The Battle of the Odysseys
Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes
“The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth,” Emily Wilson writes of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey. Her review is rather scathing, and, in my opinion, deservingly so.
I am a massive fan of Nolan’s Batman films; I rewatch them at least once or twice a year. I had tremendously high hopes for his rendition of Homer. So, I was beside myself with excitement watching the trailers—and then beside myself watching the film. It suffered from a removal of some of the Odyssey’s most legendary moments (the ‘nobody’ scene, the appearance of the majority of the actual gods, the bag of winds, the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa, a mischaracterization of Odysseus as a clever man with PTSD, a cast overly saturated with A-List faces, a lack of historical accuracy and/or flourish with its costumes, and so on and so forth). Of course, the Odyssey is a 12,000-line poem of which it would be virtually impossible to adapt entirely into a single film. Perhaps it would be better suited as a television series, as the one in 1997—or maybe not have been made into a filmed visual media at all.
When it comes to the faults with Nolan’s adaptation, different choices of his riled up different fonts of anger within different people. Although, on the whole, it seems like since the movie debuted some weeks ago, interest of either valence has slumped pretty dramatically. One thing that stuck with me, though, was the discourse around ‘who’s to blame’ for the adaptation’s changes. Early on, Nolan cited that he was using Emily Wilson’s translation. And, as Janey Tracey writes for Ploughshares, “If you’ve heard Emily Wilson’s name in the last year, it probably had the almost-Homerian epithet ‘first woman translator of The Odyssey’ attached to it.’” The question of Wilson being a woman has become a primary pillar of the discourse not only around the quality of her translation but also the quality of Nolan’s film.
As every translator must, Wilson makes choices. In the essay “The Task of the Translator,” German cultural and literary critic Walter Benjamin rejects the idea that translation is about replacing an original text in another language and conveying meaning within it. Wilson’s translation would likely not be one of Benjamin’s top choices; Richmond Lattimore’s would be. Benjamin was primarily interested in translation as an act that preserved the original form—the syntax, word order, and more literal aspect of the diction—rather than the tone or mood a work conveys. Even when Lattimore’s lines come off awkward in English, he attempts to preserve the grammatical and structural skeleton of Homer’s poem.
As Benjamin says, and as has become specially evidenced with the emergence of Wilson’s translation, there is no such thing as a neutral translation. We can observe this incredibly well with the Odyssey’s fifth word: πολύτροπον (polytropos). The full line is ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ (andra moi ennepe, mousa, polytropon, hos mala polla). Polytropos presents one of the classic problems of translation: how does one convey the meaning of a word that doesn’t have an English equivalent? That ‘problem,’ of course, does not only belong to translations between English and Greek. The classic Portuguese example is saudades, which is how we say that we miss someone. In English, French, Spanish, and more, ‘to miss,’ ‘extrañar,’ and ‘manquer’ are verbs whereas saudades is a noun. It is a feeling you have. How do you convey the connotation of missing something or feeling its lack as a noun rather than a verb? How does that change the reader’s understanding of the emotion? Polytropos comes from the ancient greek πολύς (po-leehs) (“many” or “much”) and τροπονς (tropos) (“turn” or “twisty”). As such, each translator must endeavor into their own interpretive journey to convey the relevant connotations of polytropos. Wilson encountered a unique facet of that challenge because of her formal commitment to employ iambic pentameter throughout her entire translation in order to preserve the sense of the poem’s orality while also restricting her translation to the same amount of lines as Homer’s: 12,109.
Each translator takes his or her own approach to polytropos: Robert Fagels translates it as the man of “many twists and turns.” Richmond Lattimore translates it to the man “of many ways.” Emily Wilson translates it “complicated,” one of the more controversial choices. Some object to ‘complicated’ because they say it is too modern in terminology and as such foists modern psychological and moral standards on the poem. Personally, I like complicated becomes its Latin etymology “complicare” (com- meaning “together” + plicare meaning “to fold”), which derives from the ancient Proto-Indo-European root “-plek-,” meaning to “plait” or “weave,” and some of the Greek in the original manuscripts is actually closer to this archaic origin than modern Greek. By way of complicated, Odysseus and his odyssey reveal themselves as ‘many-enfolded,’ for she points out that the word syntactically applies to the man, the journey, and the poem itself.
