Hexameter to IMAX

Translating The Odyssey Across Time and Medium

I have been a classically educated student my entire life. Homer and Cicero were household names, and even though I did not always love the classics as I do today, I always knew there was something incredibly important about these subjects. Nearly all the adults I knew in my school life consistently talked about the advantages of knowing Latin, and of course, I was hesitant to believe them since it was rather challenging and I found the grammar was painstaking.

However, after about eight years of slow progress, I eventually had a Classics teacher in middle school who introduced me to Homer and Virgil’s stories, not just their names, and began to tell my class the myths of Zeus and Perseus. I, previously apathetic, felt for the first time the feeling C.S. Lewis described in Surprised By Joy when he read Norse myths. Hearing these stories, though I could not put it eloquently at the time, felt like “Pure ‘Northern-ness’ [engulfing] me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of the Northern summer, remoteness, severity... the memory of Joy itself.”

This snapshot of severity and joy became a driving force for my desire to continue studying Latin and eventually to move into the study of Ancient Greek. I’ve been fortunate to have a Greek teacher who has always emphasized that the end goal of this sometimes intellectually strenuous endeavor is the ability to read these sweeping epics in their native tongue.

When it comes down to it, the value of the classics, in my experience, is the ability to time travel and, to the best of our ability, step into the context and syntax of empires that have long since fallen. There is both an untouchable glory and an intuitive thread of language running through the entire story.

All of these steps in my life have primed me to be excited by the news that Christopher Nolan would be directing an adaptation of The Odyssey. Finally, the myths that I loved so much and the grandeur of Hellenic history would become part of the collective memory and imagination. I was also excited to see the “remoteness, severity… the memory of joy itself” portrayed on screen for the first time. In short, I felt as if I would be able to get as close as possible to what it must have been like to hear these stories from Homer thousands of years ago in a banquet hall or around a fire.

However, not everyone shares this sentiment. Some readers are concerned about fidelity to the plot. Others assume it will be modernized and filtered through a contemporary American worldview. Still others are frustrated or fearful that Hollywood spectacle will flatten Homer’s intentions.

Beneath these criticisms lies a deeper anxiety: not merely about costumes or dialogue, but about worldview. Which moral universe will shape this retelling? Will it remain Homeric, rooted in honor, glory, and divine caprice? Will it be subtly reframed through Judeo-Christian categories of redemption and humility? Or will it be absorbed into modern psychological and egalitarian sensibilities?

These are not trivial concerns, but they may not be reasons to fear.

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I would venture to say that the main concern beneath arguments about armor, casting, and even plot fidelity is a question: What happens when an ancient moral universe meets a modern storyteller?

In my studies, I have been taught that every translation is an interpretation. If we left Greek translations in their literal syntax, we would only succeed in confusing and maddening ourselves and our readers. Part of the translator’s work is to have a good grasp of the modern context and then, within reasonable and grammatical boundaries, to choose words and order that will benefit others. This is seen in various Bible translations. Different versions emphasize certain parts of the English language and may appeal to different generations and even various denominations. So goes it with Homer.

Every engagement with Homer is already an act of translation. Very few modern readers experience The Odyssey in Ancient Greek, in dactylic hexameter, shaped by oral poetic tradition that assumed a shared mythic vocabulary. Instead, we encounter Richmond Lattimore’s literalism, Robert Fagles’ lyricism, or Emily Wilson’s lean, contemporary precision.

Lattimore preserves structure and syntax as closely as possible, giving readers a hint of the architecture of the Greek language. Fagles heightens the grandeur, often amplifying pathos. Wilson pares down ornamental language and focuses instead on moral and ethical edges, sometimes making characters feel more severe.

Consider something as small but significant to Greek poetry as an epithet (an adjective or phrase expressing a quality characteristic of the person or thing mentioned). Odysseus can be described, based on the translation, as “resourceful,” “cunning,” “wily,” or “complicated.” Each choice shapes our perception of him. Is he admirable? Dangerous? Manipulative?

Even tone shifts across editions. One version may make the slaughter of the suitors at the end of the epic feel triumphant; others may render it in stark terms. Nevertheless, the plot remains.

This is not a flaw in translation; rather, it is the job itself and a healthy symptom. Translation is not a mechanical transfer but an artistic judgment. It requires vast knowledge about rhythm, connotation, and worldview. Every English Odyssey is, in some measure, a conversation between Homer and the translator’s own time.

