CapriciousK

When I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey – where she made a point of keeping it the same length as the original text – I was shocked to realize that very little of it was about Odysseus’ famous journeys and adventures – the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus-Eaters, the Sirens, his men releasing the winds, Circe, and so forth. All of that is told in flashback, and all of that is 4 chapters out of 24. That’s right. They’re less than one-fifth of the text (in page count as well as chapter count). They take up a little less space that Telemachus’ journey to see Menelaus, which starts off the book and is not part of popular common knowledge of the Odyssey (when people talk about accuracy to the the text, the fact that this was included at all is probably one of the things they’re thinking of!)

The rest of the book – i.e. the majority of it – is the events that happen after Odysseys leaves Calypso. His meeting with the princess Nausicaa, getting help from her father, returning to Ithaca, everything with the suitors. Odysseus on Ithaca isn’t the conclusion (as it has been in most popular depictions and descriptions of The Odyssey that I’ve seen), it’s over half of the story!

You’re talking accuracy? You are never going to get an adaptation that distributes its time that way, and virtually everyone watching it would be disappointed if it did!

And the clincher, also the thing that made this translation really make an impression on me, is that Emily Wilson starts off Odysseus’ tale of his fantastical adventures, with:

Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies, answered:

This translation is implying that all the monsters and magic in his adventures could be Odysseus just making shit up. No adaptational divergences from the specifics of those adventures even comes close to the kind of earthquake that reading of the text is.

In terms of the history – other people with more knowledge have said this too, but it’s impossible to have a “historically accurate” adaptation of The Odyssey because the original wasn’t historically accurate! The most common estimates for when it was composed are around the 700s BC (though there’s certainly debate ). The original events that inspired it, if they occured at all (which is also debated) would most likely have been in the 1200s BC, and would have been far smaller scale in terms of number of ships, number of men, and length of time. Neither the logistics nor the technology nor the pooulation size of Mycenaean Greece would have been able to sustain a war of anything like the size of the one described in The Iliad. It’s transposing 700s BC-scale-wars (probably the scale of wars in the Middle East, like Assyria’s conquests; 700s BC Greece was only starting to have governments and writing again after the multi-century impact of the Late Bronze Age Collapse) into the 1200s BC.

So there’s no way to get historical accuracy. Put it in the Late Bronze Age, where it was set, and it’s out of step with the kind of war that could have existed at the time. Put it any time in the Iron Age, when that scale of warfare could exist, and it’s wildly discordant with actual historical events. It is fantasy. It’s kind of like the Arthurian mythos, whose faint historical roots are, if anywhere, in the early middle ages and whose knights-and-castles aesthetic is in the late middle ages.

Watching the Odyssey really supercharged listening to such. Especially coming at a moment where a work of fiction I've been working on for months comes to a break point so I can make progress on other things that don't require complete focus.

In no particular order,

Pillar of Garbage's, "The Odyssey: An Alphabet of Obsolescence"

Digs into (as you my expect) a, b, c's of the epic's history, how history has interacted with the epic, lore, context. Whether that's the wierd theory that the epic was set in Denmark, the scandal over the Pope translation, oral literature, neoplatonicism, Ulysses, etc.

Dig, "Was Homer a Historian? Archaeology, Troy, and the Trojan War"

Examines the ways that the epic has multiple viewpoints: the bronze age in which it's set, years of oral transmission, and the archaic period. Looks at the various sources outside of the epic to corrobrate or be in conversation with the epic.

Wine Dark Sea's, "Agamemnon, King of Men: The Glory and the Fall | A Tale from Greek Mythology".

Ah, yes, the Iliad's figure I most like to hate on. Ah, man of the cursed house of Atredes. Wait, no that's the other cursed house. Atreus. Video goes over the twists and turns of that cursed house. Well, the Aggamenon branch of it at least.

Captainmidnight's analysis of Nolan's Odyssey, "The Tragic Brilliance of Odysseus (The Odyssey)"

Really focusing on how Nolan's interpretation examines how when you/we live in a rules based society, how that society can break down when some people think rules don't apply to them.

Spectacles analysis of the role of Sinon in Nolan's Odyssey "The Odyssey isn't about Odysseus"

Trademovies Podcast "The Odyssey Is Woke. And It Rules."