But I think the other part of the perceived problem with ‘complicated’ is that it is a word chosen by a woman. In her talk (at Ploughshares I presume, I got this quote from the same article but it just cites “her talk last week” without any further information) Wilson joked, “I doubt that anyone asked how the other translators’ ‘male perspectives’ affected their translations.” Moreover, many serious movie reviewers—like Nerdrotic whose video about Nolan’s Odyssey on YouTube has 1.4 million views—primarily blame Emily Wilson rather than Christopher Nolan for the movie’s unfaithfulness, for its ‘feminist’ or ‘woke’ approach. I find this deeply disingenuous, and troubling. I have read multiple translations of the Odyssey and Wilson’s is not necessarily my favorite. Her translation has both literary merits and drawbacks, but whether she is a woman has very little to do with either.
And yet, in response to Nolan’s casting and Nolan’s interpretive choices, many people have scapegoated the translator whose version he cited as an influence. But Wilson did not omit the year Odysseus spent with Circe, nor did she silence the Sirens, nor did she remove the male gods. She translated all of it. There is some confusion to be addressed here. Wilson’s first version of her Odyssey translation came out in 2017. In 2020, South African classicist Richard Whitaker noticed some aspects that were missing or incorrect—a 50 that should have been 500, for example—that were not corrected in its first printing. (That could take us into an entire conversation about the often lamentable state of publishing/editing these days that I don’t personally care to go into right now). However, those were corrected for the Norton Critical edition that came out in 2020, and the following paperback versions. Frankly, however, those are not really the issues that most who criticize Wilson’s translation focus on.
The most charitable version of the anti-Wilson-translation position I’ve seen is that: Wilson, because she’s a woman, foregrounds questions of gender, power, and hierarchy that neither Homer himself nor prior translators did—which weakens her text or its fidelity to the original’s meaning. The least charitable version is that she reappropriates Homer’s text into woke or feminist propaganda and her translation is therefore to be disregarded in its totality. Of course, both of these objections presuppose that a translation, or at least a ‘good’ translation, are meant to convey the meaning of the original. We’ve seen that Benjamin already somewhat disagrees here, and we already know that there is no such thing as a neutral translation. Every creative—and indeed every individual—has a physical embodiment and personal, linguistic, and cultural histories that inform their opinions, decisions, and art. Every translation, as every piece of writing, overtly or covertly reflects those conditions and its contemporary moment.
Wilson does make feminist interpretive choices, as she discusses in her chapter in Oxford University Press’ Homer’s Daughters: Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Her goal, as she states, is to reveal Homer’s androcentrism while stripping away the misogynistic embellishments introduced by later translators. Homer’s world centered men and their experiences—from the beginning Odysseus’ martial transgressions are never considered immoral infidelities, yet Penelope’s chastity while she awaits a husband whose status as alive or dead is nowhere near confirmed comprises a primary aspect of her positive characterization. But the poem does not exhaustively praise the society it depicts as the only and truly correct way of being. Wilson, in addition to acknowledging and conveying the hierarchical structures of Homer’s society, also aimed to preserve the ambiguities and nuances that it presents and which the Homeric Greek language contains in its descriptions.
