By Robert Royal
I don't often comment on films or – truth be told – usually care much about them. I leave that to those who do care and are much better at it. (See under: Miner, Brad.) Most movies seem, to me, to have a greater cultural impact than they deserve. I can't deny that they've replaced the kinds of fiction that once shaped middlebrow culture. So my lack of interest is a fault, in a way. But in a culture like ours, from which Christianity is increasingly excluded, when a film like Christopher Nolan's just-released Odyssey generates such mid-summer buzz – about a book almost 3000 years old – it's worth considering what's happening to some of our oldest cultural foundations.
So, given my adolescent obsessions with Greek and Latin, and the current cinematic excitements, I made an early trip to the theater this weekend.
It's easy to nitpick about film versions of the classics. Troy, with Brad Pitt as Achilles, took vast liberties (far too weak a word, in fact) with Homer, but was in my estimation worth watching and even re-watching in its own right. There's a substantial subset of Tolkien readers who cannot abide Peter Jackson's trilogy and what they regard as all its works and pomps. (I am not one of them and frequently revisit it.) Happily, Dante's Commedia is utterly unfilmable, though some foolhardy directors have tried.
Nolan has already been attacked for his mauling of several episodes, changing the arc of the story, obvious anachronisms, and non-traditional casting (a black Helen of Troy and "trans" Sinon?). Major blemishes, to be sure, but he's admitted he wanted to create something that would speak to an audience – and was perhaps calculated to sell. And as they already said in ancient Greece, "Even Homer nods." In the end, his Odyssey is worth a look, though it would be an abuse to call it Homer.
Besides, even in literary terms, there's been plenty to object to in most later versions of Homer. The 18th-century classical scholar Richard Bentley, scanning the translation of the great Alexander Pope (an English Catholic), remarked: "It is a very pretty poem Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." That's what almost everyone who has wrestled with Homer's Greek feels about translations.
The recent translators – Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald – are readable, but not so very pretty. Emily Wilson's much-promoted, postmodern, feminist-inflected version (Odysseus is recast at times as a villain) doesn't impress the present writer. It begins:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.
Ah yes, the Greek man, for millennia believed to be a hero, was "complicated," and wrecked a holy city. Her distortions of key elements of the story – Nolan seems to have followed her at several points – betray Homer, about which more below.
A joke used to float around classics departments about the insoluble question of the "authorship" of the Iliad and the Odyssey: "Homer didn't write them; they're by another poet, with the same name."
What cannot be disputed is that the "author" knew how to tell a story. (So does Nolan.) In the ancient world, it was said that the Iliad was the vigorous, martial work of Homer's youth. In his old age, he had softened, and turned out the magical, mystical episodes of the Odyssey. Modern readers tend to like the latter over the former, which is probably a reflection of how little we appreciate the armed defenders who make peaceful living possible, and how much we prefer merely to be entertained.
Still, those old epics speak to us, even decades after our educators made the fateful, perhaps fatal, decision not to teach texts like the Bible, Homer, the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Fathers of the Church, and many other foundation stones of our civilization.
Among their deeply human themes, the ancient epics are also notably concerned with "the gods" and the afterlife, and their interactions and importance for this world. Circe ...
