We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light.
Homer’s epic has resurfaced most obviously through two major recent translations and two major films. British classicist Emily Wilson’s translation was published at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017, and not long before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Her alertness to the poem’s interest in structural power dynamics, including gender dynamics – themes she drew out in her introductory essay and public conversations about the translation – seemed to hit the political moment directly, and her version has become a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Another, by American literary scholar, writer and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, is due out this month; it will be the new Penguin Classics edition, a successor to the now 30-year-old Robert Fagles translation and, before that, to EV Rieu’s version, which he worked on during the second world war, while bombs fell on London.
Wilson and Mendelsohn’s translations, in some ways, are contrasting pairs: Wilson’s, in the English epic metre of iambic pentameter, is fleet, pared-back and exciting, foregrounding the rapid storytelling and thrilling pace of the original. Mendelsohn’s is much more ample; he has chosen a roomier, six-foot line that cleaves as close as possible to the original hexameter without losing the intricacies and force of Homer’s language. The result is more languorous: if Wilson’s Homer dashes, Mendelsohn’s spools out. Translation is a game of choice and compromise. By definition, a translator cannot carry over every aspect of the original into another language and cultural context. To read any translation, perhaps especially of a poetic text, is to read an interpretation, a poem that has been filtered through the capacities and preoccupations of another intelligence.
Mendelsohn has been preoccupied by the Odyssey for a long time: his brilliant memoir about teaching it was published in 2017. Part of the reason it is in the air right now, he thinks, is that it is “maybe not just postwar, but maybe post-ideological. It’s about a world in which all the old certainties have crumbled.” What he calls the “post-ness” of the Odyssey is, he says, “not just that the Trojan war is over, but that everything everyone counted on during the war, including the model of heroism that made the war possible, is now over”. The cover of his new translation is an illustration, clean and stark with the hint of a Japanese woodblock print about it, of a tiny figure silhouetted against the backdrop of mountains, sun and sea. A lonely man, an isolated man, set against forces bigger than himself.
Films are another form of translation, from one medium into another. It will be another year before Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is released, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus. One characteristic of the Odyssey is its curlicuing, looping narrative structure, which echoes the scheming, complex mind of its protagonist. The fifth word of the epic is polytropos, literally “turning many ways”: it is an epithet for Odysseus, carrying the force of him as cunning and devious as well as much-travelled, much-wandering. Wilson renders it as “complicated”, to carry the moral ambiguities; Mendelsohn goes with “who had so many roundabout ways”, hinting at a geographic as well as mental involution.
Nolan – who has form with narrative complexity, especially in movies such as Inception and Tenet – might be said to have a polytropic creative mind. It is hard to imagine that he will not want to dramatise the Odyssey’s sea-caked adventures: the hero’s entanglements with the Cyclops, the man-destroying sirens, the witch Circe – stories that are, in the poem, told in flashback by Odysseus himself, casting intriguing doubt on their veracity and drawing attention to the work’s own status as an artwork, a piece of storytelling told by another. But another new Odyssey-based film, The Return, by Uberto Pasolini, chooses instead to do something very particular with the Homeric text. Its screenplay, by John Collee and the late Edward Bond as well as Pasolini himself, strips away all notion of gods, monsters and witches; there are no seaborne adventures for Ralph Fiennes’s Odysseus, no tinges of Homer’s folklore and magic (or humour). Instead, it focuses all its attention on what unfolds on Ithaca, the island home where Odysseus’s wife Penelope, played by Juliette Binoche, and son Telemachus, await his return after 20 years’ absence.
That island is hardly an Aegean paradise: it is harsh, isolated, windswept – a bleak landscape that reminded me of Colm Toíbín’s 2017 novel House of Names, which is also concerned with the aftermath of the Trojan war, loosely based on Euripides and Aeschylus, and which is similarly shorn of the gods. When Fiennes’s Odysseus lands on his island, his battered, ageing, naked body is face down and near death on the beach. This is a departure: in Homer’s poem, Odysseus’s eventual return is goddess-protected, and he makes it home with a stash of riches; rightly suspicious of what might await him, he disguises himself as a beggar. Pasolini’s Odysseus, though, is truly a man who has nothing left to him but his wits and his stringy old warrior’s body.
