Abstract
I argue that developing technologies and changing societal attitudes in the environment of English translators of the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have resulted in confused versions of the passages involving textile crafts, with a consequent loss for the reader of the significance of this essential aspect of ancient Greek life. Spinning and weaving were enormously important in the ancient world, in religion, in philosophy, and in the light of material production and the requirements of almost every aspect of life. From the harvesting of the fibre to the finishing of the woven cloth, vast amounts of labour were needed from many sections of the populace, creating a product that reflected these many hours and skills in its value. During the intervening millennia, attitudes to, and the knowledge of, the making of textiles have gradually changed in the western world to a point of general unawareness in all except a very small proportion of people.
I take as a key document a 1948 commentary that criticises the mainly Victorian English translators failings in this regard. I extend the time frame of that study to analyse relevant translation trends from the earliest English translations in the sixteenth century to the present day. My work studies passages in Homer where spinning and weaving are significant, meaningful activities and motifs. I isolate specific passages that include active scenes of working on textiles, as well as descriptive passages about textiles, and analyse these in more than one hundred translations to show the time frame of the main argument of the 1948 criticism, that is, the change in wording from weaving into embroidery.
My discussion focuses on the social and technical environments at the original time of the writing of the epics and progresses into the changes in these environments at the different periods of the translations studied. My findings demonstrate the influences on translators within their own periods, these being the continuing alienation process between everyday life and the creation of textiles, plus a deterioration in social attitudes to ladies hand work. I show that some attitudes, which led to mistaken assumptions about ancient Greek practices, principally during the nineteenth century, have persisted into our own time. This persistence is due to the continuing alienation of society from the mass production of items of daily use and continues in spite of our greatly increased knowledge about the ancient world.
I also scrutinise the key tools used by translators. The major Greek-English dictionaries had their origins in the nineteenth century and are only beginning now to be modified in the topics considered in this study. In other reference tools, including library classification systems, textiles sit in an uncomfortable gap, spanning technology, craft, and art in the modern mind. Individually, we now can choose whether to engage with the actual creating of cloth, whereas in the ancient world this was a necessity and obligation for a large proportion of the population at all levels.
My own experience as a weaver of contemporary and historical weave types, on both recreated historical, and on modern, hand looms, gives me a specialist interest in the physical reality of this work. Searching for, and consulting, early books has been facilitated by my years of work within the rare book environment.