“Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.” 

With these famous words, classicist Emily Wilson opens her groundbreaking translation of Homer’s Odyssey. For thousands of years, this epic poem has tracked the turbulent journey of King Odysseus of Ithaca as he returns home from the Trojan War. Now, director Christopher Nolan is bringing Wilson’s translation to the screen on July 17. 

To understand this story more deeply, NBN sat down with Professor Ryan Platte, a professor of Ancient Greek at Northwestern and expert in Homeric works. He has published multiple research articles on the appearance of horsemanship in Homer’s works, Greek lyric poetry and epics and cinematic reception of Homer. Professor Platte shares why the Odyssey still captivates people today, the complexities of translation and how modern audiences should approach Nolan’s upcoming film. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

From your perspective, why do you think it’s important to tell this Ancient Greek story that’s thousands of years old? 

It’s great timing that you ask this because I’m about to teach the Iliad in Greek, and we’ve got students every year studying it. First of all, I’d like to say students want to, and that needs to be sort of respected, and then we can ask why they want to. 

We made the Iliad the endpoint of our second-year Greek series and students often ready the Odyssey in the third year. We do this so that students have something to look forward to because so many of them really want to read this.

These are works that people have been revisiting for thousands and thousands of years. They don’t just exist in the past; they’ve continued existing and having meaning in sort of every era since then. The meaning changes depending on who is reading it or performing it, who is adapting it and who’s viewing the adaptations or using them. But they continue having lives, and these are big, important lives. I think that must mean that there’s something valuable in them. 

As long as these stories, and classical antiquity in general, are being engaged with and talked about and reused, then I think it’s incumbent upon us to continue studying the original so that we can evaluate and think about how people are using them. I think it’s true for everything in antiquity, not just the Iliad and the Odyssey. We have students read the New Testament in Greek, for example. I tell students that this may be very meaningful to you, depending on your religious upbringing, but even if it’s not, this is a text that you hear about constantly in the modern world and it’s wonderful to be able to not just listen to people talk about it, but actually go back to the original, read it yourself, and then think about how people are engaging with it. It gives you the power to kind of intervene in this greater conversation.

From what I understand, Emily Wilson was the first woman to translate this text and faced widespread backlash for using modern language and reinterpreting the text too much in her retranslation. This is the translation that Christopher Nolan is primarily using. What are your thoughts on both the Emily Wilson retranslation and Nolan’s decision to use it?

I really like her. I really like her translation. People often think of translations as much simpler and drier than they really are, but you often have to make creative decisions that might differ between translators. All translations will emphasize different things and sacrifice different things.

If you really love this text, then knowing a few translations is great. In fact, in the second half of my class about the Iliad, every couple of days or so, we’ll read a passage, and then we’ll look at a different translation. We talk about how the translator translated, what they have tried to capture in the original, and what they have let go, because you can’t absolutely keep everything. That understanding, not of just the text, but of the translational tradition, is a really important part of understanding the history and life of a text. So no one translation can be the be all and end all.

In general, do you think it is impossible to create a movie based on an ancient story that is both fully accurate to the text but also accessible to the audience? Do you believe Nolan should modify the story and cut out plot points to make the story more palatable and relatable to a modern audience, or should modern audiences have to do the work of reaching out and actively engaging the characters themselves? 

First, I’ll say that people have been engaging with this text forever, and every time somebody adapts it, they have to adapt it for their own audience, so they keep some things and drop others. That’s just part of the process of readaptation. I don’t think there is any single answer that everyone should do this or that everyone should do that. Every artist who engages with it gets to make that choice, and then their adaptation becomes a subject of inquiry itself. You can be interested in and investigate why a person chose to focus on a specific point in the story. They’re all just doing interesting things, and they’re all interesting in their own ways. 