What has kept him away for so long, in this version of the story, is shame – he has lost all the men who set out with him from Ithaca – and, we infer, war trauma. He has been living with another woman in a place that is easier to be than home; and it is not clear why he has returned. Above all, Fiennes’s Odysseus is, unlike Homer’s loquacious charmer, a man of silence, a man who rejects storytelling, whose life is hidden deep within himself. It is a bleak reading of the poem, but one that is in tune with our times; across the world soldiers really are returning home, changed and scarred in myriad ways, with stories they cannot tell.
For Pasolini and his two mesmerising central actors, the manner in which Odysseus and Penelope gradually come to recognise each other, in the fullest sense of the word, is anxious, full of mutual suspicion and suppressed anger, before a final, tentative deliquescence into tenderness. Perhaps the film’s most striking passage, though, is when Odysseus turns his arrows on the suitors who have been harassing Penelope and consuming his wealth. He kills them all, transforming his own house into a bloody battleground, and inducting Telemachus into the brutal codes of violent manhood. All of this is there in the original. The poem has been interpreted through the lens of war trauma at least since Jonathan Shay’s 2002 book Odysseus in America, in which the psychiatrist reads the poem alongside the problems faced by US soldiers who had returned from Vietnam – trauma that on occasion played itself out as outbursts of terrible violence.
Odysseus, then, brings war home with him. But in the Iliad, the Homeric poem set during the Trojan war, he is a very different character. Here, Odysseus is part of a collective unit, an ensemble player in an army. He is a merciless fighter, an excellent negotiator, an occasional spy; he lives by heroic codes. The Odysseus of the Odyssey, by contrast, is a loner, a man who disguises himself, who lies his way out of trouble; who dissembles so much that his identity may be lost even to himself, as Mendelsohn points out in his introduction to the new translation. When the Cyclops asks his name, Odysseus famously answers, “Ou tis” – meaning, No one. In a way, it is a comic moment: the hero has just blinded the terrifying Cyclops, so that when the one-eyed giant tries to summon help he yells to his friends: “‘No one’ is attacking me!”
But the moment also serves, suggests Mendelsohn, to hint towards one of the poem’s most profound – and modern-seeming – questions: “How do we know who someone is? How do we know who we ourselves are? What is the difference between our inner and outer lives?” These questions follow the character all the way to the end of the poem. The reader is left wondering: in what sense are he and Penelope the same people who said goodbye to each other 20 years earlier? “Although the goal is the reintegration into the collective, the family, the marriage, the community, and the kingdom, the poem never shows you that,” says Mendelsohn. “The poem ends on the brink of all that, but you actually never see him as part of anything, except as the subject of his own machinations.”
EV Rieu’s translation of the Odyssey, the first ever Penguin Classic, became a bestseller in 1946, its story of a returning soldier falling into the hands of thousands of returning soldiers. If there are things too full of pain to be looked at directly, the distance of myth can help.
The Iliad is the poem of death. Death stalks its lines, blood soaks it. Countless young men appear in the poem only to be cut down. Its hero, Achilles, scythes mercilessly through hundreds of bodies in an attempt to slake his grief and fury at the killing of his beloved companion, Patroclus. But at the heart of the Odyssey there is life, and survival. This survival isn’t pretty, or comforting, or dignified. It involves deep loss: of comrades, of home, of a sense of place, of status, of belonging, of identity – and when those things are restored, it is not certain, exactly, what has been regained. But Odysseus is alive. He is alive, he breathes, he goes on.
• Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of the Odyssey is published by Penguin Classics on 24 April. The Return is out now.
