Reviewing "The Return" and Reading the "Odyssey"

Online Debates to end the Year

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad, but it is not about the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. This will be the last post of the year. I will return next week with posts on the Iliad and—be forewarned—a few posts about a book I have coming out in 2025.

The news of Christopher Nolan’s plans to film a version of the Odyssey in mid-2016 has overshadowed the straight-to-video release of Pasolini’s The Return, which spent a few lonely weeks in limited theaters before showing up on streaming services.

Nolan’s Odyssey could be remarkable, an oddity, or a boondoggle worthy of Cleopatra (1963). But what it does promise is that the epic will stay center-stage for a few more years, continuing a run that started with Emily Wilson’s translation (2018), has seen several Odyssey dedicated monographs in the same period (Alex Loney’s The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey, 2019; Justin Arft’s Arete and the Odyssey’s Poetics of Interrogation: The Queen and Her Question, 2022; and my own The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic, 2020, now available open access) and a new major translation coming out next year from Daniel Mendelsohn. Oh, I am also editing a 24 essay volume for Oxford University Press that should be out in 2026. And this list leaves out the impact of non-scholarly works like Madeline Miller’s Circe or the ongoing excellence of Epic! The Musical.

This cultural moment is also marked by how quickly fraught the discussions become. I bring up Wilson’s translation in conjunction with the announcement of Nolan’s project here because on twitter (and other places) the news was met with some hand-wringing over whether people should be expected to have read the Odyssey and then a misogynistic rehash of the ‘debate’ over Wilson’s translations. I have little to add to this other than to say most of the combatants show their allegiances pretty quickly and that Wilson’s translations are just fine. I can’t say I have read a single criticism that isn’t ideologically motivated in some way.

If I can’t mount a defense of any translation with enthusiasm, it’s because translations are not meant for me. Every generation (at least) needs a new translation because our own language changes quickly and our understanding of epics change too. Wilson’s translations read quickly and clearly; if I have any qualm with them it is that they are insufficiently engaged with Homeric scholarship. But, let’s be honest, there’s more than a drop of narcissism in that concern. I’ve taught the Odyssey with Lattimore, Fagles, Wilson, and Lombardo. As with any text in any class, the success relies in part on the skills of the instructor and their knowledge of the work in question. The vast majority of the criticism I have read about Wilson’s Odyssey is aimed at the very things she gets right.

I don’t want to use this post to talk about translations: to end the year, I want to revisit, in brief, my review of the Odyssey movie on offer (The Return) and recycle my small intervention in the discussion on ‘reading’ the Odyssey from social media.

Unrecorded Artist, “Eurykleia (Odysseus’ former nurse) washing Odysseus's feet,” Terracotta c. 450 BCE, Greek, Melian, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, NY (CC0).

The Return

Last week, Hyperallergic released a review I wrote on The Return, entitled The Return is a Shabby CliffNotes Version of the Odyssey. (Super HT to Sarah Bond for making the connection, encouraging me, and editing an early draft!) As anyone who writes for the public knows, you don’t often get to choose your own title. My original title was “Nobody Returns Home”, which aimed to get to the heart of this version of the Odyssey: in its odd choices it may unintentionally reflect more about our period and beliefs than it ever could about ancient audiences.

The Return is good enough of a movie to warrant watching and maybe even rewatching, but it is not the Odyssey. And the the extent to which it is not the Odyssey got under my skin enough that I wrote a harsher review than I might have, partly because I really wanted to like the film. (For more: in a few weeks I will be recording a podcast with the Movies We Dig! Crew, sparring with Amy Pistone and Joe Goodkin). I had to cut a few key paragraphs from an overlong review because they tried to make too many arguments (I took 10 pages of handwritten notes while watching the film). So, instead of leaving them where they belong on the cutting room floor, here they are with some thoughts about what they were doing and why I cut them.

Dora Wheeler Keith, “Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night” (1886), silk embroidered with silk thread, 45 x 68 in. (114.3 x 172.7 cm), held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (image via Wikimedia Commons)

Original thesis: everyone adapts the Odyssey and reads themselves into it. Variations and doubt were part of the tradition and should still be part of it.

Playing with just who Odysseus and his family were is a part of this tradition first established by Homer: from the lost epic the Telegony that tells of the awkward homecoming of the hero’s son with Circe to Euripides’ satyr-play the Cyclops, or accounts from the travel writer Pausanias that have Odysseus rejecting Penelope and sending her home to her father. Or, worse, an ancient scholar reports in interpreting the hellenistic poet Lykophron’s Alexandra that Penelope had sex with all of the suitors and gave birth to the god Pan (the joke here being that “pan” means everyone/everything in Greek).

There was just too much going on here that needed to be glossed and the misogyny in bringing up the Lykophron stuff was just not worth it.

