I’m fortunate to live close to one of the 41 theaters worldwide that are able to project an IMAX 70 mm print, the painstaking format Christopher Nolan chose for his new version of The Odyssey. As I wait for my reserved ticket date, I’ve been thinking back to my undergraduate reading of Homer’s poem. And I finally read Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, which gives the goddess a life and a self beyond the Odysseus story.
All this renewed attention brings me back to one of the questions I keep asking on this platform: who is given the space to tell a story, and who is not?
My first Odyssey reading was Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation. Fitzgerald opens his translation by characterizing Odysseus as “a man skilled in all ways of contending,” an admiring line translating a single Greek word, polytropos. Later in this version of the poem, when Odysseus and his son Telemachus execute the household women who had slept with the suitors, women the original Greek refers to as dmoai meaning subdued or overpowered, Fitzgerald makes the authorial choice to refer to them as “sluts.”
Homer’s telling gives Odysseus another kind of authorial control. Odysseus survives his ordeal largely by constructing identities, such as telling the Cyclops his name is Nobody. He narrates his adventures at a banquet with the Phaeacians, an audience he needs to win over so that they will help him get home, authoring a heroic identity by being deliberate about his storytelling. And finally, in order to be stealthy when returning home to deal with a house full of suitors, he disguises himself as a beggar.
Penelope, while she waits for her husband’s return from the war and its aftermath, weaves a funeral shroud by day and unravels it by night to fend off the conclusion of a story the suitors are trying to force on her. Just between these two characters, Odysseus and Penelope, the poem is already a study in who gets to shape a narrative and how, and Fitzgerald’s translation is only one version.
Nolan has reportedly cited Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which begins from a different premise than that of Fitzgerald’s. Wilson opens the poem with a fresh take on that word polytropos:
“Tell me about a complicated man.”
And where Fitzgerald’s version calls the executed women “sluts,” Wilson identifies them as “slaves,” changing the moral tone of that scene in a single word.
These two versions were created more than half a century apart. Each choice decides what kind of characters, what kind of violence, and what kind of adventure become available to us in English. The poem does not change. What changes is who claims the job of bringing it to us, and when.
Translation is one kind of power over a story. Neglect is another. There are characters a story leaves in the margins until someone brings them to the center, and Circe is one of those characters. In the poem, she is authored as a threatening seductress who is dangerous enough to turn men into pigs and useful enough to spend an extended visit with. Then the ship sails on.
What Miller’s novel gives Circe, in addition to a fuller life, is magic that emerges from the attention and hard work of becoming a resilient self. In fiction as in real life, a truer story is always waiting to be told. We will see how the film’s Circe is portrayed.
What I gather so far about Nolan’s version comes from trailers, interviews, and early reviews about the film. Unsurprisingly, the Trojan Horse sequence has featured prominently in that material. It’s the image that has stayed with us for millennia, an act of brilliant deception whose consequences follow Odysseus for the next decade.
These versions don’t agree on what kind of story this is. Homer gives us Odysseus through his own performance, though even that depends on which translator is doing the telling. Miller asks what the world looks like through Circe’s eyes. And Nolan, at least from early indications, seems drawn to portraying in epic proportions the sadness and trauma of deceit, guilt, and war.
There is no neutral or definitive version of the story, and that’s one of the reasons the story keeps on living and shifting. The same figures change depending on who tells the story, who brings it to a given language, and how the rest of us receive it. Like our identities, our stories are not as fixed as we assume and can be constantly authored and revised.
I’m looking forward to seeing whose Odysseus this is, and who else the film allows to speak in full dimension.