The key point, then, is this: we already accept interpretive mediation when we read Homer in English. We recognize that no translation is neutral, yet we do not accuse translators of betrayal simply because they make choices. We understand that bringing an ancient text into a new linguistic world requires adaptation.

If this is true on the level of language, it should not surprise us that it is also true on the level of film.

Moving from dactylic hexameter to cinema is not corruption rather it is a shift in medium. The Odyssey itself has already crossed several thresholds. It began as oral performance, sung aloud in feasting halls, shaped by the rhetorical skills of memory, rhythm, and the responsiveness of a living audience. It was later fixed into its written form, where the music gave way to permanence. The invention of the printing press transformed it again, carrying the epic from elite circles into private hands. At each stage, something has changed, yet the narrative core endured: the long journey home, the testing of identity, the tension between cunning and pride, the hope of restoration. A film adaptation is simply the next passage in this long transmission. We are uniquely privileged to live in an era where we will see the “wine-dark sea” conveyed through image and sound.

But medium is not the only aspect being translated. Beneath the anxiety about format lies another concern: morality itself. If moving from hexameter to cinema requires interpretation, what happens when a story formed in an ancient moral context passes through modern hands?

The Homeric world is not our world. It is ordered around honor and reputation—kleos and timē. Glory is public, and shame is a catastrophe. Cunning is not a vice but a mark of intelligence, and vengeance, when properly executed, is justice. The gods themselves are powerful yet morally inconsistent and ambiguous, intervening in mortals’ lives according to preference, whim, or rivalry. Odysseus is admirable because he is strategic and formidable.

To modern ears, either shaped by Judeo-Christian ethical inheritance or contemporary egalitarian instincts, this can seem severe. The slaughter of the suitors is not framed as gratuitous violence but as the restoration of order. Pride is dangerous, yes, but it is also inseparable from heroic stature.

And yet, even here, we must pause. No one reads Homer from a blank slate. A Christian reader cannot help but notice where Homer’s vision for humanity veers from the Sermon on the Mount. A modern reader cannot help but feel discomfort at hierarchies we no longer affirm. A secular reader may emphasize psychological endurance over divine intervention. In other words, moral translation is already happening the moment we open the book.

We do not possess an unfiltered Homer anymore. Our education, our faith, our cultural moment all act as lenses. The fear that a filmmaker will impose a worldview onto the text assumes that there once existed a morally neutral vantage point from which Homer could be observed without interpretation. Such a vantage point has not existed for a long time.

This does not mean that any and all interpretations are valid, and it does not mean that all translations are equal. It does mean, however, that crossing moral worlds is inevitable. The Odyssey crossed from Greece to Roman admiration, from there into medieval Christian commentary, through Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment thought, and modern and postmodern literary criticism.

In my view, if Homer has survived those crossings, he can and will survive another.

What are we afraid of then?

Perhaps it is not that Homer will be ruined. Homer has outlived empires. He has endured being allegorized, rationalized, psychoanalyzed, and deconstructed. He has been read in monasteries and assigned in university lecture halls. He has been translated into dozens of languages and countless English editions. And still, Odysseus sails.

Perhaps the deeper fear is that we will lose control of the story we love, and that, by its entrance at long last into popular culture, it will no longer belong only to classicists. Yet that, too, would be a return.

The Odyssey did not begin as a solitary reading experience. It was heard. It was debated. It lived in the shared air between poet and audience. A cinematic adaptation, for all its differences, restores something of that collectivity. Strangers will sit together in darkened rooms and watch the same journey unfold. They will argue afterward about justice, pride, loyalty, and home. In that sense, the epic will once again become common property.

None of this means we abandon discernment. We can and should discuss the creative choices Nolan makes. Critique, at its core, is not cynicism; it is part of loving a text well. Our critique, though, can begin with confidence—confidence that a story as resilient as The Odyssey cannot be undone by a single interpretation.

For me, and many of my peers, the announcement of this movie does not feel like an intrusion. The same severity of green seas and awe-inspiring power of Ares and Athena that captivated me in a middle school classroom may now be encountered by someone who has never declined a Latin noun or scanned a line of Greek. They may meet Odysseus not on a printed page but on a screen, and perhaps, from there, be moved backward into the text itself.

If that happens, then the translation will have done what it was meant to do: carry something ancient across a new metric threshold without extinguishing the flame.

Homer will be just fine. He has always traveled well.