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Homer's Odyssey: as told by Nausikaa: The 1900 Translation by Samuel Butler

Translated by Samuel Butler, Edited by Stephen Games

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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 manâ€™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 ofÂ The OdysseyÂ that presented a very different picture. According to Butler, the poemâ€™s repeated borrowings from Homerâ€™s other poem, The Iliad, suggested thatÂ The OdysseyÂ 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. Butlerâ€™s translation and notes appeared at a historic moment in our culture, alongside the arrival of the New Woman and the growing campaign for womenâ€™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 literalismâ€”his insistence that the text ofÂ The OdysseyÂ could be taken at face valueâ€”and for what we would now call his gender stereotyping. Yet even if Butlerâ€™s analysis was unsound in some respects, he may still have noticed something inÂ The OdysseyÂ that generations of earlier readers had overlooked. Published three years after his studyÂ 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.Â Welcome to the Butler edition ofÂ The Odyssey. With a new Preface and Introduction by Stephen Games.