tygermama:

“… [T]hroughout the book, there’s a frankness to Wilson’s language around work and the people who do it. Of Eurymedusa, a slave in the house of princess Nausicaa, she writes, “She used to babysit young Nausicaa / and now she lit her fire and cooked her meal.” The slaves in older translations of the Odyssey do not “babysit” — often, they’re not identified as slaves at all. Fagles, for instance, calls Eurymedusa a “chambermaid.” Fitzgerald calls her a “nurse.” “It sort of stuns me when I look at other translations,” Wilson said, “how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible.” Wilson, by contrast, uses the word “slave” for Eurymedusa and many other enslaved characters, even when the original uses a more specific term. The Homeric Greek dmoe, or “female-house-slave,” Wilson writes in her translator’s note, could be translated as “maid” or “domestic servant,” but those terms would imply that the woman was free. “The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery,” she writes, “and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave.””

— Historically, men translated the Odyssey. Here’s what happened when a woman took the job.