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  • "When Early Dawn Revealed Her Rose-Red Hands"
  • Katy Didden (bio)

On hearing Emily Wilson discuss why she varied the epithet for Dawn in her translation of the Odyssey

A woman splits the root of rosy-fingeredinto weathers. Over the hero,

the sky's alive. Now the readercan step inside the story the way we step

without our bodies into memoryand deduce—from the way light moves,

from the shade of red—a good place to hide.A shifting light sharpens the scene.

I see what she means—how the womenTelemachus hanged were not like birds

in the sense centuries of men translatedas "less-than-human," but in how they aimed [End Page 402]

for home. Like a cloudless sky, the sun so brightit blinds the eyes, are the words she chooses—

like a path of sun-warmed stones:for servant, say slave; for faithless,

read raped; for the twitchingof their feet as they rose beyond men's reach

read a warning that replays in any languageacross three hundred centuries.

What light broke red the next morningover Odysseus's estate

not only could not be seen the same waybut was not the same. [End Page 403]

Katy Didden

Katy Didden is the author of The Glacier's Wake (Pleiades Press 2013) and a forthcoming collection of multimodal erasure poems: Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland (Tupelo Press 2022). She is an assistant professor at Ball State University.

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