Personally, I think some of the translation work she does is uniquely important and elucidating. For example, Helen refers to herself with the Greek epithet kunopis, literally ‘dog-face,’ and some male translators choose “shameless whore” (Fagels), “shameless thing” (Lombardo), and “bitch” (Mitchell) instead of ‘dog-face.’ Using ‘dog-face’ or ‘dog-eyed,’ as Wilson does, preserves Homer’s alterity—a general principle of successful Homeric translation—as well as the term’s multifaceted connotations. Kunopis is not a positive humanistic epitaph to give oneself yet dogs and humans have a unique connection (as, in fact, illustrated by the moving scene with Argos). That is much more complex than purely associating shame with women’s sexuality, such as with “shameless whore.” I think a similar argument for nuance can be made for Wilson dubbing the women who Telemachus says don’t deserve a clean death by the long sword “girls” rather than “sluts” or “whores.” One point I would disagree with is how Wilson compresses all servants—like attendants, heralds, or nurses—to “slaves” even though those roles were not all necessarily fulfilled by enslaved people. Each of these translators chose words that resonated for them in those scenes—and it appears to me like Wilson’s approach to Homer’s descriptions particularly of women is, if we’re accepting the premise that translation is an art of loyalty to the original, better than her male counterparts. (If you’re interested in more of a discussion about why fidelity may not actually be a suitable criterion for Homeric translation in particular, check out my video essay on this topic.). By the same token, it’s disingenuous to say that Wilson’s Odyssey is uselessly feminist or severely ideological as it would be to say that Fagels’ translation is overly misogynistic and therefore not worthy of being read. I have not heard a single person say the latter (in fact, Fagels’ claimed his translation was “sympathetic” to women…), but I have heard many adopt the former as their stance. A distinction I want to point out is that Wilson’s experience as a woman is, in part, what informed her to make these choices, but a man could also as easily make feminist choices. I don’t read Fagels as actually being very sympathetic to women in these particular bits translation, but that doesn’t mean that a future male translator cannot be.
And, to return to the film, I think it’s even more of a blunder to foist blame on Wilson for what Christopher Nolan did because it was he, not she, who chose what to include, and what not to include, in his film. And, anyway, shouldn’t anyone spending approximately $250 million on an adaptation ideally consult some manuscripts—or, at the absolute least, compare several available translations rather than treating any single translation as a solid basis for a screenplay? That’s not to say he didn’t, but at least, from my knowledge, he did not do that publicly, only naming Wilson.
Which translation is the best or the worst is a matter that straddles objectivity and subjectivity. As Vladimir Nabokov writes in his essay “Good Readers and Good Writers,” “everything that’s worthwhile is to some extent subjective.” Which translation is in fashion at any point may not be the best one on the whole nor the best one for you. John Keats has a wonderful sonnet called “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” which I think perfectly highlights how each translation can be a totally new experience. As a young man, he read Homer in translations by John Dryden and Alexander Pope—those most contemporary to his time. But he only started loving Homer after reading George Chapman’s translation, produced a century before the well-regarded translations of his time. He describes the thrill of finding Chapman’s translation like so:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Like an astronomer’s enthrallment after discovering a new planet is what a new reading experience, a new translation, can bring. Naturally, that it’s a sonnet also indicates in its form its gesturing towards love, admiration, and interest. Keats shows how there is nothing wrong with preferring another translation to the ones of your contemporary time. I agree. Your preference for Homeric translation should be based on the language and interpretive choices of the translations themselves, not solely on the fact that Wilson is a woman, and certainly not on decisions made by Christopher Nolan. And when it comes to films, there are also numerous Odyssey adaptations: L’Odissea (1911), Ulysses (1954), L’Odissea (1968), The Odyssey Miniseries (1997), The Return (2024), and, of course, The Odyssey (2026).
Since there are so many versions of Homer that we can meet, as each translation provides a new version, I would actually suggest making it a life-long challenge to try to meet them all. In the Benjaminian sense, you can encounter a new afterlife of Homer each time you read or watch or engage with a translation of his. In fact, Wilson is writing a new translation of the same poem. Something rare to look forward to in today’s publishing field. And, Homer being one of the greatest writers of the western world, I’d recommend trying to engage with him as many times as you can, in as many ways as you can.