Classicist and translator Emily Wilson published a critical review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the London Review of Books. Wilson has loved Greek myths since childhood and has translated both the Iliad and Odyssey. She has tattoos of a spear on one leg and a bow on the other — she says they represent Achilles and Odysseus.
Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania via Liveright Publishing
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Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania via Liveright Publishing
Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey is a box-office hit. But University of Pennsylvania classics scholar Emily Wilson, who published her own translation of Homer’s epic in 2017, says Nolan’s script is poorly written and lacking in emotional depth and character development. And, she adds, there are no sex scenes — and all the food looks horrible.
“We need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation,” Wilson says. “[But] these desires seem stripped from Odysseus. He doesn’t seem to want food. He doesn’t seem to want sex. What does he want?”
Set in the aftermath of the mythical Trojan War, The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus, the Greek hero who embarks on an epic journey home to Ithaca. Wilson’s translation, which took six years to complete, has been hailed for its vibrant language and faithfulness to the original Greek text. But as the first woman to publish an English-language translation of The Odyssey, she’s also faced an onslaught of misogynistic online commentary.
Nolan has cited Wilson’s translation in discussing his approach to the film, but Wilson says she was disappointed with the adaptation — and especially by Nolan’s rendering of the central character. In her translation, Wilson describes Odysseus as a “complicated” man. He outwits the Cyclops and constructs an oversized wooden horse, which allows his soldiers to ambush the Trojans and win the war.
“He’s clever … and smart and therefore a fascinating character,” Wilson says. But, she adds, “the movie gives us a version of Matt Damon as Odysseus, who is not required to be smart, instead he’s just constantly troubled by anxiety about his role in the Trojan Horse and the Trojan War. … That’s a shame.”
Nolan wrote the script for The Odyssey himself, which Wilson feels may have been a mistake: “I do think that it would have been better if Nolan had hired a scriptwriter, because that would have solved a lot of the issues.”
Despite her critiques of the film, Wilson says it’s “absolutely” still worth seeing. “There’s a lot to think about, both in terms of what is this film saying about … war, violence and deception in our times, and also what it’s doing with the source material,” she says. “The actors are amazing. It’s a star-studded cast and they’re doing their absolute best with the script they were given.”
For her part, Wilson admits to being “addicted” to Homer’s epic. In her 2017 translation of The Odyssey, she confined herself to the same number of lines as the original. Now she’s working on yet another translation of the epic poem, in which she frees herself from “line-for-line” constraint.
“I … am using more lines, therefore longer words sometimes. … And I’m also going to have much, much longer end notes,” she says. “I’m having so much fun. I’m over halfway through and I never want it to end.”
Wilson also has a collection of essays coming out in September. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature introduces readers to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and the challenges of translation. In addition, it explores some modern themes, such as parallels between the hip-hop of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion and the comedies of Aristophanes in 5th-century B.C.E. Athens.
Matt Damon and Zendaya in The Odyssey, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
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Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Interview highlights
On role of the gods and goddesses in Nolan’s film
They’re kind of missing. I mean, there’s a moment when Zendaya, who’s sort of Athena, but maybe not, says to Matt Damon’s Odysseus, who’s complaining that the gods don’t speak in a language that mortals can understand, and Zendaya says, “Who doesn’t understand thunder, fire, a baby’s cry?” We understand those things. So implicitly, the gods are present.
But I felt the film, in some ways, wants to have it both ways. … There’s noise in the soundtrack; there is thunder. So, of course, Zeus is there. … Are we actually supposed to believe in Zeus and Poseidon? Or is Calypso a goddess, or is Circe a goddess? I would have liked a little bit more of the divine.
On how the sirens are represented
The sirens in the archaic and classical Greek tradition are always represented in ancient art as kind of bird characters with women’s faces … who could lure sailors to their doom. … Odysseus blocks his men’s ears with wax so they don’t hear the enchanting song … but Odysseus himself is eager to hear their song, so he has the men tie him to the mast. It’s a memorable scene in the movie. It’s also a very memorable scene in the poem. … [In the film] they’re definitely not birds. They’re surrounded by seals. They don’t seem to have any clothes on. But I think they’re sort of naked seal ladies. But I’m not really sure.
