Watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, I too want to go home. Like all Nolan’s films, it is dour, hammy, and too long, with dialogue from a tin can. “The gods help those who help themselves,” Matt Damon as Odysseus says. Ah, the pure serene.
Homer’s man of twists and turns is unrecognizable in Nolan’s hero. He confesses to Penelope that, crazed with guilt for the war crimes he committed in Troy, he felt unworthy to return to Ithaka. This is an entirely modern sentiment, alien to the world of the poem. It would never have occurred to the composers and singers whom we call Homer. Matt Damon might as well complain that the destruction of Troy violated the Geneva Conventions.
Anything in the poem that would challenge the film’s bland morality has been sanitized. The gods are almost entirely offstage. The sirens’ song is reduced to psychobabble. Nolan cuts Achilles’s exchange with Odysseus in Hades, perhaps the loveliest scene in the poem. Odysseus doesn’t kill the slave girls, with Telemachus’s macabre collusion. He doesn’t lie to his father, who isn’t even in the movie, upon his return. And the ending, well, Nolan just invents a new ending, because whatever. It’s fitting that Spider-Man and the Punisher play Telemachus and Menelaus, since Nolan, having moved on from DC, has made a Marvel movie.
I admit it has its felicities. If Homer can nod, Nolan can, on occasion, spark to life. “Ten fucking years on this beach, let’s go home” is paradoxically one of the most Homeric lines in the film. And one wants to defend certain choices, given the bullshit the production has elicited from the right. Elon Musk was offended that a Black woman was cast as Helen of Troy. The far-right troll Matt Walsh complained that Nolan’s obsession with nonlinear storytelling undermines the poem’s original narrative (apparently this sacrilege has something to do with the influence of “liberal women”). I look forward to Walsh’s outrage if he ever gets around to reading Homer’s famously nonlinear poem.
Well, so what. We already knew that Musk is an idiot and cultural discourse in the era of social media is a sewer. Everything is stupid and nothing is true. But why are we arguing about a 2,700-year-old poem in the first place? The Nolan travesty is only the most recent development in our Odyssean century.
Almost a decade ago, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared to swooning reviews and misogynist backlash (and is said to have inspired Nolan, though Wilson remarks that she “would be ashamed to have written any part of this script”). This is the version that has made the most noise, but I count eleven translations with major publishers since 2000. The Anglo-Hellenic Review predicted that Martin Hammond’s 2000 prose version “may well prove the translation for this and the next generation.” (Not all flocks of birds are fraught with meaning.) Wilson’s success has perhaps sped up the production line: Peter Green’s rendition followed in 2018, and the Bard College classicist Daniel Mendelsohn published a translation in loose hexameter last year. If you want to read The Odyssey in English, you have your pick of suitors.
The first translation I read, in college, was Robert Fitzgerald’s of 1961, and I have since found no reason to prefer another. I reread Fitzgerald last year in tandem with Wilson and Mendelsohn, who suffer, like Odysseus lashed to the mast, from their self-imposed constraints. Wilson undertook to match the Greek line for line, and Mendelsohn to employ something approaching the hexameters of the original. Neither choice makes a lick of sense for the English language (the forgotten Edwin W. Simcox combined them in his Iliad of 1865). An inflected grammar is never going to line up with one based on word order. And as the poet Anthony Madrid put it when we were grousing about Mendelsohn: “The extremely predictable problem is that a Homeric hexameter line based on vowel quantity will never ever ‘translate’ to hexameter based on stress. There’s a reason you can mix your types of feet freely and wildly in Latin and Greek but not in English—if you do it in English, you are at grave risk of having the meter disappear altogether.” Or, au contraire, having it jingle singsong-ily: Mendelsohn’s first line is “Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways.” Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.
In her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, Wilson says that any translation without her limit on length “will tend to be longer than the original, and I wanted a narrative pace that could match its stride to Homer’s nimble gallop.” But if, as she later notes, all translations are “entirely different text[s] from the original poem,” there is no warrant to assume that fidelity to the original’s number of lines will result in anything like the original’s narrative pace. And in fact it doesn’t: Wilson’s lines feel rushed (as Mendelsohn observes in his introduction), while Mendelsohn’s feel padded. Consider Odysseus’s lament for his men killed by the monster Scylla. Wilson gives “That was the most heartrending sight I saw / in all the time I suffered on the sea.” Mendelsohn uses half again as many syllables to convey the same thought: “By far the most heartrending sight that these eyes of mine ever saw / During all of my ordeals as I quested over the sea.” Mendelsohn’s “eyes of mine” are superfluous, while Wilson’s plainness undermines the poignancy of the moment. Compare Robert Fagles’s popular rendering, from 1996: “Of all the pitiful things I’ve had to witness, / suffering, searching out the pathways of the sea, / this wrenched my heart the most.” A case could be made for Wilson’s plain diction, and she makes it, but Mendelsohn’s lines are overstuffed.
For Alexander Pope and his predecessors, The Iliad took the palm. But it was the later poem that spoke to Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, and, in the twentieth century, to the early modernists. Joyce’s Ulysses begins to appear in The Little Review in 1918. Around the same time, Pound publishes his first Canto, partially a translation of a translation of Book XI, Odysseus in Hades. Penguin Classics debuts in 1946 with E. V. Rieu’s prose Odyssey, still in print, which soon sold three million copies. But it’s Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaka,” from 1911, that marks for me the cultural turn toward the domestic spaces of The Odyssey:
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
War-weary, ready to “make it new,” the moderns set out on their long road. Which turned out to lead to hell. But perhaps the appeal of The Odyssey for our end-timey wildfire-heat-wave-storm-trooper present is related. In his essay on Odysseus, Adorno writes that the Ithakan “achieves his estrangement from nature by abandoning himself to nature.” We’re in the same ship, our estrangement from the nonhuman world having been purchased with our utter subjection to its powers, at the mercy of Poseidon. For the blustery Harold Bloom, The Odyssey is “the epic of belatedness, the song of things-in-their-farewell.” Adorno quotes Hölderlin: “But where danger threatens, / That which saves from it also grows.” This is the hope of the poem: Odysseus, after all, makes it back to his hearth at last, reunited with wife and son, “and his heart was glad.” But, as his father tells Odysseus, “dangerous men and fools hold power now.”
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Walkman (Penguin, 2021), and the essay collection Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (Simon & Schuster, 2018).