Uncomplicated Reimaginings
Is it too late to say one more thing about The Odyssey?
By Zoe Gallis
This past summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrived in theaters around the world, and in anticipation of its release, sales of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the epic surged significantly. The resurfacing of this ancient story en masse brought about a cultural moment of multimedia dialogue; the movie of the summer came with required reading—friends, distant relatives, magazine reviewers, film buffs, BookTokers and the like all jumped into discussion. These conversations, though frequent and varying in form, left something to be desired regarding scope and complexity. Both the film and the modern translation it was based on made Homer’s story easier to take in, but what does this ease cost us?
I am no stranger to the gut reaction a reader of this piece might have. I am a Columbia student who read Homer’s epics in my freshman year as a part of a larger curriculum of Western literature—an educational privilege that has been known to lead to the formation of some elitist convictions. But I am not forcefully defending the high-brow, nor am I throwing stones at accessible media. Instead, I am asking what we lose when we turn away from complexity for the sake of clarity, what we may gain from broadening our discussion of works that are fundamentally interpretations, and why modern mainstream media springs to finding answers when its power lies in asking questions.
What Wilson and Nolan’s reimaginings of The Odyssey offer is an opportunity to experience an ancient story without demanding prerequisite knowledge of its subject matter. While an accessible (and profitable) approach, these interpretations make specific choices with the aim of producing a more comprehensible version of the narrative. Nolan removes scenes and characters that change the larger framing of the plot, while injecting discernably plain and direct language in his script. For instance, in place of the muse invocation that traditionally opens the epic introducing us to Odysseus and his tumultuous journey, Nolan inserts three short lines (“A face. A fleet. A war.”) in substitution. Moreover, the movie’s didactic closure constraints viewers to a single interpretation of the film’s narrative. It offers a vague explanation for modern societal ills instead of leaving the audience to contemplate the despair and sense of belonging that the epic has carried within it for centuries. On the other hand, Wilson’s translation makes use of feminist and politically engaged language, often collapsing the subtleties of the original text by choosing vernacular vocabulary over more faithful archaic renderings. While impressive, the feat of Wilson’s reimagining can only really be reckoned with when considered as part of the long lineage of this epic’s translation. Wilson’s use of iambic pentameter allowed her to match the exact line count of the original Greek text while sustaining a swift and musical tone throughout. Reading it in isolation in many ways obscures the details that are necessary to understanding its strengths. These changes, which have had simplifying effects on the epic and its context, limit our conversations and understandings of this story.
I do not mean to discourage nor be ungrateful towards the voices that continue to contribute to the retelling of this tale. Willful, ongoing engagement is precisely what has kept this epic alive for thousands of years, and both of the retellings I have mentioned have a rightful place in this narrative’s survival. However, when looking ahead at the ways in which media captures, revives, or reproduces the human experience, my hope is that creators won’t fall into the temptation of making it wholly digestible.
In demanding more of its audiences, media doesn’t necessarily exclude individuals from engaging with it. Rather, it offers them more entry points to the relevant broader conversations in which the piece of media exists. While the discussion that took place around The Odyssey this summer included both a book and a film, its parameters remained largely within the analysis of only those two specific versions. What are we to make of Odysseus, who, to Wilson is “a complicated man,” to Fagles “a man of twists and turns,” or to Lattimore “a man of many ways.”? There is merit in attending to these details because they show us all the ways we come to understand something and then communicate it, and that interpretations are layered, varied, and personal. There is no audience member that comes prepared to a retelling of this epic. Whether you are unfamiliar with the narrative arc, an avid reader, or an expert Classicist, its history is longer than any one of our own. As such, we are bound to come across moments that feel opaque, that unsettle us, that make us feel as though we aren’t quite getting it.
Have we not all, at one time or another, picked up a poem, watched an old film, sunk our teeth into a long novel, gazed upon a piece of art and not been able to make heads or tails of it? It feels so much like a personal shortcoming, this initial feeling of incomprehension. However humbling, these experiences do the work of showing us how much we don’t know. I believe that this, too, is valuable. In the case of The Odyssey, we are gifted the teachings of a story which precedes each of us. What a rare opportunity: a story so ancient and retold, showing us our blind sides.
