What Translator Emily Wilson Thinks of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey'

0:05Derek Thompson: I'm pro football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of, major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a health care professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story. Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Cap-Lyda Lumeteperone. This little light of mine In the dark found a hopeful sign I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Cap-Lyda Lumeteperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone, building on my progress without starting over.

0:54Derek Thompson: Cap-Lyda is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common. Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Capilita is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal.

1:23Derek Thompson: Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects. Ask your doctor about Kaplita. Learn more at kaplita.com or call 888-252-4824. This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the Center helps clients anticipate what comes next.

2:06Derek Thompson: Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash Center for Geopolitics. My first book, Hitmakers, was about the science of hits in pop culture. And the thesis of that book, in a nutshell, was that hits exist at this intersection between surprise and familiarity. By definition, a hit has to be something that's new. But most successful cultural products, whether you're talking about a song or a film or product design, tend to sneak in a bit of familiarity so that audiences or consumers are delighted by the shock of recognition. That interplay between familiarity and surprise is profoundly at work in Christopher Nolan's new film, The Odyssey, a throwback piece of monoculture that has the entire world buzzing these days for good or bad.

2:55Derek Thompson: On the one hand, The Odyssey is everywhere. It is the most familiar story in Western history. As the author and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has observed, The story of the hero, separated from home and loved ones, who wanders among strange peoples and fantastical places during a difficult journey home, that's The Wizard of Oz. It's Finding Nemo. It's Dante's Inferno. It's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's Huckleberry Finn. It's even Christopher Nolan's own films, Inception and Interstellar. The hero who uses disguise to test the loyalty of those around him has been recycled by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo and Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

3:37Derek Thompson: The poem's fascination with alien creatures, Scylla and Charybdis and the Cyclops Polyphemus, could even be seen as a kind of ancient recipe for Star Trek. But in an equally true way, the Odyssey is not everywhere. The Odyssey is nowhere. This is an alien story about alien values from an alien world 3 ,000 years ago. The Bronze Age is over. The age of archaic Greece, when the Odyssey was finally written down about the Bronze Age, which had been over for several hundred years, that's over by several thousand years as well. Troy is buried. And the values of the Iliad and the Odyssey are blessedly passé, including their warrior culture and their fixation with a version of glory that often relied on the slaughter of others.

4:28Derek Thompson: For the last few weeks, before and after Christopher Nolan's movie debuted, there's been a debate about whether his movie properly honors the original text or the performance poetry on which that original text was based. Is it okay that Helen of Troy is portrayed by a black actress? Is it okay that Matt Damon's Odysseus seems traumatized by war in a way that seems very modernly PTSD? Is it okay that Telemachus calls his dad, dad? These are all fundamentally questions of translation. What is the duty of modern artists when translating ancient work for a modern audience? Well, who better to answer that question than the classicist whose translation of the Odyssey reportedly inspired Christopher Nolan's own screenplay and film?

5:18Derek Thompson: Today's guest is Emily Wilson, a classicist and translator whose new book is Crossing the Wine Dark Sea. The following conversation we have breaks quite cleanly into two. For the first 30 minutes, we talk about Homer's Odyssey and the art of translation. And for the second 30 minutes, we talk about Nolan's Odyssey, what Emily thought about it, and the degree to which Nolan's work upholds or significantly changes the characters and the themes of Homer's original. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plane English.

6:15Derek Thompson: Emily Wilson, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Ten years ago, when I was at The Atlantic, we did this feature called What People Don't Understand About My Job. And we heard from all sorts, librarians and bass players and botanists. We did not hear from translators of ancient Greek. And so, Emily, a two-part question to get us started. What is the most fun part of your job of translating ancient Greek for modern audiences? And number two, what is the thing that most people don't understand about your job? I mean, so much about my job is so fun. I get to read Homer all day long and I get to think about language and rhythm and sound and characterization and how do you get from words and syllables to these epic, grand, deep, profound feelings that these narratives of the Iliad and Iodosy can convey, both in the original and then, if I do my job right, for the readers of the translations that I'm trying to produce.

7:09I think the main thing that people who aren't translators tend to underestimate or not understand, And this, I think, applies to literary translators with any language pair. It's not just about ancient Greek. It's not just about ancient to modern. It's about all languages break up the world, imagine the world, represent the world differently. So if you think about translation just as, let me just write out that same thing but use different words, that doesn't make any sense. It's not possible to do that, right? So there's this constant process of trying to reimagine a whole experience, a whole literary experience, but you can't use any of the same words.

7:49So people tend to think, especially with ancient translation, the hard part must be the reading, because ancient Greek is imagined to be a hard language. But I'd been reading Homer in Greek and teaching Homer for decades before I started the project of translating the Odyssey and the Iliad in a way that I felt I can actually publish that and feel proud of it. And it's really going to take you along a journey that's similar to the original. That's a writing challenge. I was a fluent reader of Homeric Greek, but I want to convey to readers who don't read Homeric Greek, what does that feel like to be in the poem like that?

8:23Derek Thompson: Could you put that into words for someone who does not speak either modern or ancient Greek? Someone reminds me of Muslims who will say that a translated Quran is not the Quran. There is an indelible quality to the Quran in its original Arabic that makes it almost impossible to fully translate. How would you explain the degree to which Homeric Greek is similar? What are the indelible or alien qualities of ancient Greek that I need to understand at a high level to appreciate that any translation, whether the Wilson or the Fagels or the Nolan, is just going to be something different than the original?

