okay so I haven't read Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey but I figured I'd read her review of Nolan's film and what is this:
The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist. Scott, as the Ithacan bard, Phemius, yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre: the most melodic note in the percussive soundtrack comes from the plucking of Odysseus’ bow (a beautiful sonic image of the archer as musician, borrowed from the poem).
a) Himesh Patel isn't Black
b) Patel's character, Eurylochus, repeatedly argues with/challenges/defies Odysseus
c) EVERY character in The Odyssey who is not Odysseus or Telemachus or an obstacle to their journeys exists to aid Telemachus and/or Odysseus, every last one, this is true not just in the film but also in Homer's original verse
d) Is that bit about "yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre" supposed to sound like it's condemning rap as "not real music"?
There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem.
Ma'am, were you asleep during Circe's scenes? Did you miss "back into your disguises," arguably the hardest line in any theatrical Odyssey adaptation ever?
Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife
It's a brooch. It represents Athena. Penelope gave it to him to wear so that she would know if stories she heard about him were true. This was established in dialogue on screen.
In the movie Odysseus doesn’t have to outwit Polyphemus because the Cyclops is a puppet who has no wits.
...No, that's what Odysseus assumes and then he's proven wrong in horrifying fashion after he commits horrific violence against Polyphemus and only realizes afterward that this is a sapient, intelligible creature.
I mean I'm not going to lie and say this review has no valid criticisms but what in the fuck is all that I just quoted up there?
So then I decided to look more into Emily Wilson and what a shock. A British transphobe. Never thought I'd see the day.
For those who don't know, Anne Carson is a translator/poet/essayist/etc. who has been open about identifying as transmasculine or nonbinary since at least 2004, when Carson had this interview with The Paris Review:
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your life as a gay man.
It’s been a somewhat checkered career as a gay man. I was never totally successful. I think it started in high school, when in grade ten or eleven I developed a fascination with Oscar Wilde. Some of my friends shared this fascination so we used to dress like Oscar Wilde and memorize his aphorisms and construct conversations in the lunchroom, as if we were Oscar Wilde and his friends.
But I don’t know how it developed. I can’t exactly remember why I fixated on Oscar Wilde, but I did feel that it gave me an education in aesthetic sensibility, and also a kind of irony towards oneself that was useful in later life, an ongoing carapace of irony that I think lots of gay men develop in order to get through their social and personal lives, and which I found useful for myself, too.
There are two places in your books where the persona is a gay man or a gay boy. There’s Autobiography of Red where Geryon falls in love with Heracles and the little ménage á trois in Peru and all that, but also “The Anthropology of Water” in Plainwater.
Oh, you think that’s a man?
You identify yourself as a man at one point.
That’s the other thing about being a gay man. Model yourself on Oscar Wilde and you just lie all the time.
I remember I thought I was reading about you, and your kind of resentment/adoration of the older man who took you on a pilgrimage to Compostela, and then at some point in the essay you suddenly say something that indicates you’re a young man.
I see. Yes, that may be true. I haven’t read that for a while. I’m sure it is true. I guess I’ve never felt entirely female, but then probably lots of people don’t. But I think that at different times in my life I located myself in different places on the gender spectrum, and for many years, throughout my thirties which is when I did that pilgrimage, I didn’t have any connection to the female gender. I wouldn’t say I exactly felt like a man, but when you’re talking about yourself you only have these two options. There’s no word for the “floating” gender in which we would all like to rest. The neuter comes up in the unbearable poem, the neuter gender, but that doesn’t really capture it because you don’t feel neuter, you feel just wrong. Wrong vis-à-vis the gender you’re supposed to be in, wrong vis-à-vis the other one, and so what are you?
Historically we use man for people of any gender because men win. So it’s useful to do that when cornered.
Here's how Emily Wilson talked about Anne Carson in 2026:
The teenage Carson liked to dress up as somebody else, ideally a man. She playacted as her father the banker, a role that entailed being “manly and reticent.” When that got old, she became Oscar Wilde, aspiring to his flamboyant wit and irony. Manly taciturnity and exuberant irony—these would become the twin modes of Carson’s literary style, a combination of dry and quirky, vaguely metaphysical humor layered with allusion and transvestism...
As she later said in an interview, “I thought, ‘Well, if I learn Greek, I could be all the more like Oscar Wilde.’… It seemed like the natural next step.” All at once, Carson had discovered a new and lifelong persona in the language and poetry of ancient Greece. A kind Latin teacher at her next school proved willing to tutor her one-on-one during school lunch times. The language provided her with a glimpse of “unbelievable otherness,” and yet at the same time, it was “like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.” Like her various masculine disguises, the alienness of ancient Greek offered her a means to access truths and experiences that hovered always just a little out of reach.
The mysteriously pithy ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Nature loves to hide” (physis kryptesthai philei). The same might be said of Carson, who often hides herself behind or inside the ancient Greeks...
Many 20th-century readers have been interested in Sappho for her depictions of same-sex desire between women, but sapphism in this sense is, here as ever, of no interest to the playfully performative Carson. In Sappho 31, “He seems to me,” the Greek makes clear that the speaker and her crush are both female; Carson’s translation does not. Sappho 102 expresses overwhelming longing for a pais, which could mean either a boy or a girl; Carson makes it “boy.” Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet figured prominently on the television series The L Word, but this popular vision of a lesbian or lesbian-friendly Carson owes more to projection than to close reading...
But for Carson, the performance of her own personal identity, on the page as well as onstage, is a site of struggle and artistry. Even now, in her 70s, she is still in a process of constant becoming, and her writing always gestures toward the possibilities and limits of self-transformation. “Once I spent a season impersonating Joseph Conrad…. He was hot in my coat,” she writes in “An Evening With Joseph Conrad”—a claim that may or may not be literally true, but that conveys an important insight about identity, or at least about Carson herself. In “Flaubert Again,” she quotes Sartre: “I am always making myself up as I go along.” Carson’s Sappho invokes Aphrodite as the goddess “of the spangled mind” (poikilophron’), and Carson herself specializes in spangles, in artful multiplicity and the glory of dappled things (in Greek, poikilia). The sense of performative mutability in Carson’s literary self is an important element in her popularity with young readers, who are often still in the process of inventing themselves. Not for nothing do readers on sites such as Goodreads make comments like, “It feels cool to read Anne Carson. It makes you feel like a cool guy...”
And then I found out Wilson's translation of The Odyssey reduces its word count by a third and removes all ambiguity and nuance and I don't know, maybe this person isn't worth listening to.
turnnoffyourmind
jimmyeatworldofficial
blakekathryn
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
