Who’d have thought Helen of Troy would cause so much trouble?
Earlier this year, certain quarters of the
internet spun out at news that Kenyan-Mexican Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o was rumored to appear as the impossibly beautiful Spartan noble Helen—whose face, it was later written, launched a thousand ships—in Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Hollywood Homeric epic, The Odyssey.
The confirmation of her casting in May kicked off another wave of conniption fits.
One YouTuber seemed to seriously suggest that the nation of Greece should file a lawsuit against Nolan. (On what grounds, exactly?) “Helen of Troy” rocketed up the trending topics on X, with the website’s trillionaire owner claiming that Nolan “ has lost his integrity” and had “ desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award.” Such a feverish reaction to the idea of a fantastical ancient queen being played by a Black actress has become grimly predictable. History, literature, and even completely made-up myths have become fodder for reactionaries, cranks, and amateur historian content creators with names like @RomanHelmetGuy, all contesting vague ideas of “Western culture.” (@RomanHelmetGuy did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Few people know more about these squabbles than Emily Wilson. An Oxford-born, Oxford-educated classicist (with another degree in early modern English literature), Wilson’s modern translations of Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have themselves been staging grounds for culture war consternation. It’s an issue she seems to approach with the resolve of a grizzled veteran—or just an exhausted one. When I say the words “culture war” in our interview, Wilson, now the department chair of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, pats her hand over her yawning mouth, exaggeratedly. Bo-ring.
The dust-up around Wilson’s Odyssey, published in 2017, starts at the beginning. In the original Greek, the story opens with a description of its hero, Odysseus, the wayfaring Ithacan king. He is first described with the Greek word polytropos, an untranslatable adjective meaning something like “many-turned.” “It’s a very rare epithet,” Wilson says. “It’s a striking choice. It’s also a choice that hints at the layers and twists and turns of this poem, in the journey, in this protagonist. In a way, it's a promise: you’re not going to be bored by this poem. And you’re not going to be bored by this protagonist.”
Previous Greek-to-English translations had rendered polytropos as “various-minded,” “skilled in all ways,” and “the man of twists and turns.” Wilson goes for a simpler, arguably more evocative word: “complicated.” The choice raised the ire of a class Wilson terms “armchair classicists,” who saw complicated as somehow "
pejorative" or even an “ abomination.” Wilson herself was called “ woke,” a “ feminist leftard,” and worse. “Complicated is not an insult!” she insists. “Obviously it’s not. Though some people love to wig out online.”
Criticisms of Wilson’s Odyssey—the first major translation from a female scholar—followed their own predictable pattern. Her language was too modern, too plain. Her translation afforded sympathy to previously monstrous figures (like the dreaded cyclops) and dignity to slaves, swineherds, and the servant women summarily slaughtered, near the poem’s climax, by Odysseus and his wimpy son. Where others framed these killings as a result of the women’s inequity—Fagles, in his popular translation, and the one I read as an undergraduate studying the classics, called them “sluts”—Wilson found little in the original to support these sorts of value judgments. No victim-blaming here.
Wilson’s Odysseus himself is, by turns, heroic, cunning, cruel, conniving, maudlin, and ever-blubbering—in a word, complicated. Such sympathies naturally offended the sensibilities of those who hold Homer (and Odysseus himself) as foundational to that amorphous notion of “Western civilization,” which can seem like little more than myth sustaining white, patriarchal, Eurocentric supremacy. Some other scholars had more substantive critiques of Wilson’s work.
Richard Whitaker, a classicist teaching at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, penned a
response to Wilson’s translation. (He also sent a list of unsolicited corrections to Wilson’s publisher.) In his critique, Whitaker distinguishes between “academic” and “creative” translations: those which attempt to faithfully capture the original text and present it to first-time readers and those that take liberties reimagining that text. “I object to Emily Wilson’s Odyssey,” Whitaker tells WIRED. “It attempts to be a creative translation that reworks and critiques Homeric values and characters, while flattening out the complexity of the epic in unacceptable ways. And the translator makes no effort to overcome her obvious, and personal, but anachronistic, biases.”
Whitaker regards Wilson’s characterizations of women and slaves as especially “wrongheaded,” offering a modern corrective to the depictions of these characters. He believes that academic translators have a duty to “try to represent as faithfully and accurately as possible the value systems they find in the ancient text.”
For her part, Wilson says she took tremendous pains to achieve precisely that sort of faithfulness. She was determined for her translation to match Homer’s original in terms of lines (12,109 exactly), and for conveying not just the text but the rhythm. Where Homer’s epic was composed (and performed) in a classical meter called dactylic hexameter, Wilson transposed that into iambic pentameter, the most common meter of English poetry and Shakespearean drama. Painstaking work, for someone supposedly committed to befouling Homer. “I was hell-bent on both of those things,” she says. “It was a heavy lift.”
Viewed one way, Wilson’s translation may seem like some kind of woke, feminist, anti-macho twist on Homer. In another, it is a correction to centuries of translations that come laden with their own biases (both cultural and personal), and creative, literary flourishes that have little to do with the source material. In her forthcoming collection of essays, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, Wilson takes up the question of her own translation, and the problem of translation more generally. “Grafting contemporary values onto ancient texts is,” she writes, “often done unconsciously. It is very rare for a translator deliberately to set out to distort the original she or he is translating. It can be difficult for us to see cultural assumptions of our own time as for a bird to see air, or a fish water.”
For all their squealing about fealty, the assumptions that some fans, armchair historians, and trillionaire rocketeers bring to The Odyssey tend to betray their now narrow understanding of the works they claim to hold so dear. Likewise, describing Odysseus as “complicated,” or casting a Black actress as Helen of Troy, raise hackles not because it is ahistorical—neither Homer’s hero nor Helen were actual historical figures—but because it disturbs modern, conservative assumptions about male heroism and female beauty. Undermine the presumptions of Western literature (and Western civilization’s) foundational myth, and soon the whole project might seem totally forfeit.
“It can have a sinister ideological dimension,” Wilson says. “The idea of ‘Western civilization’ is a historical invention of the 19th century, and developed to justify slavery, to justify racism, to justify European and American colonization and empire-building. It’s not actually about any historical, absolute continuity to ancient Greece.”
Whatever his issues with Wilson’s work, Whitaker agrees that many of the more vocal, pitchier critics of Wilson (and Nolan) are subject to certain hysteria. “There have always been conservative and unimaginative critics who have clung onto traditional interpretations they learned at school and been incapable of appreciating the radically new,” he says. “Some conservative, white men, feeling threatened by these innovations and their appearance in popular culture—such as movies—condemn them wholesale and absurdly interpret them as a covert attack on a white, male masculinity that supposedly underpins the whole Great Western Tradition.”
Having suffered her own heroic labors—she deleted her X account in 2024, following waves of targeted harassment from armchair historians and trolls roiled by her work on Homer—Wilson now prefers to focus on the pleasures of the text. When she teaches her students and hosts readings in bookstores she’s encouraged to find new readers eager to talk about Homer, Odysseus, and the hoary old myths of the ancient Greek world. Such readers include Nolan himself, who Wilson says has read her translation, among others. She’s working on an expanded translation of The Odyssey, granting herself “a few more syllables to play around with.”
“I’ve had so many devoted readers and interlocutors,” Wilson says. “We’re focusing too much on the Twitter warriors. There’s a lot of the world beyond the toxic swamp of the internet.”
<small>Source: Wired</small>