9:06It's going to be different. I mean, I think part of this is just about the question of how do you translate poetry? I mean, translation in general is impossible, but poetry is even more impossible, especially metrical poetry, because it's so much about sound. The Homeric poems were designed for oral performance. They have this beautiful regular meter and music in the original. And the meter that they're composed in, Dactylic Hexameter, sounds musical and natural and traditional in Homeric Greek. If you try to use dactylic hexameter in English, it sounds horrible, in my opinion. I mean, people have made attempts to do it.

9:41Longfellow did it. Arthur Hugh Clough did it in the 19th century, not with Toma, but just with original poetry. There is one translator called Rodney Merrill who does dactylic hexameter. But it ends up forcing him into these terrible convoluted ways of phrasing things. Like, he can never say, Agamemnon, son of Atreus, because that doesn't scan. It always has to be Scion of Atreus, because that's the only way to squeeze it into this completely alien meter. So it's partly about just how do you signal this sounds traditional poetic? And then these beautiful compound words, the wine dark sea, horse-floored nestor.

10:17Modern English doesn't go for those words as much, though I actually use them in my translation because I think they're so beautiful. But on a poponton doesn't sound exactly the same as wine dark sea.

10:28Derek Thompson: Translators are sometimes expected to make their work sound familiar to their audience, but they also feel, I think, this obligation to honor the original text, even when, as you say, the language or the music or the themes are unfamiliar to a modern audience. How did you think about that challenge specifically when dealing with the Odyssey? Yeah, that's such an interesting and central challenge for any translator. There's been a big trend among translators in translation studies over the past generation to defamiliarize, to make translation work more visible, both in the sense of put the translator's name on the cover.

11:08Even if you're reading Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, you should realize that you're not reading the actual words. But also in the sense of maybe it's okay if it sounds weird sometimes, because maybe that's a reminder of this is not an Anglophone text. I thought about it in the sense that I definitely want to defamiliarize and I want to give the reader or listener to the audiobook a sense of this is alien, extremely ancient, traditional poetry. It's not all going to be completely familiar. But I also thought there are ways of defamiliarizing that have themselves become familiar. So if I use a super clunky, archaic, kind of faux early early 20th century kind of language, that's not actually defamiliarizing.

11:54And that's not getting you any closer to the specific ways that Homeric Greek sounds, which is not the same as how Europides sounds or Sophocles sounds or other ancient poetry sounds. So if I want to get to the specificity of Homeric Greek sounds alien and traditional, but also it has this real clarity and vividness and depth to the storytelling, it's almost like drama, even though there's a single narrative voice, I need to shake things up. I need to use meter. I need to think about alliteration. I need to think about poetics. But I also need to make the syntax as clear as the original syntax is.

12:31So I'd need to therefore very often change the word order, change things around, because Greek can use participles in ways that English can't. So if I want the clarity that the original has, I need different syntax.

12:44Derek Thompson: And we're going to get to this in a minute, because I want to share a snippet of the original Homeric Greek and walk through how different translators over time have dealt with that language. But first, I want to return to a point that I heard you make on another show, and I just loved it. I haven't been able to forget it, that many people today, when we think of a Homeric epic poem, we want it, quote unquote, to sound ancient, maybe the same with Beowulf or some other ancient performance poetry. but ancient to us now sounds like elevated Shakespearean language. And you made the point that Shakespeare is 400 years separated from us.

13:23Derek Thompson: Hamlet came out in like 1605, 1606. Shakespeare himself was 2 ,500 years separated from Homer. So we are far closer to Shakespeare than Shakespeare was to Homer. And so this idea that old equals Shakespeare, no, Shakespeare is a child. Shakespeare He was an infant compared to Homer. And so I'd love to hear just a little bit more about how, as a translator, you think about making something for modern audiences that is so old that it makes that which we consider old relatively young. We're just dealing with something that is practically alien here, Bronze Age poetry. Bronze Age poetry, or in fact, it's archaic era poetry.

14:08It reflects a sort of folk memory of the Bronze Age. I know we're going to talk a little bit about Nolan, but there are ways that he's messing with the time frame, as is, of course, Nolan's right and Nolan's constant way of doing things in terms of time and memory as his themes. So I think it's very important just to realize we need to constantly defamiliarize and be open to how very strange these poems are and to the fact that they were always strange. They were always mythical. they always evoked a world that never actually fully existed in the ways that it's represented in the Odyssey. I mean, in fact, even in Archaic or even in Mycenaean Greece, I don't actually believe that there were goddesses descending to talk to people, for instance, but that also it reflects multiple different eras in history because it's based on this long pre-existing oral tradition.

14:59So in order to evoke something like that experience of going in a way on a kind of poetic time machine when you read the Odyssey. I think it's useful just to constantly remind yourself, my job isn't to pretend I'm taking the reader back in time 50 years, because that's not nearly far enough. I need to convey things about the vividness of the storytelling, the humanity of the characters, and then lull you into a false sense of security. And then you'll be like, wow, this is so strange. Why is he wailing and slapping his thighs and slaughtering 500 cattle. That's strange. And so I think if you come at the poem with boring kinds of strangeness up front, like why is the verb in a weird place?

