Emily Wilson is in the spotlight for her scathing critique of Nolan’s ‘Odyssey,’ but she’s always been opinionated

Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of “The Odyssey” was a phenomenon: it was the first major translation of the epic by a woman into English, for one thing, and the first to hew to the same number of lines as the original, the better to convey Homer’s “speed and narrative drive,” the author Madeline Miller wrote in a review for the Washington Post. The book was named one of the year’s 10 notable books by The New York Times, and Wilson was named a MacArthur fellow in 2019. A fresh translation of “The Iliad” followed in 2023. And Wilson, an Oxford native and graduate, found herself in a spotlight few academics have experienced.

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Wilson’s bold, often negative review of Christopher Nolan’s film “The Odyssey,” which the director had said was largely based upon her translation, appeared this week in the London Review of Books. One memorable passage reads, “The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.” A classic internet pile-on ensued. Nolan defenders, many of whom were already worn out defending the movie from attacks by far-right voices for its racially inclusive casting, now aimed their fury at Wilson. The day it published Wilson’s review, the LRB’s site briefly crashed due to the traffic. The digital magazine Lithub published a piece listing “The ten sickest burns in Emily Wilson’s Odyssey review, ranked.” Unsurprisingly, Joyce Carol Oates weighed in as well, posting on social media that “Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note.”

Now Wilson, who has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 2002, finds herself in the middle of a feverish debate about the epic poem, her translation, the blockbuster film, and the role of criticism in the arts. She also has a new book to promote: “Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature,” which will be published on Sept. 1. She spoke with us by telephone.

Many of the essays in your new book first appeared as reviews, and now you find yourself under fire for your review of the Nolan film. Do you worry that the role of critic has been lost in the contemporary idea that one is either a fan or a hater?

I’ve been writing reviews for a long time. I find it so sad that so many people seem to have that idea. There is this really close symbiosis between academic humanities, education, and public discourse, which includes nuanced layers — let’s pick over this work of art and think through what is it trying to do and does it succeed in its aims, and give a reasoned account of why a person might have mixed feelings. And it seems if right now we’re in this cultural moment where a careful articulation of some mixed feelings is seen as illegitimate, and you somehow have to have entirely unmixed feelings. There’s no room for any kind of nuance, and it seems a real impoverishment of public discourse, and of thoughtfulness in dialogue.

At one point you write in the book about “the trolls who pounce on a Homerist who makes the basic error of being female in public.” How much do you think some of the current furor is just about misogyny?

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That’s kind of a given. I think it’s partly just the cost of fame is that people are going to scrutinize in a different way and the level of unreasoned outrage is going to be linked to whatever very familiar tropes already exist. And of course, misogyny: you don’t get any older or more familiar a trope than that. Before my Odyssey translation came out, nobody had heard of me. I wasn’t, and I’m not, a particularly feminist scholar or feminist translator — that wasn’t at all the framing for anything I’d done before that. But then when that translation came out, every piece about it had the word woman in the headline, which meant that there was both the rather limiting positive coverage of, “look at her, yay, her, she’s a woman,” which doesn’t engage with my work whatsoever, and then the inevitable backlash of, “Oh, I hate her, she’s a woman.”

One of the things people are saying on social media about your review is that you ought to be grateful that Nolan mentioned your translation, that it probably helped your book sales.

Oh my gosh. I mean, that was very predictable that people would say that, right? I mean that is sadly not a surprising reaction. I don’t know that I have to say very much about it because … yeah, there it is again.

You’ve read ancient Greek history as well as literature. What do you think modern American and English people misunderstand about the world that’s described in the Odyssey?

I think that’s very poorly understood. It was a time, for Greek speakers, of real political and social ambiguity. Different Greek communities had radically different political formations in that period. So the way that the poem is really interested in tensions between, is it about one man or is it about men, one man gaining glorious control over all others, or is it about a sharing of power? That’s a live issue in the 7th century. And I think people sometimes assume, oh, of course, back in the day, everyone just wanted one man rule and greatness and glory for single individuals, and it was a “great man” time of history. Which is just historically false. Similarly, I’ve been a bit baffled by the idea that colonization is a modern thing. The archaic period was a time of massive diaspora and the founding of colonies by Greek speakers all over the Mediterranean world. So the ways that the Odyssey is about migration, communities, and specifically about what does it mean either to regain a home or find a new home? All of that is engaged with the social realities of the poem’s time.

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