Homer was made for Hollywood, you could say. Lantern-jawed men, sexy witches, casts of thousands, audiences holding their collective breath. In a 1954 cinematic epic about the end of the Trojan war and the challenges that Homer’s hero has to overcome before he is able to make his way back home, Kirk Douglas’s Odysseus has to defeat the terrifying one-eyed Cyclops, outwit Circe, the enchantress whose spell turns his sailors into swine, and outsmart the Sirens, the deadly birdlike women who lure crews to their deaths. He orders his men to plug their ears with wax and lash him to a mast so he can listen to the Sirens’ song without being tempted to throw himself overboard. All this in a little khaki tunic, one end draped over his right shoulder.
The opening line of Homer’s poem includes the word “man”—and there’s always been a bit of manly swagger about it. The poet himself dressed Odysseus in a boar’s-head headdress. But in L’Odissea, a silent movie from 1911 that was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, Giuseppe di Liguoro sported long flowing ringlets, a calf-length robe and a brass breastplate as he kissed the bambini goodbye and headed for distant shores. More than a century later, in The Return (2024), Ralph Fiennes, so honed and toned he looked like a bit of old rope, lay stark naked on a shingle beach. In the latest version, Odysseus, more decorously dressed than many of his predecessors, sports a helmet capped with horsehair bristle of blood-dark cerise.
Each new film of Homer’s work is bigger and more staggering than the last, it seems. That latest version, Christopher Nolan’s new Imax film starring Matt Damon, offered work to a reported 5,000 extras in Morocco, where the opening sequence of the Trojan War was shot, and, overall, consumed at least two million feet of film. The first tickets went on sale a year before the film’s opening; they were gone in minutes.
Who was Homer? Was he a real person, this Anon of Bronze Age Greece? No one knows. The work that we have come to accept as his was created in seventh or eighth century BC by a society that acclaimed the reciting of epic poetry but which was largely illiterate. Yet it was not unsophisticated. Homeric Greece was a society on the move. Greeks, who for centuries had lived in small settlements around Attica and on the nearby Aegean islands, were coming together—and looking overseas at the same time. Gradually, they moved across the Mediterranean, east to what is now Turkey and the Black Sea, and also to North Africa, learning about the challenges of migration and about other cultures. What makes a society and what constitutes home were becoming ever more familiar questions; as familiar, in a way, as they are today. Which is one reason why Homer’s writing has long been so influential.
In the fifth century BC, the Athenian playwright Aeschylus described his tragedies as “slices from the banquet of Homer”. In the years since, the Greek poet’s fantastical stories-within-a-story have inspired writers, poets and filmmakers across the globe. James Joyce used his work as the foundation for his 1922 masterwork Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus). Dante had Homer in mind when he wrote about the descent into the nine circles of hell in his 14th-century Inferno. Claudio Monteverdi may have been thinking of something similar when he composed his own descent into Hades, L’Orfeo (1607). In 1911, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy focused on the journey rather the destination in his best-known work, Ithaca.
Tennyson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Louis MacNeice were all inspired by The Odyssey. Decades later, in The Penelopiad (2005), Margaret Atwood wrote about Odysseus’s homecoming from the perspective of his long-suffering wife. In Circe (2018), Madeline Miller focussed on the enchantress—or the “sexy witch”, as one translator called her—who would risk everything for the mortal Odysseus. JK Rowling was steeped in Homer as she sketched out Harry Potter, as was the St Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott while writing his magnificent epic Omeros (1990). Even children’s films, such as the clownfish ocean rescue Finding Nemo (2003) and Hayao Miyazaki’s classic Spirited Away (2001), were touched by The Odyssey.
Unless your primary school curriculum was sufficiently saturated in the classics that, by the age of 12, you were reading Herodotus or the New Testament in the original, chances are your knowledge of Homer has been acquired through translation. It was the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman who unlocked Keats’s love of The Odyssey. A new prose version, written by EV Rieu just after the Second World War, was said to capture the imagination of returning soldiers, and became a bestseller. Robert Fitzgerald brought out a stately blank-verse version in 1961, which was followed in the 1990s by what one commentator called a “gripping Wild West adventure” of a translation by Robert Fagles, who taught comparative literature at Princeton.
