The recent translator of The Odyssey takes the director of The Odyssey to task despite his claiming, apparently falsely, to have based his revisionist, anti-Homeric film on her revisionist post-Homeric translation.
Christopher Nolan built his entire Odyssey around Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, crediting her famous opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as one of his biggest points of inspiration going into the project. Wilson has now seen the finished film. Her review, a 4,000-word essay published this week in the London Review of Books under the title “An Uncomplicated Man,” is one of the harshest takedowns Nolan has received in his entire career, and it comes from the one scholar whose own work he explicitly built this movie on top of.
Wilson opens with something close to a compliment before the knife goes in. “I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation,” she writes. “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” That single sentence has already become the pull quote defining coverage of the piece, and it earns that status. It’s not a critic taking a shot from a distance. It’s the translator whose language Nolan quoted in press interviews telling him, in print, that she wants no association with what he built from it.
She spends the next several thousand words explaining exactly why. Wilson describes the overall experience of watching the film as “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display, and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.” She connects it to a pattern she sees across Nolan’s career: “As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget.” That’s not dismissive on its face, but the verdict that follows is blunt: “It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
She’s absolutely not wrong. And yet, as one of the most prolific translators of 2026, I don’t have to read Ms Wilson’s translation to have a pretty good idea about the nature of its flaws from that one single line alone. Translators have to make a lot of choices, and most translators tend to make what I believe to be distinctly suboptimal ones. Ironically, the current taste for revisionism to suit current preferences is very much in keeping with the translations of the late 19th century; the very accomplished and highly prolific Clara Bell, who translated Balzac, Casanova, Huysmans, Ibsen, and Maupassant, as well as by Louis Couperus, Georg Ebers, Benito Pérez Galdós, Ernst Haeckel, Pierre Loti, and Helmuth von Moltke, among others, became notorious in translation circles for making all of their books sound as if they were written by a late 19th Century Englishwoman.
In the 1950s, the academic craze for accuracy and literalism resulted in nearly all of the post-Waley translations being dry renditions that leave the English reader wondering how the foreign language novel ever became popular in the first place. The 1980s hit a high point with William Weaver’s translations of Umberto Eco’s novels, but since then, we’ve generally reverted to the older, more revisionist Bell-style standard.
My preference is to focus first on readability for the modern reader followed by non-literal accuracy. Which may explain why blind comparisons have regularly indicated that Castalia’s translations are preferred to the existing ones.
