical allusions to extant Aeschylean and Sophoclean plays. Not only Euripides’ modifications of the myth but elements of his production were bold and uncomfortable.

5. Ruffell helpfully views the play and its interpretation through the eyes of the Nurse, an unnamed and therefore unheroic character whose sympathies are at the ‘moral centre’ of the play (81). He is right to point out that the character is never expressly called a nurse and that, never addressing Medea as ‘child’ (73), she is not certainly Medea’s own nurse. He is also right to see the Nurse’s loyalties as multiple (81): she is concerned not only for Medea but for her impact on other characters. It would be worth saying to this volume’s audience, if Ruffell would have the Nurse back on stage after l. 214 (80), that the text does not explicitly cue her return, long taken as a principle of tragic staging. 1

6. Morwood retracts his earlier view 2 of Jason as ‘the villain of the piece’ (83). This is a commendable though excessively moderate palinode, taking into account hints that Jason, though of course lacking in empathy and tact and not admirable, is a more sympathetic character in places than the author had previously acknowledged. Morwood concedes (87) that though Jason has perjured his oath, we perhaps feel ‘a glimmer of genuine audience sympathy’ for him in the exodos in the midst of his ‘shipwreck’. This does not go far enough. We feel more than ‘a glimmer of sympathy’ for Priam at Iliad 24.486-506, the canonical address of bereaved father to killer of sons, when he dares, more than ever any mortal on earth, to reach his hand to the lips of the man who killed his child. Jason’s words (in Stuttard’s translation, ‘I wish that I had never fathered sons to see them so destroyed, and you their murderer’, 202) have a characteristic Euripidean spareness, but that does not diminish their pathos.

7. Rutherford lucidly reminds us that Medea, who must as a matter of staging appear ex machina in the Exodos (90), is a mortal who has just taken a terrible revenge and has no divine or otherwise authoritative perspective on the action to impart. She is no Artemis in the exodos of Hippolytus giving a comforting aetiology (91–2); and may be more barbarian in costume when she last enters in conformity with her visually striking serpent-borne chariot. This leaves the end of the play ‘disturbing in the extreme’ (97).

8. Mills reminds the reader that Euripides was not constrained in his choice of the gender and identity of his Chorus (101–2). This is not said often enough by interpreters of tragedy in general, and is particularly useful for the volume’s target audience. Corinthian women are best placed to ‘follow their mistress’s lead’ in seeking redress for very womanhood (109), but Mills, arguing for the complicity of the chorus, relies excessively on their passivity and understates their horror at the proposed infanticide and open opposition to it, already noted in Griffin’s paper (16). ‘Do not do it’ (line 813) is unambiguous. So is: ‘You will be a most wretched woman if you do.’ (line 818; see also 856–65). It is of course the exception for a tragic chorus to act in any concrete way, as the Erinyes do in Aeschylus’ Eumenides , prosecuting Orestes. No character in Medea stands in Medea’s way at all effectively, not even Creon, and it is asking too much to expect a chorus of townswomen to mount any real opposition.

9. Roisman. Starting from the disproportion of Medea’s vengeance, which she infelicitously calls a ‘dys-fit’ (111), Roisman contrasts Euripides’ relatively human and identifiable Medea with Seneca’s more straightforwardly villainous character. She concludes that in Euripides, Medea is not simply a ‘barbaric foreigner and supernatural witch’ (121) and that any outrage evoked by her actions is a response to their horrific magnitude, not her vengeful impulse. Roisman’s careful insistence that Medea in Euripides is human, not a monster, is welcome.

10. Cairns. A paper on ‘Feminism or Misogyny’ is an essential contribution to an introductory volume on Medea . Cairns concludes that Medea ‘revels in’ Athenian male stereotypes rather than ‘subverting them’ (137). Some will take issue with Cairns when he cites ‘Medea’s emphasis on sex’ (135), mentioned as one of several female stereotypes Euripides confirms. Throughout the play she subordinates integrity to persuasion: does she really ‘endorse’ (136) the male judgement that the issue is one of sexual jealousy at lines 263-66 (134) or does she conform to the perspectives of male characters she seeks to persuade? In the parodos (172, lines 160–3), she attributes her sufferings first of all to oath-breaking and injustice, not to sexual rejection: she first invokes Themis.

