**The Weight of One Word**
Margaret Yates had been staring at the same line of Greek for three days.
*Polytropos.* The first real word Homer used to describe Odysseus, and English had never agreed on what to do with it. Translators for three hundred years had called him "much-turned," "many-sided," "crafty," "wily," "long-suffering." Her predecessor at the university, the man whose office she now occupied in the Classics building in New Haven, had translated it as "resourceful" in 1961, and the choice had stood unchallenged in every syllabus since.
Margaret thought it was wrong. She thought it had always been wrong.
She was forty-four, tenured now after eleven years of not being taken seriously, and she was three months from a deadline on the first major English translation of *The Odyssey* to be published by a woman. The press in Boston had paid her a $40,000 advance and had been patient about the delays. Her department chair, Professor Daniel Hurst, had not.
"You're rewriting Fitzgerald," he told her over coffee in the faculty lounge, not looking up from his own proofs. "You're rewriting Fagles. Forty translations exist. Why does the world need yours?"
"Because none of them are told from where I stand," she said.
He gave her the look he gave any woman he suspected of being sentimental about a text that belonged, in his mind, to the men who'd always owned it. "The Greek doesn't change based on who's reading it."
"No," Margaret said. "But English does."
"That's a nice line for a jacket blurb, Margaret. It's not a translation philosophy."
"It's three months and forty pages behind schedule, Daniel. That's my translation philosophy right now."
He didn't answer that. He never did, when she was right and it cost him nothing to admit it.
She went home to the apartment on Elm Street. Her daughter Claire, sixteen and openly unimpressed by Homer, sat at the kitchen table doing precalculus, and the radiator ticked, and a car alarm two blocks over went off and quit. Margaret made a cup of PG Tips — the last bag in the box, she'd have to buy more — and sat down across from Claire with her laptop and Liddell and Scott's lexicon open beside it, spine cracked at the P's.
*Polytropos.* Complicated. That was what she kept coming back to. Not cunning, not wily — those words made Odysseus sound like a con man, and worse, they let him off the hook. Twenty years of lies, a wife left waiting, a son raised without a father — call him wily and it all became a rogue's résumé, something rakish and forgivable. She didn't want to let him off the hook. She wanted the word to hold what it actually held: a man turned by circumstance and turned by his own choices, a man too full of contradictions to be pinned to one adjective.
It was 11:40 p.m. Claire had stopped pretending to do homework an hour ago and was asleep with her cheek on her notebook, pencil still loose in her hand.
Margaret typed: *Tell me about a resourceful man.*
She read it, and something in her stomach went sour, the way it did when she handed in work she knew was safe. She deleted it, letter by letter, the backspace key loud in the quiet kitchen.
She typed: *Tell me about a cunning man.*
Worse. That was a man you didn't trust, a man in a poker game. Delete.
*Tell me about a man of many turns.*
Technically closer. Also dead on the page — nobody had ever talked that way at a kitchen table in their life. Delete.
She got up, refilled the kettle, stood at the counter while it ticked toward a boil, and thought about her mother, who used to say of Margaret's father, not unkindly, *he's a complicated man,* the way you'd say it about someone you'd decided, after thirty years, to stop trying to simplify. Not an insult. Not quite a compliment. A whole life folded into two words.
She sat back down. Claire stirred, murmured something about a derivative, didn't wake.
Margaret typed: *Tell me about a complicated man.*
She looked at it for a long time. Then she left it there, and moved to line eleven, and didn't touch that first line again for the rest of the manuscript.
—
The manuscript went in eleven weeks late. The book came out fourteen months after that, on a Tuesday in October, and the reviews split exactly as she'd expected.
The scholars who'd built careers on Fitzgerald's cadences called her line flat, prosaic, a betrayal of the epic's grandeur. Daniel Hurst wrote four hundred words for a small classics quarterly arguing that her translation "sacrifices majesty for accessibility" — a phrase Margaret recognized, because she'd heard versions of it aimed at her for twenty years, usually meaning *a woman did this, and it shows.*
She found him in the faculty lounge the week the review came out, standing at the coffee machine with the quarterly folded under his arm like he'd been carrying it around for effect.
"I read your piece," she said.
"I assumed you would."
"'Sacrifices majesty.' You used that exact phrase about my article on gendered pronouns in Sophocles. Nineteen ninety-nine."
That, finally, seemed to land. He set his cup down. "It wasn't personal, Margaret."
"It's never personal. That's the part I mind." She poured her own coffee — the burnt breakroom stuff, ninety cents from the machine — and didn't sit down across from him. "Nobody accused Fitzgerald of sacrificing anything when he cut half the epithets to make it read like a novel. He 'modernized.' I 'sacrifice.' That's not a translation note, Daniel. That's a word choice too."
He didn't have an answer for that either. She left him standing there with his coffee going cold, which was, she thought on the walk back to her office, its own small and complete kind of ending.
But something else happened too. High school teachers in Ohio and Arizona started assigning her translation over the old ones, because their students could get past line ten without a dictionary in their lap. A letter came from a reading group in Sacramento — eight women in their sixties, one of them recovering from a hip replacement and reading propped up on four pillows, they'd written, who had tried three times over twenty years to finish *The Odyssey* and had finally done it, cover to cover, in a single winter.
Margaret read that letter out loud at the kitchen table one night in December, to nobody — Claire was away at college by then, first semester, a psychology major who'd texted her mother two weeks earlier: *overheard two girls arguing about Penelope in the dining hall tonight. Actual arguing. Thought you'd want to know.*
Margaret read the Sacramento letter twice, folded it back along its creases, and put it in the drawer of her desk where she kept the things she meant to keep.
The sticky note from that December night was still there too, stuck to the frame of her monitor, curled now and gone the color of weak tea at the edges. *A complicated man.* She didn't look at it because she doubted the word anymore. She looked at it, some nights, working on the next project with a new cup of tea going cold beside the keyboard, because it was easy to forget the woman who'd sat at that kitchen table at a quarter to midnight, deleting one word and then the next, while her daughter slept over a calculus notebook three feet away and three thousand years of somebody else's certainty waited, one more time, to be turned into something new.
