'Odyssey' translator Emily Wilson rips apart film, says she'd be 'ashamed to have written' script

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” published in 2017 served as inspiration to Christopher Nolan when crafting his blockbuster adaptation of the nearly 2,800-year-old poem, has some thoughts on the film.In a biting missive for the London Review of Books, the British American classicist dissected Nolan’s work with a scalpel so sharp that he may need to borrow some of Matt Damon’s armor to read it all the way through.

Last fall, the acclaimed director quoted Wilson’s translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story.“I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,’” he said.

“The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me.He’s not just a soldier.

He’s an amazing strategist, a very wily person.”Wilson, although admittedly “humbled” by the nod from the filmmaker, wrote: “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”A professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson has also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer’s “Iliad.” In her takedown of the film, she likens Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones” and says that, by the end, she “almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.”Earlier this month, The Times’ film critic, Amy Nicholson, wrote that “Nolan has sacrificed Odysseus himself to serve his own needs, scrapping the character’s prickly personality to Trojan-horse a message about how empires collapse....

Aghast at the ways of men, he’s dug his own Circe-like fingers into Homer to manipulate the tale into a moralistic ‘Oppenheimer’ prequel.”Wilson appears to share the sen...