Thesis 2: Most people think they know the Odyssey. The know some scenes from the legends around Odysseus that our Homeric epic actually toys with.

Some of the most memorable scenes to be found in Homer’s Odyssey are not shown in the film, which as the name suggests, is only focused on Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca. This includes his blinding of the cyclops, his overcoming of the sorceress Circe, or his resourcefulness in withstanding the charms of the Sirens’ song. This is as true today anecdotally–these are always the scenes my students seize upon when they recall Odysseus’ journey. Even in ancient art, such tales of monsters are privileged over the more mundane, if bloody, return of Odysseus.

This is a fine note but turned out to have nothing really to do with this film. But taking this out meant the following had to go too:

Because these monsters tend to steal the scenes, it is often all the more jarring for modern audiences when they read the first ten lines or so of the Homeric epic. They tell of a mortal man who tried really hard to save his companions from deaths on a disastrous journey home. At its beginning, The Odyssey says nothing about monsters or Odysseus’ characteristic wit as it starts to tell his tale; it doesn’t even mention Odysseus’ wife Penelope and their son, Telemachus, or the travails they undergo at the hands of the suitors. It asks its audience to think about a man who tried and failed to bring his people home, all the while inviting us to consider more than once how human beings make their fate worse than it has to be.

I really wanted to emphasize this mortals make their fate worse than it has to be bit because it is central to my own work on the Odyssey but it didn’t fit with the review, so I cut it.

Thesis 3: The Odyssey is unfilmable. Epic is unfilmable. It is too long, to based in an aural aesthetic that is ruined by putting it on the screen and its narrative is too associative.

Given the sheer number of events, characters, and themes, the Odyssey is ultimately unfilmable. Perhaps a prestige television series with 12-24 episodes could do it some justice–but adapting the Odyssey’s eighteen hours of recited verse to two hours of video run time would be a fool’s game. The creators of this year’s The Return are not fools. They only focus on the actions from Odysseus’ arrival on Ithaca to his reunion with his Penelope. Only 11 books of 24.

Why review a film on a book if you think the entire enterprise is impossible? It seems silly and futile. Cut!

Thesis 4: Everything is Odysseus’ fault and no one recognizes this but me!

A close second detail students remember about the Odyssey is that the action is about a veteran father coming home to exact vengeance against the suitors who have ravaged his home and terrorized his wife and son. As more than one critic has noted, there’s something very American Western about this theme, culminating in violence that is darkly retributive, as in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven or more obscenely violent, like something Quentin Tarantino would imagine. But this framing is in part a great simplification. A close reading of Homer’s epic recognizes that Odysseus is in part to blame for what happens to his family. If he hadn’t blinded the Cyclops and boasted about it, sharing his name, he would not have been waylaid so long. The suitors don’t arrive until he has been gone 17 years; he washes up on Calypso’s island in year 13.

That’s actually part of the point of this movie and many, many people know this besides me

The editorial team at Hyperallergic did a good job making my review coherent. It came out a little harder than I had intended, but let’s see how it ages…

Reading The Odyssey

Some of my simplified tips for reading the Odyssey and avoiding the nonsense discourse online

A quick addition to the reading the Odyssey discourse. I have covered some of these ideas at length in posts on all the problems that make up the ‘Homeric Problem’, the strange nature of Homeric poetry, my general advice on reading and teaching Homer, and how to learn to read Homeric Greek online:

1. I think almost no one in antiquity ‘read’ Homeric epic from beginning to end. They listened to episodes and then in later periods read excerpted passages. It would have been rare to experience either epic from beginning to end

2. No one would have gone to reading the epic from beginning to end without prior knowledge of the characters and plots, the backstories and variations

3. This makes what we do with Homer absolutely anachronistic and weird. It also makes it really hard for modern students (and non-students) to get through the epics

Fortunately, there are ways to handle this!

1. Read a summary first. It’s ok! Epic is about the unfolding of basically known plots, the how of the journey rather than the stops. Ancient summaries like those from Apollodorus are great, but try out Natalie Haynes’ 27 minute version

2. Read a different version: Gareth Hinds’ graphic novels are brilliant. I have left them around the house and now my kids can argue with me about Homer

3. Listen to an audiobook version. Epics are for listening! Take time doing it.

4. Try out different translations. I teach with Lombardo, Wilson works great. Fagles and Lattimore are getting harder to teach with, but that depends on the dialect and reading experience of the audience. If one doesn’t work, try another.

5. Try using a free online performance: there’s a reading of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey by 72 actors:

6. We did a 24 hour reading of the Odyssey on youtube during the first year of the pandemic

7. EPIC! The Musical. Seriously, check it out.

8. L Jenkinson Brown has a neat interactive novel coming out You Are Odysseus!

9. Joe Goodkin’s Odyssey songs (and all sorts of modern performances)