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.
Thus begins Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. It’s been rolling around my head for weeks, inspired by the press for the upcoming film adaptation by Christopher Nolan.
I love these lines. And I genuinely love this book. It has everything I could possibly want in a story: a very sweet Bildungsroman and a ripping good hero’s journey; feasting and drinking; fasting and grieving; sexy goddesses and horrible monsters (and vice versa); fucking and sleeping; tricksters and seers; starlight and moonlight; men who weep and women who wield power (and vice versa); and all of the wicked people get shot in the head with a bow and arrow.
And such beautiful language—a feast of words and phrases—for me the text equivalent of peonies and ripe strawberries and the scent of rain after a hot day—such sensuous summer weather writing.
Here’s how I described it in an earlier Substack
It’s one poem . . . that conjures a millennia of stories told by firelight, shaped by generations of souls imprinting on bright, heroic images spun out of the darkness by blind bards, effusions of courage and resilience, erupting from the ash heap of history.
I was going to begin this essay by saying something like, is this not just the most spectacular opening for a story?!
But in typing it out, I realized that maybe the beauty of these lines might not be as obvious to everyone as they are to me. A complicated man? Who suffered, felt pain, and failed? And all of his men died? What?
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So what is it about this opening that makes me feel like the music of the world has started playing?
It’s the idea that this hero—this man whose name will soon be in IMAX-sized letters in a theater near you, 3000 years after he (theoretically) walked the earth, was a complicated guy who let a lot of people down and struggled mightily just to get back to the ordinary human baseline of having a home and a family.
I like this idea because I also am a complicated human who has let a lot of people down and have struggled to get to—and hold on to —the ordinary baseline of home and family.
It makes me a lil bit weepy, if I am honest, the idea that the Muses can spin an epic tale about someone who’s as fucked up and confused as the rest of us. If this is true, than what else do we even need? If the necessary quality of heroism is closer to struggle mightily than be great at everything then maybe I, too, can aspire to hear the sirens singing before the human voices wake me and I drown.
We know, if we think about it for half a second, that the difference between a hero and and ordinary mortal can be measured in factors of endurance and resilience more than anything else. But it’s so easy to make our heroes into unattainable specimens of perfection. It happens so quickly: one minute we are watching an unbelievably goofy video of some random guy named Zohran Mamdani spitting rhymes from a halal cart, wearing only an apron, and the next we are tearing up at his 4th of July address from the Mayoral office. What he has become seems like what he always was.
You see this even in the difference between the Robert Fagles translation and the Wilson one: In the Fagles translation the opening is softer.
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
Fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove__
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
In this version, he is a man of “twists and turns” a description that evokes the idea of his long journey, not his nature. He is “driven” off course and suffered many pains, which makes him seem more like the recipient, or even the victim, of happenstance. In this version, he fought to save his own life and help his comrades, but could not. The verbs are passive and the rhythm is winding, conveying the idea that Odysseus is wily and resilient, a heroic figure tossed on the seas of fate.
Wilson’s version is active, shorter, more to the point. He is complicated, not “on a journey.” He “wrecked” Troy, which connotes “burned it down,” which is what they did, in clear contrast to the word “plunder” which is a soft sounding word that conveys the idea that goods were stolen, which is not quite the same thing.
The difference is why people didn’t like Wilson’s translation, but for me, it’s intoxicating. I have always loved a plain, hard truth over a careful formulation, and I love it even more now, in these times of positivity and inclusion—not that these aren’t also virtues, but they’re better when balanced with old fashioned trust-building honesty.
If one of the greatest heroes that humanity has ever known is straight up called out for being a failure in the first stanza of his viral epic poem, then maybe being a hero is a lot more about grit and resilience than some kind of unattainable exceptionalism.
Odysseus was, as we are reminded hundreds of time in The Odyssey, a mere mortal—just like us!
You can see this same hero quality of gritty resilience in the poem, Scylla and Charybdis by Megan Fernandes. As you can guess from the title, she riffs on themes from The Odyssey, making it a great thing to read before you go and see the movie version—a feat much easier than shotgunning all 24 chapters of the book.
Here’s the opening sequence:
I like when the choices are both ugly—
the rock and the hard place. Odysseus chose
Scylla and I, too, would have opted for
a terrestrial evil, the sea vortex probably
concealing some subterranean meat with its beauty.
I freaking love that line. “I like it when the choices are both ugly—” You can put it on my gravestone and I will go into eternity happy. It’s so baller to just go straight at how hard life is, to reach out and take all of the difficulty in your arms and say it’s what you wanted all along.
For me, it exactly captures the appeal of Odysseus, how he takes a life that is objectively defined by bad luck and turns into his own personal brand of heroic.
