This essay originally appeared in Sapientia.
Like many people unfortunate enough to occasionally check a certain Social-Platform-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, I was surprised by the visceral reactions to trailers for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. I understand the sentiment behind some of the complaints — it is a bit odd to hear Tom Holland (the actor not the podcaster, though both are on the same page) refer to Odysseus as “dad” in an American accent. Of course this can’t truly be seen as a fault since American-English is no further from the Greek than British-English, even if it sounds off to our ears. But above all, I was stunned by the sheer rage: rage over casting, historical inaccuracies (oh boy), costumes, set design, language, translation, you name it.
There’s a certain naïveté to the anger, so much so that I wonder if a large swath of the internet thinks The Iliad and The Odyssey are historical accounts, making Homer one of the world’s first war correspondents. (Let’s please pause for a moment to remember that Helen of Troy was a demigod child of Zeus who hatched from an egg. But what’s unrealistic here is that she’s being portrayed by a Black woman… Sure, Elon.) I think a bit of unfamiliarity is to be expected when approaching a work like The Odyssey. Even those of us who love such works may have not really read or studied them since college, and may not even realize how embedded these myths are in our culture. But the more sinister part of the discourse comes from those who fan the flames, who frame Nolan’s choices as simultaneously “woke” and oppressive.
I suppose it’s not that they fear the bastardization of a classic, but that its very accessibility and diversity pose a threat to ideals which conflate classicism with traditionalism and white supremacy.
This association is not new, nor is it exclusive to American nationalism. In fact, the appropriation of antiquity was popular among 20th-century fascists, with Mussolini and Hitler both holding the Romans and Greeks as esteemed models of the human race — even if it took some ethnic exaggerations to make that case. According to Chaos and Classicism by Kenneth E. Silver, for example, Hitler “considered the ancient Greeks to be ‘Nordics,’ ancestors of the Germans” (Silver, 46).
As Silver writes: “‘The new age of today is at work on a new human type,’ he [Hitler] told his countrymen less than a year after the Olympics had finished. ‘Tremendous efforts are being made in countless spheres of life in order to elevate our people, to make our men, boys, lads, girls, and women healthier and thereby stronger and more beautiful. … Never was Mankind closer than now to Antiquity in its appearance and its sensibilities” (Silver, 48).
The obsession with the ancient Greeks as the embodiment of whiteness and masculinity continues to this day, as has been made clear by the discussions surrounding the film.
It is interesting, then, to turn to the staunchly anti-fascist Virginia Woolf, who explores Hellenism and the looming threat of fascism in her 1922 novel, Jacob’s Room. Woolf prided herself on her own Greek studies, but was quite aware that it held a different significance for her as a woman, and as a pacifist.
The titular Jacob Flanders is enamored with Greek, which he explores through a masculine romanticization of the language and culture. Woolf portrays this fascination as a kind of indoctrination into a patriarchal system that functions inseparably from war — which ultimately kills Jacob.
Classics, Woolf argues throughout the novel, are misconstrued and misremembered when they are only accessible within a male-dominated education system. She consistently satirizes Jacob’s understanding of Greek as hollow and confused:
“A strange thing — when you come to think of it — this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden … Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing. However, as he tramped into London it seemed to him that they were making the flagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if Socrates saw them coming he would bestir himself and say ‘my fine fellows,’ for the whole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free, venturesome, high-spirited…. She had called him Jacob without asking his leave. She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in the days of the Greeks.”
She further develops this idea of the classics being a male-centered field in her 1925 essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” Both works can be read against the current Odyssey discourse as Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the poem into English, faces backlash in the wake of the adaptation that is inspired by Wilson’s version. Nolan referenced Wilson’s translation, triggering ire from an audience who deems her work as simple, woke, and a feminist revision of Homer. Really, Wilson is a master of her craft. Not only does she preserve the traditional poetic meter, using iambic pentameter to mimic the poem’s original dactylic hexameter, but she also offers new interpretations, based on the original Greek rather than existing translations, that undo much of the editorialization of other translators.
“The reader or listener has the right to dwell in ambiguities, when the original is meaningfully ambiguous, rather than having everything explained and glossed by the translator,” Wilson writes in her new book of essays, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, her ode to her artform.
The most infamous point of contention regards Wilson’s opening line (cited by Nolan), perhaps the best-known of The Odyssey. Wilson’s version reads: “Tell me about a complicated man.” That is a stark contrast to others:
- – “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and / turns …” (Fagles)
- – “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending,/ the wanderer, harried for years on end, / after he plundered the stronghold / on the proud height of Troy” (Fitzgerald)
- – “SPEAK, MEMORY — / Of the cunning hero, / The wanderer, blown off course time and again / After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights” (Lombardo)
- – “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven / far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred / citadel” (Lattimore)
- – “Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy” (Rieu)
In “On Not Knowing Greek,” Woolf points to the “compactness of the expression” that is baked into the language: “Spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled … Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations” (56).
I can’t help but see Wilson’s opening lines in this vision of translation, their movement, their rhythm, their intention.
Woolf writes that the Greeks were better-suited to appreciate “bareness and abruptiveness in their literature.” Theirs were not the insular stories found among Woolf’s modernist contemporaries, whose minds and work reverberated against the drum of war, but performances that laid bare a shared emotional experience.
“In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction,” she writes. Alternatively, the Greeks were “accustomed to look directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe for them to step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an age like our own. … But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time ‘Yet being dead they have not died’” (54).
I don’t know that our current age is all that different from Woolf’s war-stricken reality. Perhaps Nolan’s adaptation will capture this “blinding and bewildering” quality of the Greek. Perhaps it will fall short. But we certainly can’t make that decision before letting it play out.
Clearly, translation is a fickle thing, bent at will and shaped to the cultures into which it’s born. Are we to treat Nolan’s adaptation so differently? Are its casting choices or linguistics so distracting that we allow ourselves to lose the magic and grandeur of the epic? Or, can we find space for retellings and interpretations? Can we let the Greeks meet us where we are?
“Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age,” writes Woolf.
It seems worthwhile to return to Ithaca in our current time. Maybe the very choices that are drawing criticism will be the elements in which we see ourselves, in which we allow ourselves to feel the “thick of emotions” rather than fear them.
