im so glad the trojan war fandom understands there's more to the myths surrounding Paris than the ""immutable"" iliad and odyssey read only with a modern lens.
im so glad that the trojan war fandom likes paris as a character who was stuck between a three-fold rock and a hard place with the Judgement of Paris and who didn't make a good decision because he wasn't aware of any better option than to avoid war and maybe seek love. im so glad the trojan war fandom understands the ambiguity of the so-called "Abduction" of Helen, where Helen in some myths came willingly with Paris even if she may have come to regret her decision later. im so glad that the trojan war fandom knows that Paris in the Iliad is heavily based upon the fact that Paris to a decent extent represents the Eastern/ """oriental""" nation of Troy and that his effeminacy is largely based on orientalist stereotypes. I'm so glad that the trojan war fandom is aware of the idea that in antiquity, even consenual adultery of a woman was considered assault because it "damaged" the "property" of the husband, and that this idea was likely linked to the myth of the ""Abduction"" of Helen.
I'm also so glad that to the trojan war fandom none of this is controversial at all
"Daniel Mendelsohn's 2025 translation [of the Odyssey] begins, 'Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways / to wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy's hallowed keep.' Fourteen words in Greek have become twenty-four in English, through the addition of words and phrases that correspond to nothing in the Greek, though they often draw on the phrasing of earlier English translations: 'the tale' is an addition also found in the 1929 translation of Herbert Bates; 'off course' is a nautical phrase, not corresponding to anything in the Greek but also found in Robert Fagles' version, and in tune with the modern misconception of the poem's subject as a set of maritime misadventures; 'ways' expands the original epithet polytropos and is also found in the Loeb translation and Lattimore. Following Lattimore in his courageous defiance of contemporary English idiom, Mendelsohn presents Odysseus as if he were enduring a journey very much like driving through Milton Keynes—a nauseating and banal passage through one traffic circle after another."
Emily Wilson, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
reading a paper written by an expert in your field that you personally respect deeply and disagreeing with something they say fundamentally and with zeal is so funny. like well you may be an expert whose writings have been foundational the my very field of study and i may just be some guy struggling to write his master's thesis but you're wrong and i'm right. ☝️ about this.
This is probably a sensitive topic to ask, but why is there such a huge discord on the mythology fandom about the skin color of the gods and of certain mythological characters? This is related to Lupita's casting as Helen of Troy in the upcoming Nolan movie
hi anon i see you've selected the can of worms special today
tl;dr because people are really invested in greek mythology depicted according to their worldview of either 1) ancient greece as the foundation of the West and Whiteness 2) ancient greece being greek cultural heritage and thus exclusively for and by modern greeks 3) people's own ideas of historical accuracy and to what extent historical accuracy is moral because of its truth value and 4) the only moral way of adapting historical/historically Westernized literature is doing it with as little regard for historical ethnicity as possible. -> this way is never actually that unbiased. characters have characteristics that can be racially coded and stories often have racial themes because it's a huge part of history.
the main issue of the discourse revolves around a preference for creative casting and "authentic" casting, "authentic" here being in quotation marks because this is moreso about affective historicity (what feels historically authentic) than historical accuracy. This is also known as the Tiffany effect: a name that sounds hella out of place before the 20th century, but actually was recorded as a nickname for Theophania in old timey england.
So Nolan has opted for creative casting, not necessarily in tune with the actual diversity of the ancient mediterranean-which buries the opportunity for actually highlighting the complexity of the ancient Levant and the many different peoples interacting in that place and time, in history or literature/myth. The ethiopians are actually mentioned in Homer! Egyptians and Phoenicians too! Many heroes can even be said to descend from these as well (Europa was Phoenician, making the knossian and theban dynasties phoenician, Andromeda either phoenician or ethiopian, making the line of perseus half-that, Danaus was Libyan and married his daughter(s) to egyptian princes, hippolyta was a western asian amazon, etc. etc. etc.). greek mythology is actually wildly interested in its neighbours, distant lands, and other peoples! Not in a good way necessarily! but that's where modern adaptations can creatively dismiss their bigoted bs!
But instead of tuning into the diversity of the ancient world, 'creative casting' presents ancient ethnicity as irrelevant, necessarily cheapening the worldbuilding in favour of the actor's abilities. This is, in my opinion, of less value when it's an exclusively A-list cast selected for star power where the majority is still anglo-saxon af. It's an easy excuse for filmmakers to hide behind, and can be really dicey when the story being adapted actually has racial themes. This is the case, imo, with the new Wuthering Heights, where it makes no sense casting an east asian actor for the role of 'epitome of British noble imperialist chauvinism' and casting a white actor for the racially coded scapegoat Other protagonist. creative casting has its limits, and one of those limits is the very real history of racial oppression.
the authentic casting camp tends to split into two sides, where one is protesting creative casting for accuracy's sake and the other because they're white fucking supremacists and greek nationalists who believe no one in ancient Greek ever saw or was an african let alone a sub-saharan african. Which is dumb as hell. the ancient world was centred around the Mediterranean sea, ALL COASTS, not Europe. there was arguably more interaction between ethiopia and india and greece than there ever was between germany and greece. This makes arguing for authentic casting a veritable minefield, because in no time you'll have people yelling that all the actors should be white or that is is a moral imperative that all the actor were born in greece and born greek. don't let this fool you: it's about a white claim to the literary material, just a specific type of whiteness.