Examines Nolan's Odyssey in the context of Nolan's evolving pov from Batman "Mass surveillance is fine as long as it's Batman" to "Nope, even when the hero does the thing, it's still breaking the world"

Ezra Klein "Christopher Nolan's Finest Trick | The Ezra Klein Show"

Zohran Mamdani just did what most politicians only promise. NYC's first city-owned grocery store is officially opening in the Bronx, and the location says everything: it's rising on the former site of the Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility, a place once synonymous with neglect and mistreatment, now being turned into a source of affordable food for the South Bronx.

This is part of a $70 million plan to open five public grocery stores, one in every borough, run under the brand "NYC Groceries." No lottery tickets. No cigarettes. No profit margin baked into your grocery bill. Just fresh food sold at cost, in a neighborhood where 77% of households can't afford basic necessities and grocery prices have jumped 30% since the pandemic. The stores won't pay rent or property taxes, keeping overhead low and savings passed straight to shoppers, an estimated $1,000 a year per household.

This is exactly why Mamdani won. He didn't run on vague slogans. He ran on specific, concrete promises, city-owned grocery stores, free childcare, freezing rent for stabilized tenants, and he's been checking them off one by one since taking office. While critics predicted chaos and failure, he's been busy actually building the infrastructure he promised voters, on schedule, with real sites, real funding, and real timelines.

Corporate grocery chains and bodega lobbies are already threatening to fight back, with one CEO claiming he can't compete with a store that isn't even trying to make a profit off desperate families. That tells you everything about what "competition" has actually meant for people struggling to afford dinner.

@hater-of-terfs I have a useful link for making CR Boxes.

He kidnapped his wife’s host. He violated the sanctity of marriage. Menelaus and Helen welcomed Paris as they would any Greek guest, and in return this foreigner bedded (raped) and stole the warlord King of Sparta’s wife.

This isn’t to say what the Greeks did to the Trojans was justified — on the contrary, both sides of the war, in life and in death, in the Iliad and Odyssey and extended body of spin-off works, lament that there was so much death and destruction on behalf of one woman.

But the war very much wasn’t just about Helen — it was about her kidnapping, and what it represented.

How could the Greeks let such a violation of xenia, such a barbaric act that spurned their most valued customs, go unpunished? They couldn’t. That was why the Trojan War happened. And you can’t ignore that, especially not in a retelling of the Odyssey, which is all about xenia and hubris and what happens when men do things they should not.

I’m a Classicist. Were Emily Wilson and I Watching the Same Odyssey Movie?

The celebrated translator used baffling arguments to flay Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem.

By Theo Nash

July 29, 20265:06 PM

Emily Wilson, like Odysseus, is terribly clever. In comments about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and in a provocative new essay for the London Review of Books, she does not come out and tell you that she did not like the film. She says watching it is a good way to hide from the heat; that her teenagers liked it; that the source material is so good that it cannot be messed up entirely. The best way to damn, after all, is with faint praise.

Wilson’s fame is closely tied to Homer’s Odyssey, a poem that the Oxford-and-Yale-educated classicist translated in 2017. Her version, celebrated as the first translation by a woman into English verse, has sold over 1 million copies and is widely assigned in classrooms. Like any other translation, it is an interpretation. Especially in a poem, how something is said is just as important as what is said. Wilson’s decision to translate into verse, and to keep the same number of lines as the original, preserves the rapidity and poetry of the original. But it also forces her to be very concise, and her unadorned language occasionally feels a bit blunt.

Some of her choices have attracted the derision of a subset of online right-wing reactionaries, but in truth they are mostly just angry that a woman has dared to interpret Homer. Their unhinged politics and violent rhetoric have made it generally difficult to engage in any sort of meaningful criticism of Wilson’s Odyssey or more recent Iliad. On X, I have probably spent too much time defending Wilson’s work against ideological attacks from those who feel that Homer should support their regressive worldviews. These people do not, as a rule, know the first word of Greek but opine with a confidence as savage as it is unearned. Contrary to what naysayers may believe, Wilson’s Odyssey has replaced neither the original nor any of the earlier translations that many continue to prefer. As a classicist, I appreciate it for making Homer accessible to a new audience.