11. Hall on the divine in Medea notes, like Rutherford, Aristotle’s disquiet at the mortal Medea appearing ex machina in the Exodos (139–40). Hall uses the play’s modern reception to illuminate the anomalous status of Medea, whose quasi-divinity has been sometimes emphasised, sometimes downplayed. Above all Hall’s Medea leaves perspectives on the divine open, not settled (141), in a play underpinned by an ‘awesome, unknowable religious element’ (154).

12. Smit considers some twentieth-century presentations of Medea as black. The Colchians were not. But a modern strategy has been to emphasise her barbarian ethnicity starkly, an obvious tactic but, as Smit shows, not necessarily a cheap simplification, given the variety of contemporary theoretical approaches to ethnicity. Several contributors mention the issue of Medea’s barbarian costume in the production of 431. A contribution on the recent tendency to focus Medea’s disturbing otherness through contemporary anxieties about skin colour is a fitting conclusion to a collection that never underplays the innovations and challenges of Euripides’ text and production.

In conclusion, Looking at Medea presents an accurate and performable translation together with twelve useful and sometimes illuminating interpretative perspectives on the play. Euripides’ Medea emerges by consensus of the contributors as a bold and innovative work of art that is and was profoundly disturbing.

1 . So, canonically, O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: the Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1977).

2 . J. Morwood, The Plays of Euripides (London, 2002).

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'The Odyssey' Has FINALLY Been Translated By A Woman. Here's Why That's So Important

The first English translation of The Odyssey appeared around the year 1615. The first translation by a woman came out on Tuesday.

After several centuries and 60-odd English translations of the ancient Greek epic, Emily Wilson has made history as the first woman to ever tell the story of Odysseus and his arduous journey home in the English language. Perhaps just as momentous as shattering this classical glass ceiling, Wilson has brought an ancient epic into the year 2017. Her translation is lyrical, radically readable, and as politically relevant as ever.

" I guess I first encountered the story of The Odyssey in a school play, when my elementary school put on a version of it and I got to play Athena," Wilson tells Bustle. "I loved the story, I loved getting to dress up as a goddess, and that then made me want to read the kids’ adaptations of Greek myths."

Her childhood passion only deepened when she hit high school and was able to study Latin and Greek texts firsthand.

"I loved Latin, I loved the structure of the language, the sound of it," Wilson says. She loves the way that the stories engage with such crucial issues of life and death, too: conquered cities and vengeful gods and questions of national identity. "And I started taking Greek in high school as well, and that was also mind-blowingly amazing. Reading Plato and Euripides for the first time, it felt like a kind of conversion experience," Wilson says. She was enthralled by "this access to these alien cultures, which are both so totally different from the culture that I was living in and also so deeply relatable. I found that really exciting."

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson , $30, Amazon

In taking on The Odyssey, Wilson's interest was primarily poetic. She didn't set out to break into the Homeric boys' club. "When I signed up to do the project, I hadn’t actually realized that I was going to be the first woman," says Wilson. "I wanted to do a translation that was going to have its own kind of music and have a regular meter, which most of the current translations don’t have."

She also wanted her translation to have clarity for modern readers, and to avoid sounding overly pompous. "Most of the translations that are out there equate being epic and being ancient," she says. "I just don’t think that quality has to be showing off. It’s a false equivalency."

"Which maybe actually has to do with gender," she adds. Or at least, the fact that so many male translators take the more pompous route has to do with gender "on the down-low," she says.

Of course, being the first woman to translate one of the foundational texts of Western literature carries with it an enormous amount of pressure. Wilson may not have intended to write the definitive feminist translation, but her reading of the poem was always going to explore gender on some level.

