As Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Odyssey approaches, readers share their perspectives on recent film and translation interpretations of the ancient epic.
Pasolini's The Return: A Trauma-Focused Retelling
Alex Dickie of Edinburgh comments on Uberto Pasolini's 2024 film The Return, which strips the poem of gods and monsters. The film portrays Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) as traumatised by war, emotionally and psychologically bewildered—an ancient precursor to post-traumatic stress disorder. Penelope (Juliette Binoche) contends with her own inner demons in a male world immersed in physical prowess and killing. Both characters have been hollowed out by their experiences.
Dickie suggests that Homer set out to tell a good story but revealed much more, including the futility of war, echoing Robert Burns: "Man's inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!"
Debating Translations of Polytropos
Darryl Accone of Johannesburg, South Africa, challenges the editorial's description of the Greek word polytropos as "skilfully rendered in Emily Wilson's recent translation as 'complicated'." Accone argues that Richmond Lattimore's rendering as "many ways" is most accurate. "'Complicated' loses the dual essence of the Greek: many ways as in much travelled and ingenious, inventive, cunning, resourceful, evasive, wily, slippery," he writes.
Accone also criticizes Wilson's abandonment of Homeric hexameter in favor of pentameter, which he calls "alien (for Greek)" and "devoid of poetic resonance with Homer." He praises Lattimore for sustaining a six-beat line in English throughout his translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, recommending them for a true sense of the originals.
Excitement for Nolan's Odyssey
Roberto Breña of Mexico City, Mexico, expresses enthusiasm for Christopher Nolan's upcoming version. He notes that thousands of people worldwide, especially youngsters, will engage with Greek mythology, history, and values of the pre-classical age. This, he says, will be "a breath of fresh air in a world where everything seems to be so inane, so superficial, so pecuniary and so transient."