It is perfectly fitting that Wilson, whose Odyssey translation—specifically the “Tell me about a complicated man” opening line—has been cited by Nolan, was asked her thoughts on the new film and, indeed, given vast real estate to express them. The resulting piece, a 4,000-word barn burner that briefly crashed the London Review of Books’ website, is unequivocally negative, regardless of the backhanded praise with which Wilson opens. Although “humbled” that Nolan has read her translation, she is blunt in her assessment of his creation: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” Wilson’s rhetorical climax has been widely circulated: “It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

The close attention to the text that informs Wilson’s translation is lacking in her reading of the movie.

That Wilson did not like the film is perfectly fair. But in the second paragraph of her review, a reference to exploding vehicles makes one start to wonder if she watched the same movie as the rest of us. There is the Trojan Horse, of course, and some dramatic shipwrecks—but even if we call these vessels vehicles, they are not exactly exploding. The impression that something has gone a bit awry continues throughout the review, culminating in several truly head-scratching moments for the reader. Wilson is naturally at her best when discussing the poem itself: This is a work to which she has dedicated years of her life, and she knows it intimately. But too often she simply criticizes Nolan for deviating from it, as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation. The close attention to the text that informs Wilson’s translation is lacking in her reading of the movie, and the idea that Nolan might have something new to say about the Odyssey is denied. At times, her critical eye is so insensitive that she appears to willfully be misunderstanding basic elements of the film’s plot, characters, and themes.

This is the case especially when discussing the role of the gods. In Homer, they take the form of men or women and are subject to the same pettiness and jealousies as mortals. As Wilson notes, this is hard to portray seriously on the screen. But Nolan’s decision to depict the gods primarily as elemental forces—warning rumbles of thunder or violent storms at sea—is not evidence that he has decided to “leave them out,” as Wilson puts it. Her interpretation is both overliteral and superficial: “There are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the Cattle of the Sun.” This is all quite impossible to explain in the absence of gods: They are invisible, with the exception of Zendaya’s Athena, but no less real for that. The theology is not quite Homeric; some have complained that it is too Christian. But it is very familiar to anyone who has read Sophocles’ tragedies, in which the gods act indirectly to ruin those who break their laws.

Wilson’s reading of human characters is similarly opaque. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, she complains, has “nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown.” The reasons, of course, are perfectly clear: He is her husband and the father of her son. Because a three-hour movie has less time to explore its characters than does a 12,000-line poem, Wilson discards this Penelope as “barely more interesting” than the totem Odysseus carries to remember her by. And yet Hathaway’s is one of the strongest, and most celebrated, performances in the film. Her Penelope is a prisoner in her own home, able to express her frustrated rage only in private to her son, Tom Holland’s Telemachus, in a scene that will surely be her Oscar reel.

Agamemnon, too, is reduced to “the one in the weird Darth Vader outfit.” This is a strange return to criticisms from before the release of the film, when Agamemnon’s oversized and anachronistic helmet was lazily taken as proof that Nolan was being careless with his source material, although he made no strict promises to ideas of historical accuracy. And yet, in a film that does not lack for memorable images, it is the silhouette of Agamemnon walking through the gates of Troy that may be the most striking. That the man inside (played by Benny Safdie) does not live up to the armor, and dies naked and vulnerable, is precisely the point. A film is not a poem: Costume design contributes to imagery, symbolism, and meaning and may draw inspiration from sources other than archaeology.

What Wilson most misunderstands, though, is the crux of Nolan’s film: that the Trojan Horse was a breach of xenia, Zeus’ law of hospitality, and as a result, all of civilization would collapse in punishment. For Wilson, Elliot Page’s Sinon, a young Ithacan who is killed presenting the vessel to the Trojans, is part of a “muddled subplot.” Why, she asks, does “the sinless Sinon [want] in on the scheme, if the sack of Troy was as bad as the movie wants to suggest”? But the entire point of the sack is that its horrors are realized only after they are already in motion—not, incidentally, unlike the bomb in Nolan’s Oppenheimer. And, significantly, as is made clear in the movie, Sinon did not know that he was part of a trick. It was his job to tell the Trojans that the horse was a gift, and to do that, as Damon’s Odysseus attempts to justify, Sinon had to be deceived too.

