‘The Odyssey’ translator takes aim at Christopher Nolan again after inspiring his hit film
Emily Wilson, it seems, is not letting go of Christopher Nolan so easily over what she described as an “emotionally empty” adaptation of The Odyssey, which she translated.
In a latest essay in The Atlantic, the University of Pennsylvania professor, who became the first woman to translate Homer’s epic, doubled down on her criticism of the British filmmaker’s take on Greece’s tragic hero.
She particularly took aim at Nolan’s understanding of ‘Zeus Law’ in the movie, which, in his movie, the protagonist Odysseus violated by coming up with the Trojan Horse invention.
However, Wilson wrote, “The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift.”
Yet, according to the author, “But the film does not explain what ‘hospitality’ has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already [which Nolan’s movie does not depict]; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war.”
Wilson, then, drove her point home by stating, “If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands.”
Nolan, reportedly so far, has not responded directly to Wilson’s criticism of The Odyssey.
