Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, is getting a lot of attention.
And that’s a good thing.
It is being discussed all over social media and in magazines such as The Week, albeit because of Christopher Nolan’s spectacular new film. The film has now sailed past $1 billion at the global box office, which is not bad for a story that is roughly 2,800 years old.
I must confess something upfront.
Although I have known about Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad for most of my life, I have never actually read either of them.
In my younger days, I was more interested in Dante. I read The Divine Comedy and thought I was doing rather well. But now I discover that, compared with Homer’s Odyssey, even Dante is a mere pup. The Divine Comedy is positively modest beside it. Perhaps I have been reading in the wrong direction all these years.
The Odyssey is one of those books that sits somewhere in the foundations of Western literature. You know all about it without necessarily having read it. Odysseus. Ithaca. Penelope. The Cyclops. Circe. The Sirens. The long journey home.
It has seeped into popular culture so thoroughly that you can probably recognise half the story without having opened the book.
So perhaps I should do myself a favour and finally read it.
I have my eye on Richmond Lattimore’s translation. It is an old-fashioned choice, but that is rather the point.
There is currently a great debate about modern translations of Homer. One of the most prominent is Emily Wilson’s much-discussed version of The Odyssey. Christopher Nolan has said that her translation influenced his thinking about the film, particularly her opening description of Odysseus as a “complicated man”.
Wilson, in turn, has been spectacularly unimpressed with Nolan’s movie.
She has described the screenplay as “abysmal” and said she would be ashamed to have written it. She thinks it lacks much of the psychological, emotional and ethical depth of Homer’s original.
There is something rather entertaining about this.
The translator inspires the filmmaker.
The filmmaker makes the blockbuster.
The translator then tells everyone that the blockbuster is terrible.
And the whole argument sends thousands of people rushing out to buy Homer.
In fact, Wilson herself acknowledges the upside. She says the film is bringing audiences back to cinemas and getting people interested in The Odyssey again.
So perhaps Christopher Nolan should simply accept the criticism and take the victory.
He has probably got people reading Homer.
So what is The Odyssey actually about?
Well, as I understand it, the basic proposition is surprisingly simple.
A man wants to go home.
Odysseus is the king of Ithaca and has been away fighting in the Trojan War. The war itself has lasted ten years. Then, just to make things difficult, it takes him another ten years to get home.
Twenty years.
Imagine leaving home for twenty years and then expecting everything to be exactly as you left it.
It isn’t.
While Odysseus is wandering around the Mediterranean having a remarkably difficult time of it, his wife Penelope is waiting in Ithaca with their son, Telemachus.
And there is a problem.
A large crowd of suitors has moved into the household, eating the food, drinking the wine and attempting to persuade Penelope to marry one of them.
Odysseus, meanwhile, encounters some of the best-known characters in mythology.
There is the Cyclops.
There is Circe.
There are the Sirens.
There are monsters, storms, shipwrecks, temptations and various other obstacles standing between the hero and his front door.
It is, in other words, an extremely long commute.
Eventually Odysseus gets home, disguised as a beggar, and discovers that his household has been thoroughly taken over.
What follows is not exactly a gentle domestic reunion.
And that, roughly speaking, is the story.
It isn’t really a novel. The Odyssey is an epic poem. It belongs to an oral poetic tradition and was composed in dactylic hexameter, the metre used for Greek epic poetry.
That is one reason translations matter.
You are not simply translating a story. You are trying to carry across something that was designed to be heard as poetry.
And Homer is not quite the straightforward historical character we might imagine.
We don’t know very much about him.
We don’t even know for certain whether “Homer” refers to a single historical poet in the modern sense. The poems emerged from a long oral tradition, and the figure of Homer has acquired almost as much mythology as his characters.
What we do know is that the Iliad and Odyssey became enormously influential works of literature.
Their influence is difficult to overstate.
The wandering hero. The long journey. The return home. The dangerous encounters along the way. The temptation to abandon the journey. The struggle between identity and circumstance.
We have been telling versions of them for nearly three thousand years.
And then along comes Hollywood
This is where I find the current Odyssey excitement rather wonderful.
A filmmaker has taken one of the oldest stories in Western literature and turned it into a gigantic cinematic event.
People are arguing about it.
Academics are arguing about it.
Translators are arguing about it.
Film critics are arguing about it.
And audiences are buying tickets.
Meanwhile, Homer is sitting quietly in the corner, having been around for considerably longer than all of them.
The $1 billion box office is almost beside the point.
The really interesting thing is that people are talking about Homer again.
And perhaps that is what great art does. It disappears for a while, gets buried under everything else, and then somebody comes along and reminds us that it was there all along.
I haven’t seen Nolan’s Odyssey yet.
And, rather embarrassingly, I haven’t read Homer’s either.
So I may be about to correct both omissions.
I think I’ll start with Lattimore.
As for the great argument about modern translations, I’ll leave that to the experts.
I have no particular interest in joining it.
This too shall pass.
Homer probably won’t.
