What’s Epic About the ‘Odyssey’? Everything.

What It Covers

Translator Emily Wilson and novelist Madeline Miller join The Daily to contextualize Homer's Odyssey ahead of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation, examining how the 3,000-year-old epic's characters, themes of hospitality, and oral tradition inform modern retellings across translation, fiction, and cinema.

Key Questions Answered

• •Translation fidelity vs. flexibility: Wilson translated the Odyssey into iambic pentameter — matching Shakespeare and Milton's meter — while maintaining the same line count as Homer's original. This approach preserves the poem's oral performance rhythm, which most modern prose translations abandon under the mistaken assumption that contemporary readers cannot tolerate structured poetic form.
• •Repetition as characterization tool: Homer's formulaic epithets (e.g., "wine-dark sea," "bright-eyed Athena") served as memory aids for oral bards. Wilson strategically varies these epithets in translation to convey fuller character dimensions — rendering Odysseus's core epithet differently depending on scene context, shifting between "veteran," "stubborn," or "resilient" to match the emotional register.
• •Adaptation requires a singular vision, not fidelity: Miller argues that successful retellings succeed or fail based on the completeness of the writer's internal vision, not proximity to source material. Her novel Circe diverges significantly from Homer by centering a minor character's perspective, treating witchcraft as artistic vocation and reframing Odysseus's account as self-serving narration.
• •Penelope as strategic equal: The Odyssey's text — not later feminist interpretation — positions Penelope as Odysseus's intellectual match. She delays suitors for years through a weaving deception, extracts gifts from them while Odysseus watches approvingly in disguise, and ultimately devises the final identity test using their immovable bed as the verification mechanism.
• •Hospitality as the Odyssey's central moral framework: The entire poem operates around the Greek concept of xenia — sacred guest-host reciprocity. The suitors' core transgression is violating Odysseus's household hospitality uninvited. Zeus explicitly protects strangers and the poor, making hospitality a divine obligation with consequences, a theme Miller and Wilson identify as directly applicable to contemporary social ethics.