Greek myths keep finding new life, and this weekend The Odyssey gets the Christopher Nolan treatment.
Tom Roach, a history and literature professor at Bryant University, says Homer’s epic still hits a nerve because of what sits at its centre: a person far from home trying to get back.
“We want this hero to find his way home, we identify with him, we root for him,” Roach tells The Current. “With any luck, the film might encourage audiences to identify with the homeless, with the wanderers, with those who are sort of seeking a home after being displaced.”
The poem dates to about 800 BC, but Nolan has tried to make it more accessible through diverse casting choices and modern language. The script includes a few f-bombs.
Roach and Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the poem, say the story still feels current. “It really is a story about a family trying to reunite after a war,” Roach said.
The Odyssey begins after The Iliad, shortly after the 10-year Trojan War. Odysseus and his men then spend another 10 years trying to sail back to Ithaca, a northeastern island on the opposite side of Greece from Troy.
Odysseus is at times wily, selfish and courageous, but he stays focused on returning to his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus. Along the way, monsters, gods and goddesses keep delaying him.
“I love the monsters and the spectacle and the bing, bang, boom of cinema, but at the same time, these characters are very strange and very complicated,” Roach said. “I think one of the biggest challenges in interpreting this, translating this, bringing it to the big screen is to make it accessible.”
Roach praised Wilson’s 2017 translation, which matched Homer line for line, all 12,901 of them in iambic pentameter. He says it is also much more readable than earlier versions, though some readers objected to its modern language choices.
Wilson’s translation has been cited as an inspiration for Nolan, who mentioned her in at least one interview. Wilson said she is excited to see the film and believes Nolan suits the poem’s themes.
“Nolan’s films have always been about rivalry between men, time, memory, the theme of the man on a quest for a lost beloved, usually objectified and underwritten, woman,” Wilson told CBC’s Day 6 in a recent interview. “That’s going to be an easy theme to redo for the Odyssey.”
Wilson also said the poem speaks to immigration, grief, loss, war and community.
“It’s so much a poem about the world and about the place of an individual in a globalizing society and what does it mean to be either belonging in a place or be a migrant or an immigrant, which, of course, is a central theme in contemporary culture.”
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