theTangentSpace

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.
The ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning…

This week I finished the Odyssey. It was awesome.

Was I inspired to read it by the film? Sort of, I guess — I started it before I was even aware of the film, but I had other reading projects with more time pressure (essentially, two “book clubs” that aren’t quite book clubs, more on that in an upcoming post), so progress was slow. When I heard about the imminent release of this movie, it became a much higher priority. I’m glad I did becuase I was able to get much more immersed in it.

I had already read Fagles’ translation of the Iliad in 2019, so it’s not my first experience with Homer. But I guess I was just coming to Odyssey from a better place; I enjoyed it way more.

I went for Emily Wilson’s translation, the Norton Critical Editions version, which I believe has some revisions to the translation since the 2017 original. I chose that edition because I loved the cover illustration, and it was a nice compact paperback. I’m glad I did. Wilson’s translation is so readable, all the more impressive for the constraints she placed on herself. Homeric verse is traditionally in dactylic hexameter. A dactyl is 3 syllables^[1], although the last foot is sometime only 2, making a 17-to-18-syllable line. Wilson wrote the whole thing in iambic pentameter (10-syllable lines) and kept the exact same line-count as the original poem. It’s an impressive achievement.

Despite this, on the first reading I mostly ignored the poetic elements and read it like prose, which also works fine. Occasionally I’d re-read particularly pretty passages with a more poetic cadence, and there are a couple of times when Wilson herself comments in a footnote on her the use of a poetic device in her translation or the original Greek, but for the most part I read this like a novel. Wilson’s language choices are simple and direct enough to facilitate this kind of reading.

So, why read the Odyssey in 2026 with so many adaptations available? First and foremost, it’s tremendously engaging and entertaining. Despite the misery and bloodshed, it’s a swashbuckling adventure full of capricious gods, cunning schemes, and courageous heroes. Another reason to read rather than watch is that most adaptations focus on what is a relatively small portion of the text, which is Odysseus’s journey. But actually, plenty happens back home on Ithaca both before and after this part of the story.

One can’t help but be amazed texts like this exist. It is one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature, and yet it is so sophisticated. It features complex characters, a non-linear narrative structure, and an incredible thematic unity across the whole text. Before reading Homer, I knew the works were derived from oral tradition, which I instictively assume would feel kind of messy and “off the cuff”. But it’s not like that at all. It doesn’t feel like it happened by accident.

The theme that stood out to me this time through was loyalty. To a spouse, to family, to a way of life, to the gods. When we first meet Odysseus, he’s at his lowest ebb. His journey so far has been totally disastrous. All that sustains him is his loyalty. The loyal characters are always rewarded for their fidelity. The disloyal ones… uhm, not so much…

I’m already looking forward to rereading this when my “book club”-like commitments die down a bit — I have no shadow of doubt it will be worth it. This is a story that has survived 2 800 years for the simple reason that it is an absolute banger. Go read it.