Odyssey Translator Emily Wilson, Who Slammed Nolan's Movie, Retranslating Homer’s Epic From Scratch
Emily Wilson strikes again! The University of Pennsylvania professor’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey was an inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie adaptation, a film that Wilson has slammed as “abysmal” in two recent op-eds that went viral. While Nolan’s film isn’t cited as a reason why, Wilson has revealed that she is translating Homer’s poem all over again.
“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told The Associated Press. “I’m about halfway through.”
As the AP and the academics they spoke with point out, it’s exceedingly rare for a translator to issue another translation of the same work from scratch.
In her first op-ed criticizing Nolan’s The Odyssey, Wilson said she would “be ashamed to have written any part of this script” and that Nolan’s film “lacks psychological, emotional, political, and ethical depth."
Wilson’s second op-ed slammed Nolan’s take on xenia, or what the film calls Zeus’ Law, and how Odysseus’s ruse with the Trojan Horse is depicted as the ultimate violation of it. (Xenia is the ancient Greek code of hospitality that requires hosts to treat guests with respect lest they be gods in disguise.)
Wilson called Nolan’s Odyssey “itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the ‘apparent magic’ of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies.”
While Nolan has not directly commented on Wilson’s op-eds, the Oscar-winning director did recently reveal what he thinks of amateur film critics.
Nolan isn’t alone in being held in contempt by Wilson. The classicist also isn’t a fan of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books.
“Many of my students love them so much. I think if I had read them as a child, I might have been a fan. They’re not designed for an adult literary reader, Wilson told the AP.
“I think especially in the first Percy Jackson book, The Lightning Thief, there’s very much an ideology of: ‘Here’s this white boy in America who’s going to gather the whole of Western civilization, and there’ll be a hero’s journey, which will really be the heroism of American exceptionalism.’ And I just think that is ideologically and historically quite questionable.”
We’ll keep an eye out for any other thoughts Wilson might share about Riordan’s works when Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 3 premieres on Disney+ on November 20.