The Odyssey
by Homer
Translated by Emily Wilson
Everyone’s got Odyssey FEVER! Say what you will about Christopher Nolan, but he has a way of peaking an audience’s interest in any random historical topic: Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and now the Odyssey. We’re all a bunch of philistines anyway, so if he’s getting us to learn about something to make us more cultured, God bless him. Turns out of Nolan cares about a topic, suddenly EVERYONE cares.
The problem, of course, is that Nolan’s movies are made to belittle his audience: they’re structured in a way as to show his superiority as a movie-maker, not to connect with his audience. So, I gave up on Nolan a long time ago. Not that I’m not interested in his movies, but given the nature of his motivation, why wouldn’t I prioritize other movies instead? I’d rather watch a Powell and Pressburger movie.
Everyone’s going to be talking about the Odyssey, and I’ve got FOMO, so the closest I’m going to get to watching Nolan’s the Odyssey is reading it. I’ve always thought of the book (story, epic poem, whatever) as an impenetrable fortress full of difficult language. This is what makes me appreciate this translation of the Odyssey so much: Emily Wilson has now made it accessible to the common person. Any potential criticism Wilson gets from the old guard might be merited (she’s quite a character according to my Google searches), but I ask you, does it really matter? Isn’t any translator going to be biased? Like she herself said, anyone translating the Odyssey will end up with text that sounds nothing like how they spoke or wrote 3000 years, so why get so precious and caught up with now a modernized version of it sounds? Even the Chapman version from the 1600s, as “poetic” as it may be, would sound nothing like how the original poem was supposed to sound. Also, Wilson is allowing the poem to be appreciated by a wider audience. Why are we acting like there’s only an exclusive group of people who are allowed to read it? Are we going to be elitist about it? Those alternate translations will always be available to read, if anyone is interested.
So yeah, way to go Emily Wilson for being punk rock about this book. She leveled the playing field and took the snobbery out of the Odyssey. We owe her for that.
Oh, and the book is really good too.
