“I would be ashamed to have written even the slightest part of this script”: the translator of The Odyssey castigates Christopher Nolan

When Emily Wilson talks about Homer, fans of Christopher Nolan listen. The first woman to translate The Odyssey in English in 2017 delivered a reference work from which the director was greatly inspired. He repeats it and resumes his translation of the inaugural formula: “Tell me about a complicated man.”

When the translator, set up as a model by the filmmaker, undertakes to deconstruct her film by asserting that it is about“a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle […] with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth as a Bastille Day fireworks display,” it casts a chill. His review published under the title An Uncomplicated Man in the London Review of Books, quickly spread across social media, garnering widespread attention within a matter of hours.

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From script to casting

Emily Wilson recognizes in the film an undeniable sense of spectacle and a way of “hide from the heat for a few hours.” But she reserves her harshest criticism for the script, whose writing she judges “abominable” adding that“no character has a compelling motivation for their actions or words.” Before stating: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”. She still recognizes one merit of the film: that of having put Homer back in the spotlight.

Concerning the protagonists, the translator doesn’t do it by half measures either: “If only the human characters had received the same attention as the dog Argos!”, she writes, before directly attacking Matt Damon, whose Ulysses is not “neither complicated, nor cunning, nor truly ingenious” or exactly the qualities that define Homer’s hero. The female characters are “sacrificed” according to her. Her furious and brilliant Calypso becomes in Charlize Theron a smooth and featureless figure, while Anne Hathaway “has nothing to do but pine for Matt Damon”.

Joyce Carol Oates to the rescue

Christopher Nolan will console himself by reading the comments of novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who accused Wilson of speaking “in the foul language of the Maga partisans.” Sound “tone of disdain and superb haughtiness” lack of sincerity. She added that this posture was all the more surprising coming from the world of translation, where “all translations are, by definition, subjective and not equivalent to the original text”.

The novelist did not stop there, criticizing the translation of Emily Wilson, which she considers written for an audience accustomed to the simplicity of the young adult novel, while recommending another English translation of The Odyssey. She also defended Christopher Nolan’s right to reinvent the myth, recalling that previous adaptations had taken this liberty without it causing any problems.

With 3.4 million tickets sold in two weeks in French theaters, The Odyssey already seems to be a commercial success which also benefits the translator, as Joyce Carol Oates points out in her message in support.