Wilson’s version instantly made waves, not least because, after centuries of male gaze, hers was the first English translation by a woman
Then, in 2017, Emily Wilson’s translation appeared, “like one of Zeus’s thunderclaps, to part the clouds”, as another commentator said. It instantly made waves, not least because, after centuries of male gaze, hers was the first English translation of Homer’s epic by a woman. Tight, disciplined and unusually bright in tone, it almost shone. Wilson had fallen in love with classics as a child, when a perceptive teacher cast her as Athena in a school production of The Odyssey. “It was a turning point in my life,” she wrote in the introduction to her translation.
A British writer and academic, who now teaches classics at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson is the daughter of Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones and AN Wilson, the writer and critic. She combines her mother’s sensitive ear with her father’s performative energy. Few can forget her raised arms, tattooed with Greek deities, as she recites from memory the opening lines of Homer’s epic. On hearing her for the first time last summer, at a gathering of writers in western Greece, one member of the audience was heard to quip: “Who needs Christopher Nolan when you can have Emily Wilson?”
In her translation, Wilson matched Homer’s original line-for-line for all its 12,000 lines of hexameter verse, but set the poem in iambic pentameter, the classic meter of English poetry used by Shakespeare, Milton and Byron. Readers bought Wilson’s translation in their thousands. It became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Writers were as gushing as ordinary readers. Soon after she finished reading it, Ursula Le Guin emailed the grumpy academic and critic Harold Bloom: “It moves as swift as the sea with a good wind in the sails, and I loved the voyage.” Last year, Salman Rushdie, on Desert Island Discs, chose Wilson’s translation as the book he would want with him were he washed up, Odysseus-like, on a distant shore. “It’s about somebody on a long journey who gets marooned in all kinds of places, which he can’t get away from, although he does in the end. So it has optimism and hope.”
“Tell me about a complicated man.” So begins Wilson’s translation. Much ink has been spilled about the choices Wilson made as she went about her work, but nowhere more than here. The original Greek has the word polytropos, combining poly (“many”) and tropos (“turns”). Literally, it means “many-turned” or “much-wandering”, and suggests someone who is clever, adaptable, unstraightforward. Translators through the ages have struggled with the phrase. Fitzgerald rendered it as “skilled in all ways of contending”, and Fagles as “the man of twists and turns”. Thomas Hobbes, as far back as 1674, omitted the adjective altogether and called him, simply, “The man…”.
Wilson spent weeks thinking about this one line. She knew that most Homeric characters carry standard epithets, but this one was unusual. It was meant to do a specific job. Hobbes’s choice to leave out the adjective was not an option. She also didn’t want to coin a word that didn’t already exist in English; “muchy-turny” or “twisty-turny” would not do. “Twisty” on its own was great for an airport novel or a corkscrew, she wrote on her Substack, “but not plausible for a person”. “Topsy-turvy” seemed more “appropriate for a children’s TV show”; “circuitous”, “zigzag” or “meandering” suggested a journey; “roundabout” made you think of traffic; “flexible” of yoga; while “‘turned’ sounded like spoilt milk”.
“So I went with ‘complicated’,” she wrote, “which suggests something of the imagery (folding or layers, which are analogous to turns) and has the same syllable count as the original, and is a real, not made up English word, conveys immediate meaning, as the original does, but the meaning is appropriately multiple, and hints at truths to come, about the character, the poem and the trip… And it’s potentially a shock, not quite what you expect at the start of an epic poem.”
Critics scolded her, saying “complicated” was too negative, too modern. But Wilson was adamant. “I see the original, and my translation, as a promise, or even an enticement, in the first line: Dear Listener, stay with me, because you won’t be bored,” she wrote. Wilson did come close to abandoning it when, at a much later stage, she learned about the opening of the film Shaft (1971) whose theme song, by Isaac Hayes, includes the line, “He’s a complicated man / but no one understands him but his woman.” In the end, she stuck with her original, more convinced than ever that she’d made the right decision.