Then, these lines:
I understand now that to love radically is to always
be willing to be banished to some disfigured island of stone
in the middle of the sea, a small sacrifice, really.
There it is. Another fundamental truth for us mortals: love is the thing that breaks us into little pieces and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Odysseus is a warrior, yes, but more than anything else he’s a lover—the best kind, the kind that is all-in, the kind that lashes himself to the mast so he can hear the sirens singing, the kind that weeps in the arms of a goddess because he misses his wife, the kind that somehow doesn’t lose his charm even when he’s naked and covered in sea kelp. It’s gives him a quality of vulnerability and that is better even than his biceps.
Here is a man whose failures far outnumber his successes, who has suffered in exile for twenty years, but who never loses his capacity to feel all the most important things: grief, love, longing, loneliness, fear, lust, anger, and hope. It’s a heroic capacity that eclipses everything else.
It’s why he is an everyman hero—this orientation toward nevertheless, I am still going to keep to moving forward toward what I love—it is what resonates equally for a poet in New York, a middle-aged woman in Vermont, and I assume, an Athenian lad, listening to a storytelling competition in the sixth century B.C.E.
And toward the end of Fernandes’s poem, another truth about Odysseus: he was selfish enough to survive.
Our hero didn’t really want to go down with the ship.
It’s true, you know, what they say. Odysseus is a liar and a cheat, who took what he could get, when he could get it, the kind of leader who, by the end of his journey, had failed to save even one of his men.
But you know what? It’s a good thing he didn’t want to go down with the ship, or we wouldn’t have The Odyssey. Sometimes you do just have to save yourself to get home to the ones you love. Moral clarity can only get you so far when the arrayed forces of the God of the sea are out to get you.
And believe me, friends, most days, it’s pretty safe to assume that the (metaphorical) arrayed forces of the God of the sea are out to get you.
Odysseus’s selfish desire to persevere and get what he wants is also relatable. At least to someone like me, who isn’t under an illusion about my own goodness, or that of most humans. Trying to be good and dutiful has caused me far more trouble than being brave enough to break a rule in order to survive ever did.
David Denby’s essay about Nolan’s film adaptation is a good way to talk about the complicatedness of Odysseus. It’s a good thing I stumbled on it, too, for I have had my guard up about what would be the media treatment of the Nolan adaptation since the first trailer came out.
I’m so utterly weary of the hot takes about film adaptations of books: the same half dozen tropes, each one calibrated to the brand of the writer or channel, always predictable, always reductive. There’s the one about how it’s woke and the counter one about how it’s not woke; there’s the one that excavates the absence of women or people of color in the original text, and/or the one about how the author or director was a sexual predator. There’s the one about how the celebrity stars lost or gained weight to do the role, what was their workout, how they gave up gluten—that whole thing; the one about the costume designer (I usually like that one), and the long-form think piece that delves into the minute historical and cultural context of the book and posits how the film adaptation is either a searching and fearless mirror held up or a blatant and reckless laundering of violent historical truths.
I’m not saying there isn’t merit in any one of these conversations if they were ever conducted thoughtfully; rather, that the dumbing down of the quality of our cultural conversations is endemic.
It’s exhausting, and when I saw that Denby had done a long-form on the film before he’d even seen it, I was like hoo-boy, here we go.
But Denby didn’t let me down. On the contrary, he sets the banquet table for a robust conversation about a story that’s been riffed on in books and on film dozens of times. His essay covers a bit about Christopher Nolan’s filmography and shooting style, glances at previous film adaptations of The Odyssey, as well as its literary antecedents (James Joyce’s Ulysses, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad), and considers the effects and benefits of new translations, including Emily Wilson’s, which is the one that Nolan used, and the most recent one by Daniel Mendelsohn.
What I liked best, though was that Denby gets ahead of what I am dreading the most about the advent of this film: a thing that I would like to call the “toxic masculinification” of Odysseus.
Denby is polite, but firm about Odysseus’s character, saying he “is not always, in current moral terms, a good man.” As his case in point, he points to Odysseus’s (spoiler alert) wholesale slaughter of all of the suitors who have besieged his wife Penelope and the twelve housemaids who have been sleeping with them. As moderns, we can be very sure that the housemaids did not have any choice in the matter, just as we are aware that Odysseus’s men, none of whom he troubled himself to protect or save, were closer to slaves than loyal comrades. As Denby says, “We cannot, to be sure, simply impose our notions of good and evil on an ancient aristocratic warrior culture. But a slaughter of all the men, without distinction among them? Easy moralizing would be wrong, but moral indifference might be impossible.”