Nevertheless, i tend to be sympathetic of people criticizing creative casting choices for accuracy's sake (NOT the white-only bs!!!!), based on the fact that in the entire cast (and this is very often the case) none of the actors are greek, mediterranean, or middle eastern. the cast of Nolan's Odyssey is very much america's idea of diversity- meaning all white people in the cast are piggy white and the others, who make up only half or less of the main cast, are mostly black with some other ethnicities represented by single actors. This reminds me of the series Troy: Fall of A City, which took the same approach, but where imo it was very telling which characters ended up being white and which didn't. I found it telling there that Zeus and Achilles, neither a main character and both depicted as (physically) powerful and overbearing characters, were black actors, and wrathful goddesses in the story such as Athena and Artemis were black, but Aphrodite, the main deity in the adaptation, protector of the protagonists helen and paris and goddess of beauty, was an ivory-skinned ginger woman. There's racial coding involved that cannot be ignored.
Mythology, though, is a more fantastical literary world and not the real Ancient Greece at any point in time which people clamoring for a bronze age depiction of Homeric epic tend to neglect. i.e. I think creative casting makes more sense in a Homeric epic than in an adaptation of the Persian wars. Even though Greek mythology is still incredibly tied to the land (literally, via aetiology: a myth happened in a specific place which had a religious effect on the place), there is wiggle room. I'm mostly just frustrated that this never seems to be used with much intent or thought behind it. I see the subversiveness of casting Lupita as the most beautiful woman in the world (a role that suits her!!) but i find it telling that it is not penelope, for example, who is the main love interest and not a side character. creative casting is dope but i rarely see it done in a way that doesn't still create narrative/meta tension.
to conclude: the discourse arises from whether people find creative casting or authentic casting more politically correct, and to what extent it is fair to bend accuracy for inclusivity. i'm no huge fan of any of the approaches hollywood tends to take, because they either present an american-centric idea of diversity or go for an all (anglo) white cast, which buries the diversity of the ancient world either way and never lets people out of the binary of historical white vs. modern multicultural.
What are your thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey and his decision to use Emily Wilson's translation? I have heard plenty of complaints, but I am not from a classics major and I can't judge.
this ask has been in my inbox for some time because i feel it's kind of disingenuous to judge the translation/adaptation decisions of a movie that hasn't come out yet, since that is specifically about the part of the movie we're not yet privy to- the script? I will likely come back to this answer after I've actually seen the movie.
from what i can tell (this video essay gives a decent overview) most criticism of nolan's choice of translation to work off of comes from the same group that was the loudest in their criticism when the translation first came out: misogynists. they think that translating with a goal in mind or with conscious consideration of your predecessor's and your own biases is either tainting the text an sich or rewriting the text- like a text about to be translated is a solid, impenetrable (hah) thing that can be left untouched or unchanged. None of these critics have ever heard of the polytropos problem so i'm not taking them seriously at all.
wilson's openness about her thinking process about gendered issues in the language of the epic and expectations set by her exclusively male predecessors does not make her a rewriter and does not affect the integrity of the odyssey. at all. Therefore, it does not affect the adaptational integrity of nolan's movie. Given the aesthetics he went for, i don't think he is going for accuracy anyway. See this ask about my thoughts on nolan's aesthetic choices and their political ramifications.
That said, the video essay takes it to the other extreme- in defending both Wilson and some of Nolan's choices -especially colourblind casting - it makes claims about the language and intent of greek epic that are also inaccurate, especially about the nature and status of the epic genre in antiquity. Wilson's translation is meant to be accessible to a modern (unfamiliar) reader and more true to the directness of Greek language here and there, often embellished by older english translators that were trying to maintain metre or work in verse. But those are two translations goals that happen to coincide- they do not mean that Homeric epic itself was meant to, or considered, accessible, low-brow, or folksy in antiquity. It just means that Homeric Greek, translated as literally as possible to English, often comes off as more straightforward. one example of this imo is English' lack of compound words- Greek can get REALLY intricate and complex with combining words and making new ones by using certain prefixes- something that often can't be mimicked in english without sounding like rudimentary language. Wilson managing to include more accurate language while also making the work more understandable is a triumph, not a failing.
so, the people criticising nolan on using wilson are launching a two-pronged attack on what does not conform to their idea of Homer's Greece: they say Nolan does not understand his source material, and when it's pointed out that he closely worked with a critically acclaimed translation, they attack said translation for being too 'political'. Nolan is not intellectual enough, and intellectuals are inherently corrupt; otherwise they would never disagree with their limited worldview of a rosy, white, heteronormative, elevated Homeric Greece.
Regardless of my thoughts on Nolan's movie, from the little I've been able to glimpse of it, using Wilson as your primary source for the Odyssey is not the problem.