15:45I actually think that distracts you from what's fundamentally strange in Homer, which is things like how it imagines feelings in the body and society.

15:54Derek Thompson: In your new book, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, you write about how our relationship to ancient literature has changed. And I'm interested in how the virtues of translation have evolved in the last several hundred years. So when we compare, say, Odyssey translations by Alexander Pope, who's 1688 to 1744, so extremely old, extremely dead, to modern versions, has the definition of what a good translation is changed? I think the norms about what counts as a good translation have definitely changed, especially in the case of translations from Latin and ancient Greek. Pope, like me, wrote a big bestseller by managing to translate Homer at a time when his culture was very much ready for it.

16:44He uses wonderful, ornate rhyming couplets, and it is both responding to the existing norms of Augustine, which is how people talk about the culture of that time in England, and it's also reshaping that culture. So there's always in translation, especially of an old text, a way that there's this interaction between, I'm going to familiarize it, I'm going to domesticize it, and yet I'm also going to reshape the possibilities in the receiving culture by bringing something alien into our culture and making us able to respond to something alien. I think Pope did that especially with his Iliad translation, but also with his Odyssey translation, insofar as, you know, before the Pope translations, English readers were really suspicious of Homer.

17:34And they assumed that, of course, if you're going to read a canonical classic, you go for Virgil. That's the ornate, stately, classical one. Whereas Homer has things like people falling over in the manure. The whole structure of the narrative is really weird. It's quote-unquote primitive. It's hard to assimilate into a neoclassical set of aesthetic norms. And Pope sort of did that, and that's therefore managed to make Homer feel accessible to readers in the 18th century. But he did it by, as you say, rhyming couplets. Ancient poetry never rhymes.

18:08Derek Thompson: I want to get to the translations in just a second, but your last comment sort of sparked something, which is that I wonder, has the Odyssey been as central to what we think of as the Western canon throughout the last few hundred years? Because I think like now, you know, in reading all of this about Nolan's Odyssey and your Odyssey, we keep hearing, oh, this is the, this is the urtex of modern literature. Like everything, whether it's, you know, Alice in Wonderland or Ulysses or Star Trek, everything flowed from this urtext. But like, I think back again, just 400 years ago to Shakespeare, who was rewriting every familiar story.

18:52Derek Thompson: He gave us Chorlis and Cressida, but he didn't give us an Odysseus. James Joyce gave us an Odysseus, Ulysses, 300 or so years later. Was the Odyssey always this central to our conceptualization of Western civilization, or is that itself a somewhat modern development? Yeah, I love that question because I think people sometimes, and this is also a theme in the Crossing the Wyandark Sea book, people sometimes think of the canon means the great books that have absolutely always been read and absolutely always been interpreted in exactly the same way, and that's historically false. Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey have only been translated into modern vernacular languages very, very recently in the big picture.

19:37I mean, the last, it's about 400 years in English, It's maybe 500 years if you also look at the European receptions and translations into Italian and French, which were, as ever, a little ahead of us. But it's only since that period of the early modern rediscovery of ancient literature, rediscovery of ancient Greek as well as Latin literature, and a new interest in the Greeks, which was developing at the same time as this development of modern nation states. So I think you can also see why the Odyssey in the early modern period meant something to people who are thinking about what is it to form a community or form a homeland in a new way from how people were thinking about those questions in the medieval period.

20:26And of course, in the Middle Ages, people were not reading Homer. People were reading summaries of myths about the Trojan War, and they were reading the Aeneid, but they were definitely not reading the Odyssey.

20:36Derek Thompson: I think it'd be fun to go through one passage in the Odyssey and hear how different translators dealt with that passage to really get a sense of how elastic this work of translation can be. Let's do the opening lines of the poem. You have a chapter in your book, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, that goes through several different passages and shows how different translators have dealt with it. But for familiarity's sake, I think we should just start at the top. Before we get into the most famous English translations, could you please read or recite the proem in ancient Greek so we could hear some of that dactylic hexameter for ourselves?

21:10Yes, of course, yes. So this is the beginning of the Odyssey.

21:38Nostum hetairon. Alud huset aruset aruseto hie minosper autoi gar svetaresin at astaliesin olunto. Nepioi. Hoi catabus hubarion o se elioio estion. Autor hod toisin afaileto nostimon emar. Ton hamothenge thea. Thucatē Dios epe caihemin.

22:08Derek Thompson: And so one thing I was listening out for, dactylic is triplicate, right? Dactylic is three because it's, is it based on the finger, the three joints in the finger? So andramoi. So there's a long. Long, short, short, long, short, short. Yes. So you're hearing it. So you're hearing la, la, la, la, la, la. But you're also hearing how the rhythm, the music is varied as every meter has these possibilities of variation in the pattern. you can substitute the two shorts for a long. It sounds a little bit like a haunted waltz, essentially. There's one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. What I'd like to do now is I want to read several English translations of the first sentence of the Odyssey.