On performing in a school production of The Odyssey when she was 8
I went to the local primary school and the teachers there were getting sick of doing nativity plays every year, so they wanted to mix it up and use their creativity. So they did a kids’ adaptation of The Odyssey and [my sister] Bee was Helen of Troy. She was great. And I got to be Athena and I got make my own tinfoil helmet. And we got to gouge out the eye of the headmaster who played Polyphemus. He was wonderfully game, and let us do it. And it was such fun.
And for me as a very shy child, I realized that there was this wonderful outlet through the world of stories, especially through the world of Greek myth. So it turned me on to the fact that this world of magic existed. … I read all of the kids’ adaptations that I could get my hands on. And then eventually I went to a high school where I could learn Latin and Greek. And so my life was made.
On how getting her doctorate in the U.S. made her think about translation differentlyÂ
When I was studying Homer as an undergraduate, nobody ever said, “You must read this or that translation.” Translations were very much despised. They were for amateurs. If you’re a serious classicist, of course, you read the poems in Greek. You read the commentaries, you read dictionaries, you read original texts. Whereas once I got to this country [the U.S.], and especially once I started teaching in America, I realized there’s so much potential for translations to introduce serious undergraduates to the world of ancient literature. …
Once I’d been teaching Homer in many different translations for many years, I realized there were things I could convey from the Greek that would actually be useful for Anglophone, English-reading, English-speaking readers to have available to them in a translation of Homer.
On being the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English — but not knowing that until after the fact Â
That was news to me. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that all of the translations I’d used in the classroom before were by men. I mean, that wasn’t actually part of my motivation at all. I’ve already talked about my motivation in terms of poetics and in terms of pacing and in terms of the proto-dramatic vividness of the poem. It wasn’t that I thought, “Homer hasn’t got enough girl cooties on it, let me get them.” Which, I think, sometimes the online discourse seems to be some version of that. Or some version also … can be, “Let’s celebrate her for being a girl,” which I think either one of those is actually a little bit misleading about my actual work.
On why she doesn’t consider her work a feminist translationÂ
I think it’s very limiting in terms of women’s work — and also in terms of feminism — if you think anything a woman does is inherently feminist. I also think it is misleading about the fact that, of course, there are many, many female classicists, many female Homerists. There were also many female translators of Homer into other languages. … So I think it’s this blinkered idea both about gender and about the idea that the English-speaking world is the only thing that exists.
I certainly don’t approach the task of translation with the assumption that all female characters will be presented as ridiculous, but I don’t think that’s actually feminism. I think feminism actually needs to be a bit more than that if there’s going to be feminist intervention. I do approach the task of translating Homer with the idea that these poems are really good and they’re really good at characterizing all of the characters, including female characters, including enslaved characters, that we really do get these richly realized distinct points of view. But again, that’s not actually about feminism.
On the (mostly male) trolls who have harassed her onlineÂ
I don’t think most of these people are very serious students of Homer or students of ancient history. I think these are people who, from what I can tell, are people who want to construct some kind of narrative to justify prejudices that they are very much attached to. I wish that some of them would just have a face-to-face conversation with me rather than spamming me with emails. …
I also get so many lovely, lovely emails from strangers all the time. I mean, in fact, I’ve got far more recently with the new attention to The Odyssey and The Iliad in the wake of this spectacular Hollywood film. So I actually don’t want the discourse to be framed in terms of it’s all just about hatred and partisanship. I think it’s actually a lot of it that’s not about that. A lot of the story here is that there really are new readers, new audiences coming to Homer and ancient literature. And also some of my favorites are people who’ve read The Odyssey or The Iliad years ago or been forced through it in school and then come back to it and realize there is so much more in this poem than I realized when I read it when I was 16.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
