The same year that Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has broken box office record after box office record, Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature at the age of 76.

Although Nolan and Carson differ in approach, medium and critical reception, both have sought to make works of ancient Greece new for a contemporary audience.

This creative accessibility is likely at least part of why the Nobel committee has seen fit to honor Carson’s “bold and inventive” body of work, which defies genre: Her poems, essays, translations, stage productions and collaborations often evoke another time and place but speak freshly and vividly to audiences today.

Translation made original

Take, for example, her 2019 staged performance, “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy.” In it, Carson overlays Helen of Troy with Marilyn Monroe in order to explore the destructive power of beauty. By revisiting an ancient figure blamed for the Trojan war through the lens of a 20th-century sex symbol, Carson invites audiences to reflect on the ways both women have come to represent glamour and tragedy.

Her 2015 translation of the play “Antigone,” which toured internationally, hews closer to Sophocles’ original. Yet her........

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