22:57Derek Thompson: And I want to hear your analysis of what we're hearing in these translations. So you have some in your book, but I thought we might just pull up Alexander Pope's. the first, the beginning of Alexander Pope's, this is book one of the Odyssey by Alexander Pope. The man for wisdom's various arts renowned, long exercised in woes, oh muse, resound, who when his arms had wrought the destined fall of sacred Troy and raised her heaven-built wall, et cetera, et cetera. So there you have just very classic, almost like a Shakespearean sonnet. I want to start with— You know, I would challenge the idea that Pope's poetics is at all like Shakespeare's.

23:38I think he's— Oh, please. Okay, challenge that.

23:40Derek Thompson: Good. I mean, I love both of them, but I think that level of ornateness and coupletiness is totally different from, is this a dagger that I see before me? Pope could never have written it. Know what I mean? I suppose I meant this. Yeah, but is this I Am a Pentameter? Yes, but by me. The Man for Wisdom's Various Arts Renown. I guess just at that basic level of A, B, A. Different era of the use of that meter. Yeah. Yeah. So let's, this is a version by E.V. Rue, translated by Peter Jones, which you say is the version most commonly read in the UK. Yes. It was revised by Jones. So it's from the, I think, 1950s, something like that.

24:23Derek Thompson: But then there's a revised version. Yes, that's right. 1946, written, 1991 revised. And this is the first sentence. 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. So practically a sentence. And we compare that to Robert Fitzgerald, 1961, which you call a far more elegant version written in largely iambic rhythm. And it goes like this, quote, 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.

25:06Derek Thompson: And now finally the version that I read as a freshman in high school in the year 2000. This is by Robert Fagels. And it is free verse. It begins, quote, Sing to me of the man muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. So there we have several treatments. We've got Pope, we've got the UK version, we've got Fitzgerald and Fagels. What are we hearing here? How would you, almost as like an English teacher, explain the difference between the treatments of this first sentence? There is so much to say, and I know we only ate without, we need the quick version, so it's going to be challenging.

25:48Derek Thompson: And I just kept it to one sentence. I could have made this comparison the entire first passage. just on these lovely little case studies. I think it's so much to say. I mean, one thing to say is just the ways that each of them expand and the things they expand on, right? I mean, the Pope, you read Pope's translation, kind of translation. I think by modern norms, it's more like a kind of riff on the original. It's not exactly, I mean, I think if you tried to pass that off as a translation in the 21st century, people would be really disturbed or they would just be, I mean, I think they might say, this is an amazing poem, but what does it have to do with Homer?

26:24You made most of that up. It's wonderful. So he has four lines where the original has only two lines. So it's like doubling the amount of actual content. So much of the content is Pope's idea about the Odyssey and what it's going to be about within the norms of his own time, his own culture. I mean, for instance, this whole thing of the man for wisdom's various arts renowned, which I love. There is nothing in the original either about renown or about wisdom, right? I mean, that's just not there. It's wonderful, but it's totally made up. It's great.

26:58Derek Thompson: The first sentence, just completely invented. Completely made up, yes. And then he has, I can't remember what he says, I haven't got it in front of me, what he says about the muse. But he goes off on the muse in a way that's completely, in the original, it's just, tell me muse. But tell me again, what does... The last part of that is he says, oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate, celestial muse, and to our world relate. Oh, I love that, yes. I mean, again, absolutely no, zero correspondence to the original. I love it, it's great. Yes, totally made up. I mean, so the 20th century ones have a closer relationship to the original, but of course, there's no such thing as a translation that's exactly the same as the original.

27:39You always have to make choices. The ones you read, there was the E.V. View one, which, of course, we could argue about, does it make any sense at all to translate a metrical poem as prose, which is what the view translation is doing. That, to start with, is a set of questions about that. But then one way to narrow this down is to focus on that very marked and super interesting adjective, but it's actually an epithet in the first line, polutropon, which the Reu translation uses resourceful for that. right um and it in the original it suggests a a twistiness a turnedness it could refer to the journey the poem the protagonist obviously explicitly it's the protagonist but it could be other things too um in terms of its what it represents in the poem and what are we told about Odysseus I think both Pope and you want to tell us that this is the character you expect him to be You expect Odysseus to be wise or you expect him to be resourceful.

28:42So even if that word doesn't actually mean that, let's just make sure that we're really starting off on brand and not defamiliarize you too much right at the start. But I actually think that the original poem in a way is defamiliarizing us right at the start because it's quite an unusual word. Odysseus has many other epithets. I would say that polymechanos, which is a different and much more common epithet for Odysseus, does kind of mean resourceful. It means he has a mastery over technique, technology, problem solving. It's about resourcefulness and access to resources and ability to exploit resources.

29:20But that's not actually what polytropon means. So I think Ryu is sort of massaging the original to make it less unfamiliar, not even beyond the fact that he's making a poem into a novel or into a prose work. And then I love the Fitzgerald use of sing in me and through me tell the story, which again, totally made up. And there's not that idea of in me and through me. It's just moi, one word, dative case, to me. That's it. And Fitzgerald is sort of extrapolating from all of that of let me be the vessel of divine inspiration. And it's lovely, but in a way it makes you think you're kind of in the world of the Hebrew Psalms rather than the world of Homeric archaic poetry.