It’s not clear which translation Nolan used in the making of his film. He mentioned Wilson’s opening line once in an interview, which has led many to conclude that his Odyssey will be a cinematic rendition of her words. But he hasn’t been working with her; he hasn’t even called her for a chat, she tells me. The Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o admits to knowing nothing about Homer before Nolan cast her as his Helen of Troy, though she says she has since listened to the audiobook versions of Wilson’s translations of both The Odyssey and The Iliad.
Either way, it is probably safe to say that the director of Oppenheimer (2023), Dunkirk (2017) and Inception (2010) will have been greatly excited by the possibilities offered by The Odyssey. Imagine the Nolan take on Odysseus’s encounters with Polyphemus, the one-eyed man-eater, the deadly Sirens, the terrifying Scylla and Charybdis. Most of all, imagine what he will make of the saga of the Trojan horse and the Greek soldiers hidden inside it and smuggled into the city, where they leap out and smite the enemy.
But theatrics are only part of what is appealing about The Odyssey, and for many the less interesting part. It is Odysseus the man, who gives up the promise of eternal life with a goddess to continue the search for his wife and family, that speaks most powerfully to readers of the poem through the ages. Homer makes us listeners, Seamus Heaney reminded readers in his introduction to the 1992 Everyman edition, which has just been republished.
As the British broadcaster and classicist Natalie Haynes explains: “Odysseus is a husband away from his wife, a father who has missed his son growing up, a warrior whose war is over, a king who is far from his kingdom, a leader whose men all die, an adulterer who is the plaything of goddesses and a son whose mother dies of a broken heart because she believes him dead. He is a voyager, a pirate, an adventurer, a refugee.”
‘The Odyssey’ asks fundamental questions about what it means to be a man
But most of all, he is a man. And the poem asks fundamental questions about what it means to be a man. For Daniel Mendelsohn, an American essayist and critic, who has himself translated The Odyssey and is the host of an enlightening podcast series on the poem for the New York Review of Books, it is Odysseus the man that is the most fascinating aspect of Homer’s hero. Mendelsohn is certain that this fascination only grows as readers themselves grow older.
After ten years away, Odysseus finally washes up on the shore of Ithaca, his home, dressed as a beggar. To prove who he is, he must win the recognition of his son, his nurse and his long-neglected dog, who dies as soon he sees his master. Encountering his wife, Penelope, once again, Odysseus must pass a test she sets when she asks the beggar to move their bed. Only Penelope and Odysseus remember that Odysseus himself carved the bed from the trunk of an olive tree and it has always been part of the structure of the royal palace.
“There you have it,” Mendelsohn says in his podcast. “It’s in the architecture. It’s built into the palace in a living tree. It is a built object. It is a living object, and it is the symbol of their living, enduring marriage.” As one of the followers of Mendelsohn’s podcast added afterwards: “There aren’t many moments in world literature when I’m so taken back, so smacked, that I have to put the book down. One of them has always been that wonderful moment where Odysseus finds the bed post. The olive tree is still there, the bed is still there. It just gets me every time. And I keep going back to it.”
As for Wilson—who for the moment has, she tells me, given up adding to her pantheon of tattoos—she too keeps going back to The Odyssey. Almost a decade after her groundbreaking translation was published, she is once more at work on Homer’s poem, not to refashion her original, but in a completely new translation. “I’m very excited about it,” she says. “I like my Iliad translation more than my Odyssey translation, because I did the Odyssey one first. I felt I got better. I got better at writing out every pentameter. I got better at figuring out how to shape the line. And also, with the Odyssey translation, I was very much fixated on wanting to be truthful about the pacing of the original, so I constrained myself to the same number of lines as the original. By the time I was three-quarters of the way through, I regretted that, but it was too late. But that means the premise of the new one is that I’m going to make it significantly longer.”
Some things won’t change, though. “I’m going to keep the first line. I don’t think I can improve on that.”
