{"id":2509787,"date":"2026-07-20T17:55:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T17:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2509787"},"modified":"2026-07-20T17:55:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T17:55:32","slug":"what-does-the-odyssey-translator-emily-wilson-think-of-christopher-nolans-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/what-does-the-odyssey-translator-emily-wilson-think-of-christopher-nolans-film\/","title":{"rendered":"What does ‘The Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson think of Christopher Nolan’s film?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We can’t ask Homer what he thinks of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey<\/em><\/a>, but we can ask someone who knows it better than most.<\/p>\n

Emily Wilson, the British-American classicist whose 2017 translation<\/a> of the epic poem was one of the director’s inspirations<\/a>, was asked her opinion on The Odyssey<\/em> film by the Associated Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“I want to celebrate the fact that so many more people are aware of The Odyssey<\/em> and were brought back to the poem,\u201d she told AP. “But at the same time, I had the sense that Christopher Nolan was trying to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential to the poem.”<\/p>\n

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Nolan has cited<\/a> Wilson’s work as among his influences for the film, notably Homer’s opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man.”<\/p>\n

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\n Mashable Top Stories<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Granted, it’s nothing short of a herculean task to try and fit every last element of Homer’s 12,000-line poem into a film that runs just under three hours, despite that IMAX<\/a> screen size<\/a>. Nolan does hit the major plot points of The Odyssey<\/em>‘s 20-year chronology \u2014 the Trojan Horse, Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) sleazy suitors, Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men running into the cyclops Polythemus (Bill Irwin)<\/a>, the sirens, the Scylla monster, and the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) along the way \u2014 he leaves many myths deliberately untold.<\/a><\/p>\n

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For one thing, Wilson’s translation famously reexamined the role of women in The Odyssey<\/em><\/a>, like the characters of Penelope and Circe. And Nolan’s film does give women more agency than they’ve had in his previous work, as Mashable’s Belen Edwards writes in her review<\/a>, “Nolan makes sure to emphasize the women of The Odyssey<\/em>‘s complexities, as opposed to letting them linger on the sidelines or in dead wife montages<\/a>. Most importantly, he lets them be angry.”<\/p>\n

I’m going to leave the hand-wringing to the internet on this one (and it’s happening), but it’s interesting to hear scholars responses to The Odyssey<\/em>, a text that has been reinterpreted for thousands<\/em> of years through literature, art, film, video games, and myriad creative avenues. <\/p>\n

As to what Homer would think? No one can ever<\/em> know that, stop speaking for an ancient Greek poet on X.<\/p>\n

The Odyssey<\/em> is now in cinemas.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source mashable.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We can’t ask Homer what he thinks of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but we can ask someone who knows it better than most. Emily Wilson, the British-American classicist whose 2017 translation of the epic poem was one of the director’s inspirations, was asked her opinion on The Odyssey film by the Associated Press. “I want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2509788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2509787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/What-does-The-Odyssey-translator-Emily-Wilson-think-of-Christopher.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2509787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2509789,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509787\/revisions\/2509789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2509788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2509787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2509787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2509787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}