30:05I also really love the whole way that he makes it more grand by saying sing. But in fact, the original verb, enneper, it's related to epos, which means word. It doesn't mean sing. And it really matters, I think, that the Odyssey begins with a verb meaning tell. The Iliad begins with a verb meaning sing. These poems are always in this sort of dialogue with each other. the Iliad is going for a different kind of discourse right at the start. So the choice to make the Odyssey sing, you know, I think it kind of messes up the contrast between those two invocations to the muse at the start of the two poems.

30:45There's so much more to say, but it's Fagels. We have to get to Fagels. I mean, Fagels is popular for a reason and was a bestseller for many, many years. There's a reason you were in high school along with a gazillion other people. I think there are ways that Fagels is constantly drawing on previous translators. So I think it's notable that Fitzgerald uses Sing. So of course, Fagels is going to cannibalize on that and use Sing too, even though the Greek doesn't say Sing. So there's a way that translators can be looking back at each other rather than necessarily coming up with a new way of telling it.

31:22But I also think Fagels does do a new way of telling it in the ways that he very much modernizes and Americanizes. I mean, to me, it's a very, very domesticizing translation, the Fagels translation. So, for instance, in what you just read, the introduction of time and again, which is like a modern American cliche, right? Time and again, these things keep on happening. There's no word equivalent to time, no word equivalent to again. There's a sense of multiplicity, but it just doesn't actually say time and again. And there isn't a sort of modern American cliche idiom in there.

31:59Derek Thompson: It's poetic and it's chatty at the same time. It's poetic and chatty at the same time. It's sort of bombastic, but also very colloquial. And I think that's that sweet spot that Fagels manages to achieve. Yeah. And then finally, yours. Tell me about a complicated man, Muse, who was long so... And now let's do yours.

32:23Derek Thompson: It's the most legible of all of them, which is the funniest. Well, maybe we'll keep that or maybe we'll cut it. Tell me about a complicated man, Muse, who was lost so long and fled so far when he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. and how he saw and understood so many people and so many places and suffered so much in his heart at sea as he was struggling to save his life and bring his men back home. Two things that occurred to me before you tell me what occurred to you when you wrote it. One is there's a modern, plain is the wrong term, but there's a vernacular to it. I am not reading an attempt to do book of Hebrews poetry for a 21st century audience.

33:10Derek Thompson: I am reading someone who wants to speak to a 21st century audience in the language that a 21st century audience would understand. But there's also meter and there's alliteration. And so there's this interplay, it seems, between vernacular and the poetic. And so even as it sounds maybe like I'm telling you, talking to you as if I'm asking any question about, you know, a menu or describing the sky, there's also this alliteration which calls in poetry. I'd love you to tell me where I got that wrong. And also, you are well known for having chosen this word complicated for the first sentence of the poem, which is not many-turny, which I think is maybe the direct translation of polytropone.

33:52Derek Thompson: Nobody, I think, has gone with many-turny because it would be pretty bad. It's not many-turny. It's not man of twists and turns. It's not resourceful. It's complicated, which is a word that someone in 2026 might hear every day. Tell me about how you wrestled with that word, complicated, and how many nights that adjective kept you awake. Yeah, I love the way you described what— you're absolutely right about what I'm going for in terms of I want there to be very marked poetic qualities to the language because there are in the original, which includes traditional meter and alliteration. So I hope you could sort of hear polutropon, pola, planksere.

34:34So I'm trying to echo the feathers, this illiterative quality to the poetics of the original. But that also there's a straightforwardness to the syntax and there's a straightforwardness to at least some of the word choices like andra, moi, man, me. Those are not difficult words in archaic or classical Greek. And I think to make them more difficult or more vocabulary-ish in English is adding a different kind of poetics. And I think quite modern idea that poetic has to mean super fancy, which I don't think is how the ancient Greeks necessarily thought about what is poetic. And it also isn't how people necessarily thought about what is poetic, you know, in other eras of Anglophone poetry.

35:16I mean, I tend to think that like so many translation choices, you're always wrestling with something that's fundamentally impossible. And so there's always this, I mean, I think all the time about how democracy is the best, is the worst ever political system, except for all the others. I think complicated is the worst choice, except for all the others. In so far as the original is a real word. It's not of twists and turns. I have no idea what that is. Or a man of far journeys. I have no idea what that is. It's not really English. Complicated, as you say, is an actual word. The fact that we have uses of this word in later Greek writers, including a reference to Hermes as also polytropos, but it's also used in later Greek prose.

36:09It's used to apply to situations, to diseases. Plato has a whole really interesting discussion of how the truthfulness and straightforwardness of Achilles contrasts with the complicatedness or the polytropia of Odysseus. So Plato's writing prose and clearly has an idea that this has potentially, by his value system, could be a little bit negative, but maybe not entirely. So it shouldn't be just, yay, our great guy, because that doesn't seem to be how ancient people read that word. But at the same time, it is a single four-syllable word that I want to fit into a meter, because the original is a single four-syllable word.

36:50I mean, as I was lying awake at 3 a.m., I was constantly thinking, is there a way to do it in the ways that many, many translators have done? Where I'm like, I can't do a single word. There is no single word that is exactly the same as this. So I have to do a subordinate clause. I have to do a man who was really twisty in certain ways and was turned a lot and turned himself a lot and was constantly wearing disguises and was reinventing himself. and you're going to get to the episode where he calls himself nobody. And he was also really smart. And the gods were sending him on this very twisty journey.

