"Complicated" is an interesting translation for πολύτροπον rather than the more literal "much-traveled." But then again, The Odyssey isn't some children's adventure story. It's a story about the brutal, strange, post-war Ancient Mediterranean and people lost, or without purpose, who have to constantly adapt to the challenges of that world while still staying true to their identity. It's all, well...complicated.
“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack “polytropos,” the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”
“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.
“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.”
EDIT: And later in the article:
“If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The fact that it’s possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something.” But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: “I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”
Well, yes: I think that's the point (or at least, the debate). How do you translate such a multifaceted word when there is nothing with the same collection of meanings and implications in the target language? It's a brilliantly ideal word for its purpose in the original Greek, and impossible to capture in (say) English without footnotes.
I am a fan of contemporary localizations of old texts, since contexts change so much throughout the millenia.
Id think that in this globalized age much-traveled doeant have the same connotations of wisdom and adventure and loss as Homer’s word, and some other word might need to be used to bring it into context