"I’ve always had mixed feelings about Odysseus as a protagonist," Wilson says. "And I think this text—it too has mixed feelings about its protagonist. It too has an interest in drawing out the stories of the people who aren’t him. And of tracing the ways that Penelope’s perspective, for instance, is totally different from Odysseus’ perspective."

And not only Penelope's perspective: The Odyssey is full of women. There are female monsters, goddesses, witches, slave girls, princesses, and a giant, female-identifying whirlpool. Odysseus even has a sister lurking around in the background of the text. "I hadn’t ever noticed before," says Wilson, "Odysseus has a sister. She’s only mentioned once in the poem, but I hadn’t noticed her the first few times I read the book!"

Odysseus' sis may not leave a major impression, but some of the other minor female characters are actually quite significant. "People always just go straight to Penelope, but it seems to me that the poem is so interesting partly because it has so many different female characters and so many possibilities for how to be female," she says. So much of our media tries to squeeze all of womankind into a single archetype. "Like in Smurf village where there’s just 'Girl Smurf.'"

The Odyssey presents many models of femininity beyond Smurfette, though. "There’s more than one way to be a girl," says Wilson. "I love that about it. For instance, the goddess Calypso, she’s such a wonderful character... She’s able to articulate that there is a double standard on Mount Olympus." Calypso gets in trouble for keeping Odysseus as a lover on her island, but, as Calypso herself points out, Zeus gets away with that sort of thing all the time. "It’s not fair how the gods judge their own love affairs with mortals by one standard, and the love affairs of goddesses and human beings by a totally different standard," says Wilson, "And I love that the poem is able to at least have that moment where a female character is totally powerful and totally able to say, 'There’s a problem here, with how we’re doing this.'"

The most important god of The Odyssey is also a woman. At least, most of the time. " I love that the presiding deity is a female," says Wilson. "In this poem, it’s about Athena. She’s female, but she’s also gender fluid." Indeed, Athena seems to regard the gender binary as more of a loose guideline than an ironclad law. "She’s being a man, and then being different men, and then she’s a little girl, and there’s one moment where she switches from being a young man to being a beautiful woman," says Wilson. "Could it be that she’s just as powerful or more powerful when she’s female as when she’s male? Or when she’s a little girl and when she’s a young man? There seems to be some openness to what the human possibilities are, in terms of gender roles."

Even the lady monsters have a certain amount of inspiring power. "We have all of these female and feminine monsters," says Wilson. "All this focus on the fear of female enclosure, the fear of being eaten or being drunk by a feminine creature. There’s the voices of the sirens that are going to engulf [you], there’s Charybdis, the whirlpool, that is going to engulf [you], going to eat up the men—there’s a fear of femininity that’s going to devour you."

Being a monster doesn't necessarily have to be a deal-breaker, though. They might be fearsome, but they command respect. "They’re presented in ways that are powerful," says Wilson. "And very attractive and seductive."

As for the enchantress Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs? “It’s awesome," Wilson says. "I love it.”

Of course, it's not all gender fluid goddesses and powerful feminist subtext. Wilson's translation does not flinch away from the ugly nature of sexism in The Odyssey, either. After Odysseus has finally made it home and killed all of his wife's suitors, he orders his son to execute the slave girls who have been sleeping with the suitors as well. “It’s about eradicating not just these unclean bodies, but also, and I think this is very clear in the text, it’s about eradicating their memories," says Wilson. "They have a memory of the house possessed under different ownership. In order to get rid of that memory, that history, these women and their voices have to be suppressed.” It's quite literally a moment of women being silenced by male violence.

The slave girls only want to go home and go to bed, the same thing that Odysseus has been trying to do for the last 10 years. But the girls are murdered on Odysseus' orders instead. "We’re allowed to feel horrified by that," says Wilson.

Perhaps this is why Wilson chose "complicated" as the word that describes Odysseus in the opening line of the poem. Previous translations have called him "crafty" or "adventurous" or "skilled in all ways of contending." To Wilson, "complicated" just about sums it up.