37:25And then let's get to the main verb sometime. But that's not actually a translation, right? That's just a comment on the word. And so in order to get to do an actual translation, I think I need to translate the pacing and the experience rather than write a whole commentary about it. So trying to come up with the least bad compromise that has something of the temporality of the original experience was very difficult. And I also just felt that no two languages have the exact same set of words with the exact same set of connotations. That's why this whole thing is difficult. I felt complicated covers a lot of the bases because it does hint at both, this is going to be a protagonist who will have many different layers and guises and turns and will take many turns in his journey, in his narrative, in this poem.

38:16And also it doesn't fully play all the cards, which I think the original also doesn't play all the cards. Whereas if I start with a really wise guy who was the hero, that doesn't have that sense of, hmm, I'm kind of curious and I don't know where this is going. Whereas if I use a word like complicated, we don't yet know what that means. And we're going to find out. You're going to have to sign up for the ride and stick it out for 15 hours. And by the end, you're going to know more about it.

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40:05Derek Thompson: Watch the sunrise through the available panoramic vista roof in the Lincoln Navigator. Picnic from the available Lincoln Splitgate. Then go somewhere new guided by the available 48-inch panoramic display guide. Visit your Lincoln retailer today or learn more at lincoln.com. Well, speaking of complicated, let's talk about your feelings about the Christopher Nolan movie. I want to announce a spoiler alert here. We're going to talk directly about the film for the next 20 or so minutes. So for those of you who don't want to hear a word about this film, despite the fact that the story is 3 ,000 years old, this is the right moment to hit the pause button before you buy a ticket.

40:45Derek Thompson: Let's start very broadly. Emily, what did you think about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey? It is a big spectacle, and it is a fun time at the movies, and my teenagers really loved it. And it was fun to go with my teenagers. It's a fun summer action movie, and it's also very much a Nolan movies. I mean, I personally really like Nolan. I very much liked his early work. I liked Following. I liked Memento. Since then, he's got these huge budgets. And I'm constantly wrestling with the feeling that he's a very good short story writer who's always writing a 400-page novel because he's got the budget for it.

41:21and that it's got this actually quite small-scale, clever gimmick about narrative, but then it's blown up to IMAX enormous scale. I don't think it's a complicated movie. And I don't think it's even about a complicated man. I think it's a quite simple action hero movie about an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero.

41:49Derek Thompson: Let's talk about The Care to Odysseus first before we talk about some ways in which I think the film was trying to do some things that your translation was trying to do. Matt Damon's Odysseus. What is the biggest difference between the Odysseus that you wrestled with on the page and the Matt Damon character that you saw on the screen? So Homer's Odysseus is a complicated man, Paul Luthropos, whereas Matt Damon in the film, he's traumatized Jason Bourne. He's an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. He's not that complicated. Unfortunately, he's not the talented Mr. Ripley in this film.

42:27The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated. He's also very smart, very good at problem solving, very crafty, very good at being in multiple disguises, being a different person, depending on who he's talking to. Coming up with clever schemes like telling the Cyclops his name is no man. and such that the Cyclops' neighbors, the other Cyclopes, will think, oh, if no man's hurting you, you're fine, no problem. All of that is erased from the Nolan movie. So there's no Cyclops trick. There's no comedy. Matt Damon isn't required to be intelligent, to be scheming, to be... I mean, we don't even see him building the Trojan horse, which I thought was an interesting choice to have this tech hero, but we don't see him doing his tech.

43:17We see him agonizing about the results of the tech. So I thought there was something quite, in a way, quite stylish about doing Odysseus, but don't make him too smart.

43:30My reaction when I saw it yesterday afternoon is that in your book, you say Odysseus is

43:38Derek Thompson: poly, this word that comes up over and over again in epithets about Odysseus means many. He's a prism of many sides. He is a man of many stratagems, of much wiliness, of much enduring, of much smarts, of he's a city sacker and he's a scoundrel and he's a family man. There's all of these parts to him. And one of the more important parts is his ability to disguise, to be this chameleon, to fit the shape of what is needed for him to get from that island back to the ship or that ship back to the island. And it was interesting to me because there is a role that Matt Damon has very, very famously played, which is Politropos, which is many-sided.

44:15Derek Thompson: In 1999, the talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon lied and lied and lied his way toward the upper class, even when it meant having to, spoiler alert, also commit some atrocities on the high seas. this performance is not that this this is a Matt this is a Matt Damon performance that is a a virtuous and at the end very guilt laden warrior who is a classic leader of men from the first minute to the 190th minute or whatever and that is a representation of the Odyssey, but it is not the Odysseus that I read in the poem. It is Nolan's Odysseus, not Homer's. Is that a fair recapitulation of what you're trying to say?

45:09Absolutely, yes. I mean, I completely agree with you. When the casting was announced, it was Ripley that gave me hope in terms of where might this go with a Matt Damon as Odysseus. But you're absolutely right that it's a Nolan reinvention. And of course, Nolan is completely within his rights to reinvent in whatever way he sees fit. It's not like it's easy to cram the whole Odyssey into three hours and make this amazing ancient epic poem into a Hollywood spectacle. You're never to be going to leave things out. You're never to be going to make choices. And of course, if we look at the longer tradition, Virgil's version of cruel Ulysses is not the same as Homer's heroically, gloriously scheming Odysseus.