The Odyssey is a great example of a text that’s incredibly complex. There’s so much that happens in it. You can’t possibly do the whole thing if you do an adaptation.
The Odyssey will be a really interesting film to watch because Odysseus has, at least in my mind, been better understood by later eras as special, maybe sort of a modern hero, like a hero of the mind. We sort of analyze him in a very modern way, but that requires leaving out some elements of antiquity, where he does some things that we might find awful, or at the very least, some things that might complicate that picture. Again, I’m not saying that’s wrong. It’s just part of the process, and it’s part of what always happens. I’m interested to see what Nolan’s take is here. Is it going to be that kind of cleaned-up modern hero? Is it going to be something else? I just don’t know, but I’m interested.

What is  your favorite line or section of the epic, and how are you hoping to see it be executed on the screen? 

My favorite, I suppose, is the whole relationship between Odysseus and Penelope when he comes back. They are kind of circling each other, and she’s interrogating him. There are ongoing questions from antiquity onward about how much she suspected it was him because he’s supposedly in disguise.

I’ve actually written on this, and I’ve argued that we know that the Odyssey existed in tons and tons of variants and versions in the ancient world, and we’ve lost almost all of those variants. I think it’s very likely that they were variants where she probably really did know it was him. It’s hard to tell from the version we have, how much we’re supposed to think that or not. I love reading that section, especially with students, because I have students think about what she’s thinking and what she knows and what might be signaled in that conversation.

Based on the trailer and what you have heard about the film in general, what are your initial thoughts in terms of what you are interested to see?

I watched only the very first one. I haven’t gotten to watch the new one, unfortunately. The first one looks really cool, but it wasn’t very long, so I don’t know what to think. 

I was struck, however, by how people were talking about the costumes and the armor. People were even laughing at it, saying it looks like something from Batman rather than something from the Bronze Age. I can see what they mean, but I actually find that kind of interesting. I think it would have been cool if they had decided to make Bronze Age armor. However, I don’t think that’s the only way to go. So seeing the costumes and colored palette and things like that also got me really curious to see what direction this is going to go in. 

Also, they are having actors speak in American accents rather than British. If you look at various adaptations in the past, most are done with British accents, such as Troy (2004). Some of my colleagues were remarking on this. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I’m kind of curious how it will affect the film.

Tell me more about your planned experience to view the movie in Athens, and how you think that might enrich your experience of watching the film. 

So, I’m going to be taking students to Athens this summer because I take students every summer. It’s just good luck that this film’s going to come out while we’re there.

I want students to watch that film in Greece because I think it’ll be fun, but also because it will give them a sort of nudge to think about modern Greece and modern Greece’s relationship to its own antiquity. It’ll be really interesting to see what dialogue emerges from that for students because, by the time they watch it, they will have already spent some time thinking about modern Greek history and culture from their courses. I want them to probe how the film tackles how the past has been reflected on modern Greece and how modern Greece reflects on the Greek past, which is a really complex question.

Are there any other films or television shows that adapt Greek stories or use Greek mythology that you think is particularly interesting or enriching? 

Honestly, my favorites are the ones that aren’t that literal. I love O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which is the most creative adaptation of the Odyssey I can think of. To the point I was making about translation, where you can keep some things, but you can’t keep everything, this movie is so innovative and so different from others in this regard. It’s the only one that located Homeric epic within traditional American song culture, but that’s intentional because filmmakers are aware of the fact that epics were themselves oral songs in the past. I think very much, in terms of reception, organizing the whole story around this element is really cool.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to watch this movie? In other words, what attitude and perspective do you think someone should have going into this movie so they get the most out of it? 

The answer’s sort of hard because I don’t think you need to know a lot about antiquity or the tradition of interpretation to enjoy this. I think it’s going to be a fun, really interesting film, even if you just come in with no idea what you’re in for. 

But, it could be beneficial to know not only about the text but also about the history of adaptation. More than any other story I can think of in the world, the Odyssey has an incredibly long, complex tradition of reinterpretation upon reinterpretation upon reinterpretation. Knowing anything about that background, having looked at a few of the translations, and having looked at a few of the adaptations can communicate such a richness to understanding of whatever’s happening on the screen. It’s just this really complex tradition of reception that the Odyssey is engaged in and at the center of in a, I hesitate to say unparalleled, but a really intense way.