Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers
Since the fifteenth century, most adaptations of Homer have taken the form of translation, which has never been easy. Homer wrote a very long line of poetry—dactylic hexameter, with its six beats, and as many as seventeen syllables. Daniel Mendelsohn, the most recent translator of the Odyssey, preserves that scheme, writing a detailed, luxuriant, often beautiful line. Nolan, however, has seized on Emily Wilson’s celebrated 2017 translation. As poetry, some readers may prefer Mendelsohn’s version, but for a movie made now Wilson’s seems the natural choice. She compresses the poem by about thirty per cent, writing a much shorter line, and produces a version—the one I’ve been quoting—that is direct, clear, tough-minded, even bracing.
Wilson strips away the heraldic formality of earlier translations and brings the dialogue closer to contemporary speech, in ways Nolan has reportedly drawn on. The dialogue in Homer adaptations has always been an excruciating problem for filmed adaptations. The story is legendary, and told in verse; if the characters onscreen speak to one another in Jersey Shore or Standard Southern British, say, they bury the project in absurdity. It’s a Scylla and Charybdis affair: speech that is grand and stately is laughable on camera; speech that is too present-day comes off as a “Saturday Night Live” parody.
Wilson also makes plain the power and property arrangements of Greek “palace societies,” like Ithaca. She calls the housemaids in Odysseus’ palace “slaves.” Ithaca a slave society! However modernized in language and attitude, the Odyssey can never be carried fully into our world. It remains distant from us in its insistence on hospitality as an absolute moral commandment, and in its extreme ruthlessness in war, where victorious armies kill the defeated men and carry off the women and children. And, of course, in the literature of the West, the Iliad and the Odyssey unfurl the proud banner of patriarchal order.
Consider, among other things, the inequality of pleasure. On the island of Aeaea, Odysseus encounters “beautiful, dread Circe,” a minor goddess with pharmaceutical powers. She drugs his men and turns them into pigs. Odysseus makes a bargain with her: if she swears not to destroy his manhood, and if she turns the swine back into men, he will join her in bed. Which he does, for a year, while the men sit around feasting. Later, he lands on the luscious island of Ogygia, where the nymph-goddess Calypso reigns amid alder, poplar, and scented cypress. It is the most sensual episode in the poem: “A ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes, was stretched to coil around her cave.” Odysseus spends seven years under Calypso’s spell. When we see him near the end of his captivity, in his twentieth year away from home, he is sitting on the shore, where he “wept sweet life away, in longing to go back home, since she no longer pleased him.” Yet he still performs dutifully at night.
The enthralled husband enjoys the sexual companionship of women, while Penelope remains chaste, fending off the suitors with tricks and sheer denial. Homer approves equally of the man’s satisfactions and the woman’s chastity. But is it cynical to wonder how badly Odysseus wants to get home? Is it implausible that Penelope is more than a little inconvenienced by her years of celibacy? In “Ulysses,” Kirk Douglas looks miserable when he is captured by Circe, and his misery is deepened by the movie’s one smart idea: Circe and Penelope are played by the same beautiful actress, Silvana Mangano. Douglas looks tormented, though he does give in. It is hard for an actor to convey dismay and delight at the same time. Will Matt Damon suffer in his captivity, or enjoy it? Suffering in bed might look strange, even perverse.