“I wanted to make clear that this is a multi-layered character. And they might not necessarily be all positive layers," says Wilson. “There’s a multiplicity of perhaps a disturbing kind both about this character, but then also about this story.”

Not only is The Odyssey complicated, it's startlingly relevant. The worries of the Ancient Greeks are not so far off from our own. For one, the original Odyssey was set down as the Greek people were encountering people who weren't Greek. “I think it’s to do with how we treat people from different cultures. How do we live in a multicultural society?” says Wilson. "I hadn’t thought of The Odyssey as a poem that’s about immigration and refugees, because I hadn’t been reading it at this particular moment in history before. We weren’t in this particular moment in history before." Reading it now, though, the comparison seems clear.

And of course, the question of how we define gender roles is just as pressing in 2017 as it was in the 8th Century BCE. "In this poem, we have this sense of the Odysseus and Penelope marriage, and he has so many choices and so many things he can be," says Wilson. "And she only has one choice, which is either to stay married or marry someone else. And that’s it. And it’s figured as being faithful or being unfaithful. There’s judgment attached to it."

The poem, in Wilson's mind, asks us the question, “Do we want all women to be curtailed in the way that Penelope is curtailed?” Penelope is trapped. “In her dreams she goes to these amazing places, and she’s obviously so intelligent and alive,” Wilson says, but in reality Penelope spends her days weaving and un-weaving her own work, never moving forward.

If we could speak to Homer himself, it's unlikely that he (or whoever else wrote the poem) would come out in favor of women's equality. "But I think the poem itself points to some of the problems in the curtailed women’s roles it depicts," says Wilson. And the glimpse of so many different models of femininity, from goddess to sea monster, suggests that there are other options for women.

The Odyssey can speak to male violence, too, as well as female oppression. “It’s relevant that the climactic scene of this poem is this massacre in a domestic space,” says Wilson.

The weapon that Odysseus uses is, according to her, “not the kind of bow you just get from your local bow store, it’s the kind of bow that you use for a mass shooting.” Odysseus uses his bow to slaughter Penelope's suitors in a gruesome, gratuitously violent homecoming.

“It isn’t totally an act of justice," says Wilson. "It’s also clearly connected to the ways that, for instance, the Cyclops earlier behaves by killing the people who’ve invaded his house. The Cyclops eats the men who’ve come inside his cave, because you shouldn’t enter somebody’s house without permission. And then Odysseus does the exact same thing: kill the people who’ve come inside his house without permission.”

The questions raised by Odysseus' final massacre are only too topical, especially in America today: “What causes people to be so violent? What causes people to feel so angry and so murderous that they can’t get a sense of belonging or identity without killing a lot of people?” Odysseus is our hero, yes, but that doesn't make his actions uniformly heroic. He is, for lack of a better word, complicated .

Emily Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey is not just a landmark for a feminist reading of the poem, but for a contemporary reading. Her words are groundbreaking in their clarity as well as in their insight. And for anyone who thinks that a 2,800-year-old text doesn't have anything new to say, allow Emily Wilson to set you straight.

• Chrome for Developers

Gemini Nano language detection API available for early preview

A language detection API is now available for local experimentation to our early preview program (EPP) participants. With this API, you can determine what language is being used on a web page.

The language detection APIs explainer is available as a proposal for the future development of this exploratory API and other APIs, including a translation API.

Language detection is the first step for translation. Browsers often already have language detection capabilities, and this API will allow web developers to access this technology with a JavaScript API.

As with our other APIs, we'll take your feedback to update the way language detection works, to ensure it meets the needs of developers and users. We hope to learn about the detection quality of summarization, feedback on the API design, and the impact of the current implementation in Chrome Canary.

Once you've signed up and been accepted to the EPP, you'll have access to a demo so you can experiment with this API.

Join the early preview program

As of now, the Prompt API, summarization API, and the language detection API are available for prototyping .

Sign up for the early preview program to gain access to the documentation and demos, stay up-to-date with the latest changes, and discover new APIs.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2024-08-27 UTC.