Emily Wilson, the Translator of "The Odyssey," on How Nolan Used Her Material

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On July 16th, I walked through the Upper East Side under apocalypse-orange skies covered in smog – “Odyssean weather”, someone would call it later that night – to attend a talk at 92nd St Y: “Emily Wilson with Sarah Ruhl: The Odyssey Onscreen.” Christopher Nolan’s adaptation uses as its primary source Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which can’t seem to leave my life.

Like most people, I stumbled through it as a freshman in high school, speeding towards the end, unable to resist the pull of bloodthirsty revenge. I then enrolled in my high school’s Ancient Greek program and spent my senior year translating it into English. At the end of that year, I was asked by a skeptical Classics professor to translate Odysseus’ plunging of a burning stake into the sizzling eye of the Cyclops to a confused, grossed-out auditorium that viewed our contingent as a bit of a freakshow for choosing to dedicate ourselves to this subject. Now, I use Emily Wilson’s translation to teach it, and it is in this third exposure that I have grown the most attached.

Using Wilson’s translation for a classroom of younger readers feels like a no-brainer. While still keeping its poetry, her Odyssey is known to be more contemporary than some of the others used in curriculums or the ones I had read in school. Her translation is worth reading alone for its one-hundred page introduction, which doesn’t only teach themes and context, but also uses her subjective interpretation of the material as a lens to read the story through.

Wilson calls attention to certain ambiguities that make for a more interesting reading, such as the doubt…