Denby adeptly raises the question and then leaves it for the reader, but he does offer at least a partial answer when he points out that our values are not the same values as that of the Bronze Age Greeks. The Trojan War was about plunder and victory and who gets the most beautiful woman. For both sides. That’s it. Neither side, in our terms, was “the good guy.”
Even their gods were not moral—quite the opposite. They are selfish, philandering, petty, violent, and let’s be honest, emotionally deranged. This is not the world of the Hebrew God who is vengeful but consistent. This is not the world of Christ’s model of the suffering servant.
All of which is the backdrop of my dread of the “toxic masculinification” of Odysseus.
It’s already happening, as evidenced in the mind-bogglingly stupid way in which between one and many ridiculous people woke up one morning and thought it would be a cool thing to say that casting the utterly and devastatingly beautiful Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy is a woke violation of a sacred text.
That said, I’m also going to be rolling my eyes when someone on the other side of the clenched fist binary of our culture pens a think piece about how Nolan, a white man, is glorifying a patriarchal text about a warrior/philanderer who screwed around with goddesses, “groomed” Nausicaä, and cynically murdered his wife’s maids.
My prayer of peace to all comers on both sides of these reductive binaries is please stop. Just stop. Choose a better and more brave way to experience the world. Try for something in the general ballpark of a blind poet, speaking from memory into the firelight, spinning a story of a complicated human who failed hard and loved even harder, telling it so beautifully and well that it literally patterned the story-loving synapses of our collective humanity.
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Haven’t read the book? I got you! There’s no need to ask GPT for a summary of the plot! Here’s a synopsis of 5 - 8 of The Odyssey from a previous Substack
The sequence starts with Odysseus getting washed up on the beach in Phaeacia, buck naked—which is a good start for a case study, in my opinion. Of course, he is found by a beautiful princess and her ‘handmaidens.’ Of course, only the princess has the presence of mind to not only not run away at the sight of a naked warrior, but to hand him some freshly laundered linens. And of course, nobody knows that he is the great, Greek warrior himself, because why would anyone think to ask just who is that jacked (I assume), naked man, of kingly bearing and manner, who washed up on a beach instead of drowning, properly, like an ordinary mortal?
Next, because of the Greek hospitality principle, King Alcinous and Queen Arete host an entire banquet and athletic competition in this stranger’s honor, even though they say they don’t know who he is which is very 👀 in my opinion. All of which sets the scene for the blind bard, Demodocus, to tell the story of the Trojan Horse and the defeat of Troy for all to hear and enjoy.
Odysseus, who happens to have been one of the dudes who was inside the Trojan Horse, is very moved by the telling and starts to cry.
Now, in the poem’s telling, Odysseus doesn’t just shed a couple of tears in a nice, manly way. Instead, his weeping is described as akin to that of a woman who is wailing over the body of her slain husband in front of a whole city and her children, just before she is to be led away into slavery and degradation by the conquering army. His crying is so bad that it is described as “groaning.” It’s so bad that King Alcinous feels that he must stop the storytelling, though not before giving a speech about how awesome storytelling is.
Of course, Odysseus is like, no, no it’s all good, it’s great, these are GOOD tears. And maybe because Demodocus got told to stop, or maybe because Odysseus is completely alpha, he then starts telling his own story, which becomes a kind of recap of Books 1 - 7. He picks up after the sacking of Troy and keeps on going. He gets through Circe turning his men into pigs; to the tricking of the Cyclops, to being lashed to the mast so he could hear the sirens; to getting mostly drowned by Poseidon, and all the rest.
By the time he is finished, white-armed Queen Arete is saying, omg you are incredibly hot, please be our guest for a long time. (In the translations, it’s usually ‘comely’ but ‘hot’ is what she means.) And, King Alcinous is saying, I know who you are, and you’re a cheat and a liar, but you have the “grace of words” and I’m going to give you some swift ships to help you get home.
To me this is all just very instructive on the topic of how to handle suffering. It’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” but for coping with adversity and trauma and it’s all about getting your mind and your body into alignment again.
First, you say no to shame—it does not matter that you washed up naked on the beach. You get up out of the seaweed. You get help from a young woman who helps you get dressed and then you eat some food and drink some wine. Then you listen to a good story that is set to music and get a good cathartic cry out of it. Then, you talk about what happened to you, at length, which is to say, you don’t downplay it or act like a New Englander and pretend everything is fine, because privacy or whatever, or like a British person and pretend that keeping calm and carrying on is the cure to everything. You make it an adventure story, not a story of your victimhood.
And you play up your cunning which ensures that insanely funny story of how you told the monster Cyclops that your name is “Nobody,” so that when you poked out his one eye and he yelled for help he said “Nobody is hurting me,” will last for three thousand years.
You take all of the stuff that is fucking with your head and externalize it so that your body can process it.
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