Even though it was composed more than 2,700 years ago, The Odyssey never gets old. This summer it will be brought to the big screen by Christopher Nolan in a much-anticipated film starring Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, and Anne Hathaway.
Emily Wilson, a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says film adaptations of the epic poem always generate interest in the classic work and could provide a good excuse to introduce the epic into the classroom.
Wilson knows of what she speaks.
Nolan consulted her much-heralded 2018 translation for his film version. Wilson’s translation is also the first complete translation by a woman, and in it, she hoped to convey the rhythm of the original.
“Most of the available modern English translations before and after mine, use free verse or prose, rather than metrical, rhythmical verse,” she says.
Wilson recently shared some of the strategies she uses when teaching The Odyssey, and other works by Homer and myths, to her undergraduate students.
Teaching The Odyssey: Take A Detour From The Hero’s Journey
The Odyssey is frequently taught through Joseph Campbell’s framework of the “hero’s journey,” but Wilson thinks that approach can be too limited.
“[It] invites students to see The Odyssey as a kind of template for all other quest narratives, and to focus exclusively on the perspective of the protagonist,” she says. This can overshadow how Odysseus interacts with many other characters, “including those who do not have either a quest or a journey home.”
She adds, “When I teach undergraduates who have read The Odyssey in high school, I often invite them to reflect on both the appeal of this universalizing approach and to consider what it leaves out, including the historical specificity of the poem’s concerns, which echo the particular preoccupations of the archaic Greek world, a world of large-scale Greek migration and colonization.”
Don’t Shy Away From The Alien Nature of The Book
“The Odyssey, like other works of ancient literature, is fascinating largely because it is both extremely familiar in its concerns and themes and also extraordinarily alien,” Wilson says. “The deities, for example, may seem like narrative conveniences, and in a sense they are, and yet The Odyssey was also created by and for people who worshipped and sacrificed to Athena, Zeus, and Poseidon.”
She finds that examining the conflict between the familiar themes and alien ones can lead to deep discussions with students. “The first four books are about the small-scale journeys of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, to visit his father’s old comrades. The theme of a lost, anxious young person exploring his own identity through visiting alternative homes, is entirely relatable for any young reader.”
But at the same time there are limits to how far that relatability goes. “The terms in which the poem defines adult masculinity may be quite alien and even disturbing,” Wilson says. “Telemachus demonstrates a divinely inspired confidence by telling his mother to be quiet, and later takes a new step to manhood by murdering the thirteen enslaved people claimed by his mother’s suitors to reclaim the honor of the household.”
Examine Gender Roles
Many students today take issue with gendered inequality seen in the poem.
“Those feelings can be an excellent opportunity for discussion and reflection,” Wilson says. She adds, it’s also “an opportunity to consider whether these feelings are invited by the poem itself, or the result of a gap in values between The Odyssey and modern values.”
Wilson’s students are often “outraged by the fact that Odysseus spends eight years in sexual relationships with two goddesses, at least partly voluntarily, and yet he seems to suffer no repercussions in his marriage to his eternally faithful wife.”
She adds, “There is an interesting and teachable mismatch between the modern idea of ‘adultery’—a gender-neutral disapproval of extramarital sex—and the ancient idea of moicheia, which refers only to sexual relationships between a man and another man’s wife.”
This disconnect is more complex than students might realize. “The affair of Paris and Helen, or that of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, threatens the integrity of the household and the male lineage, whereas Odysseus’s affairs abroad are of no relevance for the household,” she says.
This is all an example of how, in Wilson’s words, “There are many opportunities for discussion of the relationship between modern norms of gender and sexuality and those of the poem.”
Use Visuals and Share Technological Breakthroughs
“When I teach myth, including The Odyssey, I often juxtapose it with ancient art; students who struggle with literary analysis often flourish in response to visual representations,” Wilson says. “There’s a lot to say about, for instance, how Athenian vases depict the blinding of Polyphemus, and how this might compare or contrast with the poem’s version of the same scene.”
Modern technology is also playing a role in the ongoing story of ancient texts. High-profile AI-assisted translations of damaged text have recently been released, but that’s only the beginning of what technology can do, Wilson says.
“One of the most exciting developments to me is not AI but digital imaging combined with radiocarbon analysis, which has enabled the decipherment of papyri that would otherwise be unrecoverable,” Wilson says. “It’s exciting for everyone, including students, to learn that we’re still discovering ‘new’ ancient literature.”
Talk About Translation
Wilson is, of course, interested in the differences between various translations of Homer’s work, but stresses that there are many excellent translations beyond hers, and students should be invited to compare and contrast the differences.
“As a way of teaching the value of close reading and the fact that every word matters, there’s no better exercise than asking students to look closely at maybe two to three lines of The Odyssey in several different translations,” she says. “I love this exercise, and I find it wakes students up to the fact that literature isn’t just, and in fact, isn’t primarily, about meaning; it’s about specific words in a specific order, and every choice matters.”
Wilson’s new book Crossing the Wine Dark Sea, which will be released in September, ends with a long essay about what Wilson calls the “minutiae of choices involved in translating just a few lines of The Odyssey and comparing multiple different translations of the same lines.”
This essay is a great introduction for educators looking to explore the role of translations in The Odyssey.
Remember: Teaching The Odyssey Shouldn’t Be An Epic Challenge
Wilson says sometimes teachers shy away from teaching The Odyssey because they think it will be daunting.
“In many ways, Homer, especially in a reasonably user-friendly modern translation, is far less daunting than Shakespeare, whom I hope people also teach,” she says.
She adds, “The debate about teaching great books or the canon is sometimes framed as if teaching canonical or ancient texts were antithetical to the project of inviting students to be aware of themselves, their own culture, and their own world, but to me, nothing could be further from the truth. We learn about ourselves by discovering who we aren’t, and who we almost are, and how we relate to others. There’s no more generative text than The Odyssey for exploring those questions.”