CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Odyssey of the West

Boreas, the god of the North Wind, blows Odysseus across the Mediterranean. 4th-century BCE pot, Thebes. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.

Now Washington, like Xerxes, crosses seas, Assured the world must bow before its might; But nations rise beyond its old decrees, And build without permission – or its light. –V.P.

Now Washington, like Xerxes, crosses seas, Assured the world must bow before its might; But nations rise beyond its old decrees, And build without permission – or its light.

In the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson, the renowned translator of Homer’s Odyssey from Greek to English in 2017, made her views plain about Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. Nolan, who won an Oscar for Oppenheimer (2023), had read Wilson’s translation and borrowed from it. But Wilson felt that the interpretation had done an injustice to Homer’s original (‘I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script’, she writes). To be fair, Wilson acknowledges – as any translator would – that each translation or rendition is an adaptation. She did not like Nolan’s film (apart from it being a respite, in an air-conditioned hall during a heatwave). That much is clear. What her review, which has been widely read, circulated as well as criticised, does not interrogate, however, is not whether Nolan is faithful to Homer, but what Nolan is telling us about our own times.

Between his The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012) and The Odyssey, Nolan has made it clear that he distrusts concentrated power (government surveillance in The Dark Knight and political persecution in Oppenheimer). Homer’s saga was a perfect place to lay out his own version of the damage being wrought in our age: the world was held together by Zeus’s law or xenia (a sacred, reciprocal guest-host relationship), to treat strangers as one would expect to be treated, which Odysseus violated – as Nolan suggests – with the Trojan Horse. That violation, rather than his other smaller acts of disrespect for the gods (such as the blinding of Poseidon’s son the........

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