The Odyssey in Translation

Many year ago I was able to read The Odyssey in the original, having studied ancient Greek at school and then university. I returned to the poem recently when I wanted to refresh my memory of it before seeing Christopher Nolan’s film. But I was dismayed to discover that my command of the language had become so shaky that I had to rely on a translation. I chose the version by Emily Wilson, which had received glowing reviews. Heading a phalanx of quotations on its back cover, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, called it a “masterpiece of translation – fluent, elegant, vigorous”.

But her rendering of the Greek bothered me from the very beginning. The reader’s first introduction to Odysseus is the word πολύτροπον (polytropon): I could imagine our hero as “various-minded”, as T. E. Lawrence put it in his translation, or as a man “of twists and turns”, as Robert Fagles put it in his, but Wilson’s choice of the word “complicated”, with its suggestion of the psychoanalyst’s couch, seemed to me jarringly anachronistic.

Never mind, I thought. I shall soldier on. But the translation became only more and more silly. The last straw was when, in Book V, the sea-nymph Ino asks Odysseus why Poseidon has created “an odyssey of pain” for him. This was a mise en abyme that brought the whole house tumbling down as far as I was concerned. From that point onwards, I found myself constantly comparing the translation to the original text in order to see what Homer had really said.

I regretted forking out £30 on such a disappointing translation, but there was at least a small compensation that some of its anachronisms were quite funny. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, the goddess Athene is described as giving him a “threadbare tote bag”: it conjured for me the vision of the words “I ♡ Penelope” stitched in its side. And when during the final showdown, Odysseus warns the suitors,“Playtime is over”, I couldn’t help think that I had already heard that line in some 1980s Schwarzenegger movie.

The extraordinary viral coverage of Christopher Nolan’s film has meant that Emily Wilson has popped up often in this or that interview. As I listened to her the other day in conversation with Walter Isaacson on CNN, I found myself thinking of that famous Billy Wilder comment that the best director is the one you don’t see. This is surely even more true of translators.

Helping to fuel Wilson’s omnipresence was a rather nasty review of the Nolan film that she contributed to The London Review of Books. With a striking lack of humility, she wrote: “I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

“Let she who is without sin...,” I thought as I read a long piece that, taking Nolan apart for the myriad ways in which he had supposedly failed to live up to Homer, was more eager to attack than find any sympathetic understanding.

It put me in mind of the fictional movie mogul Jerry Prokosch in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, who criticises the veteran director Fritz Lang for not following the script when he is hired to direct The Odyssey. When Lang attempts to defend himself, Prokosch insists: “Yes, it’s in the script. But it's not what you have on that screen.” “Naturally,” Lang answers. “Because in the script it is written, and on the screen it’s pictures. Motion picture, it’s called.”

Christopher Nolan has not made the definitive film of The Odyssey (how could anyone?), but he has made a fine motion picture. I went to see it in Oxford with an old friend from my university days. “Four stars!” we agreed.

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