45:54There have been reinventions of this character and this story for many, many hundreds of years, and Nolan won't be the last to do that. Is it possible

46:05Derek Thompson: that the Homeric Odysseus is unfilmable for one of two reasons? Reason number one being that there's a tolerance for ambiguity in the poem that doesn't exist in the assumed audience for Hollywood blockbusters. And so Matt Damon's Odysseus is a clearer hero who experiences modern guilt for which we feel a modern pity rather than this ambiguous character of many faces who's more like a talented Mr. Ripley who also wants to go home to his beloved wife. But then also number two, again, this was written 3 ,000 years ago when attitudes toward women and attitudes toward slaves and attitudes toward a warrior culture and killing people and glory above almost all else, not to even mention a relationship with a panoply of gods who no longer exist in anyone, any modern person's sense of how the universe works, that its virtues, its morals, its cosmology is completely different.

47:09Derek Thompson: And therefore it would be like kind of insane for Christopher Nolan to accept$250 million from a studio and spend it on a man whose values are utterly unrecognizable to an American audience. Is there a way in which Homer's Odysseus has a set of values that, if properly put into film, would be somewhat alien and even horrifying to a modern American audience? I think they would be, but I also would kind of dispute the idea that all films, as opposed to a summer blockbuster, are incapable of conveying ambiguity. I mean, we already just talked about Patricia Highsmith and the talented Mr. Ripley. Modern culture, and including modern TV and modern cinema, actually has a great many ambiguous kind of bad guy heroes.

48:00I mean, we've all watched Breaking Bad. We've all watched, you know, the age of peak TV. Tony Soprano. Tony Soprano. we're in the age of these gangster, conman, anti-hero representations in a lot of serious pop culture. So it's not, I don't think it's the case that we can't tolerate representations of quote-unquote heroes who might be very damaging to their communities, their families through whatever their quest is. I think it's actually something that 21st century readers and viewers are very much interested in. So that was part of why I felt a little bit disappointed that Nolan was going for the easy idealization narrative as opposed to things that I think are very much available to a modern viewer if you trust the viewer to be a little bit, to be open to just tiny notch more complexity than this movie was allowing us to have.

48:56And then on the question of capacities for empathy or the social changes, of course, this is a poem, The Odyssey in Greek, that represents a society in which slavery is normalized, in which the dominance of the elite man over his household, including over his wife and his whole entourage of enslaved people, is completely normalized. And yet at the same time, the actual original Odyssey gives us real insight into the perspectives of those Odysseus enslaved, those he subordinates, those he marries, those he has sex with, those he interacts with. We get to understand how does Penelope feel? How does it feel to be one of those slave women who get killed by Telemachus, which I would suspect that Tom Holland's agent said, don't put that one in.

49:54But we get this sense also, and one of the things I did find frustrating about the Nolan movie was that we are asked to pity the warrior, but we never get a sense of those he kills are also human beings. I mean, that all of the Trojans wear masks as if they were robots. Homer never does that. In the Iliad.

50:14Derek Thompson: Except for the Zendaya character, right? The conflation of the girl who's killed in Troy with the Athena sculpture that's decapitated. I hope you had your ears blocked if you haven't seen the movie. Right? Yeah, right. It actually is maybe the most affecting and brilliant reconceptualization, I think, of the... Yes. Yes, so that she's, his conscience come to life. She's the one moment when we might get at least a little glimpse of what is the perspective of the victims. But insofar as she seems to have a perspective, she's influencing Matt Damon to go off and go back home and kill some more people who are presented in a cartoonishly villainous way.

50:49So we don't get the kind of empathy that I think both the Odyssey and the Iliad have of understanding that the Trojans are just as human as the Greeks. Polyphemus, the Cyclops, yes, he's a giant. Yes, he eats people. We don't like that. But he also has a favorite sheep and he's a human being. He's a big human being and he has some scary foodways, but he's not completely dehumanized. He's not a puppet. Whereas I think the Nolan film makes everyone who isn't Matt Damon into a bit of a puppet.

51:18Derek Thompson: There's at least two ways I think that Nolan's Odyssey respected the Odyssey that I read in your translation. One is the braided storytelling. You'll have a dinner meeting between Telemachus and Menelaus, and Telemachus will say something like, tell me about dad. And Menelaus will say, okay, sure. And then you have this incredibly vivid scene from Troy that unspools for so long that you forget that it's a flashback from a dinner scene. And that recapitulates, I think, a lot of the Odyssey, which is just constantly stories within stories within stories. And that braiding is something that works effectively in the film and is also something that Christopher Nolan does in many of his movies.

51:59Derek Thompson: I mean, Oppenheimer, for example, was three different stories being braided together and told simultaneously. And then the second is that Nolan said this. Here's a quote from Nolan that I found, quote, I wanted the world of the Odyssey to feel like a world that a modern audience could relate to. We didn't want it to look or sound like previous movies set during antiquity, as many of them take their cues from certain periods of art and music, like neoclassical painting from the 18th and 19th century Europe or romantic era orchestral compositions. We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story, end quote.

