I first read The Odyssey during the summer holidays when I was 15 years old. Parked under the shade of the mulberry tree in our Brisbane backyard, I would read, grab a few mulberries, then read some more, my fingers sometimes staining the pages dark purple. It was a secondhand Penguin Classics edition, translated by E.V. Rieu, its yellowing paper and creased spine, to my teenage eyes, somehow as ancient as the work itself.

Every time I read the Homeric epithet “wine-dark sea” – one of the repeated formulas that bear the imprint of the epic’s oral beginnings, such as “dawn, fresh and rosy-fingered” and “Zeus the thunderer” – I’d feel as though my purple fingerprints had somehow become part of the poem.

Between falling half asleep in the stupefying Queensland heat, or running inside to escape a sudden summer storm, I immersed myself in the glittering Aegean and its rocky islands, the stage set on which the goddess Athena attempts to safely usher Odysseus, her favourite, home to Ithaka. The whole time I read, I watched out for Kythera, the island where my mother was born, or Kos, my father’s island, wondering if Odysseus would land there. There was no mention of Kos, but he was blown off course past Kythera, which sent me into a brief frenzy of excitement.

Back then, there was no way I could have known that, nearly half a century later, I would be sitting in an IMAX theatre in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, watching a film version directed by British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan and reportedly budgeted at US$250 million. I’m no longer in the family living room, peering into the tiny black-and-white TV screen, watching Kirk Douglas strut his stuff as Odysseus in Ulysses (1954), a favourite Saturday afternoon rerun.

This time, the screen surrounding me is so large I’m inside the frame, immersed in a hyperreal, Bronze Age universe where Matt Damon plays the wily Odysseus, King of Ithaca, the hero of Troy who has fallen foul of Poseidon. Douglas’ brash grin is nowhere to be seen, replaced by Damon’s restrained realism. And there’s not a papier-mâché temple to be seen. Nolan’s film is a very different kind of Odyssey indeed.

I’ve always wanted to atone for my first, rather naive reading of The Odyssey, enjoyable as it was. So, as I prepared to write this essay, I resolved to try reading it, at least in part, in the original ancient Greek. I know some modern Greek – not as much as my parents would have liked – but armed with a dual-language text, how hard could it be? I bought a Loeb Classical Library edition and imagined I’d compare the Greek and English line by line. It would be slow going, but perfectly doable.

If any classicist is reading this, please stop laughing now. No, you can’t read The Odyssey this way. Some words are the same (well, sort of), but many are not, and the winding syntax is radically different, with barely a subject-verb-object sentence in sight.

Even so, what I could glean beguiled me. The pages of ancient Greek text that unfolded before me were like an ancient dry-stone wall, interlaced with vines and intricate decorative markings. They possessed a beauty I couldn’t quite penetrate, but couldn’t stop looking at either, making them all the more mysterious and uncanny.

Perhaps hearing it read aloud would help? Online, I found recitations of The Odyssey in ancient Greek. The sound of it was unlike anything I’d heard before. I could hear a music similar to modern Greek, but now harnessed to the driving rhythm of Homer’s dactylic hexameter. It belonged to a much more distant world, lost in time but still omnipresent, which only deepened my sense of curiosity and enchantment.

But, enchanting as it was, it was still largely incomprehensible. Reluctantly, I abandoned my experiment. This son of the Greek diaspora was not going to crack that particular code.

Over the years, I’ve read translations by Robert Fagles (1996) and Robert Fitzgerald (1961). While I found them enjoyable, Emily Wilson’s 2017 verse translation, which Christopher Nolan has cited as an inspiration for his film, immediately struck me as having a much greater directness.

The appeal of Wilson’s translation is hard to resist, not least for the way it addresses gender biases in some previous versions. The density of language that can make some translations such a battle for contemporary anglophone audiences has given way to something more natural. Overall, Wilson’s approach leans towards George Orwell’s famed windowpane, where language is made transparent so that it can foreground the larger meanings of the text. That transparency proves deeply immersive, like looking at a painting stripped of centuries of varnish.

But this approach isn’t without its risks. The Homeric style is meant to have a strong poetic dimension in its rhythm, musicality and patterns of sound. Would this come through as strongly as in some of her predecessors?

Well, yes, mostly, but in its own way. The scene that introduces the goddess Calypso in her cave is an example of where the simplicity of style and lyrical flight come together:

There sat Calypso with her braided curls. Beneath the hearth a mighty fire was burning. The scent of citrus and brittle pine suffused the island. Inside, she was singing and weaving with a shuttle made of gold. Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, and scented cypress. It was full of wings. Birds nested there but hunted out at sea: the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks. A ripe and verdant vine, hung thick with grapes, was stretched to coil around her cave.

There sat Calypso with her braided curls. Beneath the hearth a mighty fire was burning. The scent of citrus and brittle pine suffused the island. Inside, she was singing and weaving with a shuttle made of gold. Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, and scented cypress. It was full of wings. Birds........

© The Conversation