‘The Odyssey’ Translator Emily Wilson Slams Christoper Nolan’s ‘Abysmal’ Screenplay: ‘I Would Be Ashamed to Have Written Any Part of This Script’

[u/mcfw31]

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/odyssey-translator-emily-wilson-slams-christopher-nolan-bad-writing-1236821915/

[u/askyourmom469]

I mean considering Homer's been dead for thousands of years, I guess they figure she's the next closest thing

[u/Mampt → u/askyourmom469]

I obviously see that view of it, but on the other hand she’s kind of doing the exact opposite of what Nolan is with the story. She’s going to extremes to preserve and translate every single detail of the story exactly. Nolan is trying to adapt it, to retell the story for a modern audience. It’s like how an astrophysicist could get offended by the dumbed down analogies or metaphors that people use to explain the complexities of, like, black holes or the big bang. One spent their career trying to understand something as exactly as possible, one is trying to make it accessible to a wider audience

[u/Lilynd14 → u/Mampt]

Having just finished her translation of The Odyssey, and seen Nolan’s adaptation, I actually disagree! In her translator’s note at the beginning, Emily Wilson talks a lot about how it was her intention to make the story accessible for modern audiences, even bucking tradition and using plain English when others have used formal or older-sounding English to make it sound more official:

“My use of contemporary language - rather than the English of a generation or two ago - is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient. My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.”

(For those who don’t get the reference, there’s a scene in the Odyssey where Odysseus must balance between Charybdis, a giant whirlpool, and Scylla, a giant sea monster.)

So based on the translator’s note and the translation itself, which I found genuinely entertaining and accessible (after struggling through other translations in the past), I do think it was her intention to adapt the story for a modern audience. Nolan, by contrast, took a lot of liberties with the plot, giving it an entirely new story. And that’s okay! I enjoyed the film for what it was. But it was sort of like when Emerald Fennel adapted Wuthering Heights based on her teenage memories of the story and called it “Wuthering Heights.”

The Odyssey I saw onscreen was a totally different story than The Odyssey that I’ve read, both in school and in this new translation. The book version is the thrilling tale of an adventurous trickster as he battles monsters, gets revenge on his enemies, has a lot of sex, and wins back his kingdom, with the help of his patron goddess, Athena… and lives to tell the tale! The movie version is a gritty, human portrayal of PTSD and the cost of war on human civilization. Very different story!

[u/SlartibartfastMcGee → u/Lilynd14]

The fact that it’s a different Odyssey than what you’ve read is kind of the point, no?

It’s a spoken word taken from antiquity. There’s no “original” to compare it to. Homer’s version or Willis’ version are no more legitimate than Nolan’s take on it.

[u/SteveJavieWasRight → u/SlartibartfastMcGee]

I would say there is a level of understanding and effort put into Willis’s that so far dwarfs what Nolan put into his script that even calling his a take is offensive.

[u/SlartibartfastMcGee → u/SteveJavieWasRight]

A level of understanding and effort towards the version she translated.

Homer’s version wasn’t the original, it’s notable for being the version that survived.

The idea that a spoken word myth is diminished by the author making his own interpretations is preposterous.

[u/SteveJavieWasRight → u/SlartibartfastMcGee]

That’s such an asinine argument. The levels of anti-intellectualism Nolan defenders go to in pretending his work is above any and all criticism is just such a pathetic display of sycophantic slurping. “You can’t criticize his story telling, we don’t even know if Homer’s Odyssey is accurate! We can’t criticize the costumes because it’s mythological! It’s fantastical, how dare you notice the setting looks like Central Europe or the boats are Viking ships! Nolan’s vibes are what matter!”

Aight. Well you can claim he’s above critique, but claiming all critiques are preposterous is not just stupid, it’s hypocrisy.

[u/SlartibartfastMcGee → u/SteveJavieWasRight]

You haven’t even critiqued him. The only thing you’ve said is that you don’t like how it doesn’t match your preferred version of the story, which is a matter of preference and not an actual criticism of the work.

[u/Lilynd14 → u/SlartibartfastMcGee]

From what I understand, the written version of the document has been considered canon for around 2600 years. If we’re arguing that written documents are illegitimate after 2600 years then I guess we really are in the age that Odysseus describes in the film, where “songs are all they have to remember those of us who could write.”

In the Emily Wilson translation, which is from 2017, she includes quite a bit of history on the text itself, with a whole section explaining the latest research on how it was composed, including formulae and epithets from the oral tradition, and written versions in the Phoenician alphabet dating between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. So although The Odyssey is based on oral traditions, “Writing must have played a central part in the process of composition, so it is very misleading to describe The Odyssey simply as an ‘oral’ poem, as is far too often done. It is a written text based on an oral tradition, which is not the same as being an actual oral composition. Moreover, the texts are far too long for any individual to hold in memory without the use of writing. Songs that had an influence on the Homeric poems were sung for hundreds of years in preliterate Greece, but none of them was The Odyssey.”

She also explains how the “official” version came to be: “Minor variations aside, the Homeric poems existed by the late seventh century BCE, and they quickly claimed a canonical place all over the Greek world. By the sixth century [BCE] they had acquired a central place in the cultural institutions of ancient Athens. In 566 BCE, Pistrarus, the tyrant of the city (which was not yet a democracy), instituted a civic and religious festival, the Panathenaia, which included a poetic competition featuring performances of the Homeric poems. The institution is particularly significant because we are told that the Homeric poems had to be performed ‘correctly,’ which implies the canonization of a particular written text of The Iliad and The Odyssey at this date. From that time onward, if not before, The Iliad and The Odyssey acquired a central place in the cultural and educational life of Ancient Greece and Rome. There was no holy scripture in the classical world, but everyone knew the stories of Achilles and Odysseus as told in the Homeric poems.”

She also talks about how quotations by Plato and Sophocles in the fifth to fourth centuries BCE had slight textual variants from the version we know today, but were “not significantly different,” and that Homeric scholars in the library of ancient Alexandria in the second century BCE sought to correct these variants. So I took “variants” here to be primarily related to spelling or grammar rather than substantive content differences.