52:37Derek Thompson: That seems like something that if you just took that paragraph and like put it in your introduction to the Odyssey, I could imagine something, you having a similar goal to present a version that isn't a romanticized Odyssey, but is something both stranger and more modern simultaneously. And so I guess I wonder how you feel about the effectiveness of the film, A, at sort of narrative braiding and B, at trying to sound like something that was straightforward rather than gussied up in Shakespearean. I love that focus on the braided narrative. I mean, I think Nolan has also said that he realized belatedly that he'd in a way been making the Odyssey all his career.

53:19That he's always been making the Odyssey, but he didn't realize it until quite recently. But he's always had these obsessions with narratives within narratives and with stories that then get reinterpreted later, that you understand later that's what that meant. and the stories within stories mode, of course, comes directly from Homer within our tradition. And I really thought he was in some ways the ideal director just from that perspective of his real affinity for stories about memory, stories about storytelling, stories about time. In terms of the earthiness, I mean, I like the focus on trying to defamiliarize And there are ways that I think this film is trying to push back against the sword and sandals tradition of the Spartacus or the Cleopatra or even the Peterson movie Troy from 20 years ago or something.

54:17And it's trying to give us a different visual palette and a different audio palette with the lack of the symphony. So it's like a lot of very, very loud noises instead of the surging string section. In terms of does it actually feel earthy? To me, it kind of seemed like, okay, we're in House of the Dragon. It's faux medieval. I mean, I wasn't sure that it felt earthy. It felt very Hollywood and very TV-ish on the big screen. I mean, I like that he's trying something new. I'm just not 100 % convinced that for me it totally worked aesthetically.

54:58Derek Thompson: The discourse around the Odyssey has been interesting. interesting is one way to put it complicated is another way to put it from the right from from conservatives there's been a great fixation on the ethnicity of certain cast members like Helen of Troy an interest in the fact that the Odyssey is not a proper representation of the Bronze Era or the era of Greece that came just after the Bronze Era when the Odyssey might have first been written down. And it occurred to me that there's something interesting about that reaction because it's simultaneously reactionary. And also, I wonder if you agree with this, also somewhat modern, this idea that the Odyssey as a 2026 movie must be as close to a kind of documentary of 900 BCE as possible.

55:55Derek Thompson: And anything that isn't perfectly documentarian is therefore woke. And I wonder like how you think about that brand of critique that is now at least so frothy on the right, because it does seem to me both paradoxically like reactionary in its conservatism, but also like the kind of reaction that you could only maybe have among conservatives in 2026. Because like certainly in Alexander Pope's time, you didn't have a lot of people who were affronted by the fact that Pope just completely made up like the first two words of the first two sentences of his odyssey, because it was beautiful poetry. And, you know, what is good is what is beautiful poetry, what is modern.

56:33Derek Thompson: And so I wonder what you've made of the discourse of the right. I think in some ways, like so much online discourse, it's not that complicated. It's people trying to come up with narratives to explain or, quote-unquote, justify some knee-jerk desires to cast aspersions on or hate people of particular categories and come up with stories about why am I totally right to be consumed by online hatred? And why am I not an idiot to be wasting my life like this? Some people come up with these complicated stories to justify all of that for whatever reason. People seem to enjoy being angry sometimes, but I don't think it's particularly complicated.

57:16And of course, it's also historically complete nonsense and a category mistake. The Homeric poems are not works of history with footnotes. They are complex epic poems that were composed in the archaic period but have this folk memory of much earlier periods. They're a mishmash of different social periods in terms of their architecture, their armor, their social practices, the linguistic forms that we find in the poems. So the idea of getting back to the real Homer and the real Homer being actually Mycenaean And of course Homer isn't Mycenaean. There's no poetry composed in Linear B, which is the writing of the Mycenaeans.

58:02In any case, all of that is historically nonsense, in my opinion, as well as in literary scholarship terms, nonsense, because Homer was a poet, not a historian. The Odyssey is, in many ways, filtering pre-existing myth to make it resonate with its own time, with the Archaic Period, with the 7th century BCE, which is a time of proto-globalization, of migration of Greek speakers, of colonization, interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks. The whole question of can Greeks meld together and what is it to be Greek versus to be an Easterner or a non-Greek. And these questions about new technology with the new technology of both iron and writing coming into being in the archaic period.

58:44So new kinds of cleverness. And the poem is sort of wrestling with those questions and wrestling with Odysseus as this kind of culture hero who can straddle two pipe time periods. He can use bronze, but then look what he's going to do when he gets back home. I'm the master of iron as well. I can move from one time to another. I'm like the sun guard who represents time. I can stop time. I can go back in time. I can also go forward in time. And the Odyssey itself is playing around with time and history. So the idea that there's one time that we need to locate the Odyssey and let's make it historically authentic.

59:18Homer did not do that. I mean, the famous Boar's Truth helmet that appears described in Book 10 of the Iliad is a much older kind of helmet than the helmets they usually wear in the warfare, in the Homeric poems. You shouldn't, if you're going to be authentic, you need to make them all wear the same kind of helmet. So I mean, all of that fixation on why are they dressed up like Batman? You don't need to be authentic. You can do whatever you want because Homer was already taking huge creative liberties with time and with props and with language.

59:52Derek Thompson: Homer was an artist, not a historian. So I'll take a historian's approach to the work of an artist. That's as good a place to end as any. Emily Wilson, thank you very, very much. Thank you.

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