A gift—that is the key idea. Wilson objects that “in Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia.” Now, there is a Greek tradition that Paris’ abduction of Helen, an act that started the Trojan War, was considered a breach of xenia, and the war was therefore justified by Zeus. This is stated most explicitly in Aeschylus. But it is a matter of interpretation. Ancient Greek texts were free to emphasize, ignore, or downplay whatever elements of the tradition they wished. Modern films, of course, have the same privilege. Nolan does not linger on the circumstances of Helen’s departure, is ambivalent as to her willingness, and does not connect the episode with Zeus’ law. Just because an idea is familiar from Greek literature does not mean that it can, or should, be read into another text.

When Odysseus finally makes it home, the killing of the suitors is something less than a heroic rescue: The mess he cleans up is his own.

And, indeed, Wilson’s reading fundamentally misses the point that in Nolan’s film, it is the Greeks who offend Zeus by hiding inside the horse, “violat[ing] all that’s ever sacred between people.” Wilson notes that, for all the importance given to hospitality, “there is no Zeus.” But Nolan does not play so loosely with cause and effect. Odysseus’ journey, the emergent threat of the “People From the Sea”—everything follows from what happened at Troy. Even the arrival of the suitors in Penelope’s hall and their outrage against their hosts are not accidents but direct results of the breakdown of the divine order precipitated by the Sack of Troy, enabled by Odysseus. On second viewing, it is clear that this is operative throughout his wanderings: In the village of the Cicones, in Polyphemus’ cave, and in Circe’s hut, the relationship between guest and host has broken down completely. These are ideas from the poem, and it is surprising that Wilson so blithely claims that “strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered.” When Odysseus finally makes it home, the killing of the suitors is something less than a heroic rescue: The mess he cleans up is his own.

I get folks who don't like the movie for reason XYZ. Sure. That's how it is. But the overwhelming amount of takes that are "Nolan didn't interpret this work in the one true way, so it's bad," are baffling.

When I went to university lo these thirty years ago, every prof I had was all, "There's all sorts of academic lenses to examine a work, here's how." A degree in literature was about learning how to think flexibly.

I expect that sort of talk/thinking from, well, evangelical Christians saying the Bible means one specific set of things, every line is straight from God, translations are protected by God, and then they quote the King James Bible.

To see people act like a 3000 year old work of oral literature that was recited by who knows how many poets before finally being written down, and only a two of the (checks briefly) seven (or eight if you count the Telegony) survived, can only have a one true interpretation or way of being artistically rendered in a new format is...odd.

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

(you do not have to follow the beliefs associated with the style if that style has associated beliefs. The wheel curse does not affect anything like that.)

I want to talk about the harm caused by trying to police AI in creative communities, because things are getting really toxic. For the record, I dislike generative AI too. I think it’s built on theft and goes against the point of human expression. But turning online spaces into places where everyone is watched just to catch 'AI users' is hurting marginalized creators. Before you accuse someone based on a gut feeling or an unreliable detector, remember this: What people call AI 'tells' often look a lot like standard ESL writing. Non-native English speakers usually use structured, precise grammar or stick to common transitions because that’s how they learn the language. Accusing someone of using AI just because their writing sounds 'too clean' or 'formulaic' is often just xenophobia. This also hurts neurodivergent or hyper-focused writers. Many writers on the spectrum have their own structured styles, or they can write a lot in a short time. Calling high productivity or a different writing style 'robotic' pushes away the very people who make fan spaces interesting. The 'witch hunt' mindset does real damage. A community can handle a few cases of bad, AI-generated text getting through. What it can’t handle is a place where creators are too scared to post because a few loud voices are ready to attack them over a simple sentence.

AI models are trained on very structured, perfect grammar. So when a real person uses precise words, common transitions like 'Furthermore' or 'It is important to note,' or textbook grammar, detectors often say it’s AI. There’s a real ESL bias: studies show non-native English speakers get falsely accused much more often. Because ESL writers use standard words and sentence structures, detectors often flag their real work as robotic. One Stanford study found that 61% of essays written by international students were wrongly flagged as AI by at least one detector.

(Yoinked this from LinkedIn, genuinely interested in seeing how responses align with demographics) (so far it’s those of us over 35 being indignant but I wanna see how those fully plays out) (it’s cultural and technological history/memory, bruh)