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SAMUEL BUTLER'S RADICAL REINTERPRETATION OF OUR OLDEST SAGA
The story of Odysseus and his ten-year struggle to return home after the Trojan War is one of the foundational works of Western literature. It has traditionally been read as a male story: the saga of one man's heroic struggle against supernatural enemies and the threat of a violent death.
But in 1900, the author and classical scholar Samuel Butler published a prose translation of The Odyssey that presented a very different picture.
According to Butler, the poem's repeated borrowings from Homer's other poem, The Iliad, suggested that The Odyssey must be a later and deferential work. By extension, he said, it must also be by a different author. And when he looked at the language of the poem and its themes, he concluded that the author must have been a woman: specifically, a young, unmarried woman living near Trapani, in western Sicily. He went further, proposing that the author had written herself into the poem as Nausikaa, the Phaiakian princess who encounters the shipwrecked Odysseus by the shore.
Butler's translation and notes appeared at a historic moment in our culture, alongside the arrival of the New Woman and the growing campaign for women's suffrage. Whether he welcomed such developments or indeed the consequences of his own theory is debatable. There are places where he seems frustrated by his conclusions: that this legendary masculine epic might be the product of a female imagination.
His fellow critics scorned him for his literalism—his insistence that the text of The Odyssey could be taken at face value—and for what we would now call his gender stereotyping. Yet even if Butler's analysis was unsound in some respects, he may still have noticed something in The Odyssey that generations of earlier readers had overlooked.
Published three years after his study The Authoress of The Odyssey, this translation shows Butler engaged in an Odyssean struggle of his own: the attempt to come to terms with a proposition that troubled him but which was entirely original and which he wholly believed in.
Welcome to the Butler edition of The Odyssey.
With a new Preface and Introduction by Stephen Games.
