The Odyssey again
16 Jun 2026 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI was intrigued (though not all that excited) to learn that Christopher Nolan is filming The Odyssey. I always expect to enjoy film portraying ancient history, but I also always expect to be annoyed. I appreciate Nolan's direction, but I'm not a huge fan of his, either.
As readers may remember, I'm not an Odyssey fan, exactly. I only read the Odyssey and the Iliad in Emily Wilson's translations a couple of years ago. I did go through a period of being in Greek Mythology fandom as a child, and hence accumulated a store of trivia about them, but I was young and it never occurred to me at that time that one could read translations of original texts. People just kept giving me different books that basically were retelling the same things from the same sources.
After the Iliad and Odyssey, I also read a bunch of Greek tragedies; I was going to read some Roman tragedies too, because one of the books I bought to get a Wilson translation of a Greek tragedy had some of both, but I didn't actually read any of the Roman ones. I'll probably get around to it at some point.
But I have been thinking I wanted to reread the Iliad and Odyssey already in the last few months, even before news of this adaptation, and then the other day I stumbled upon a video on YouTube where the classicist Mary Beard touted her podcast, Instant Classics, and said they were going to be hosting or... doing?... a reading-the-Odyssey series and talking about it soon, and I thought that sounded neat. Maybe I'll look at some of the older podcast episodes as well.
As readers may remember, I'm not an Odyssey fan, exactly. I only read the Odyssey and the Iliad in Emily Wilson's translations a couple of years ago. I did go through a period of being in Greek Mythology fandom as a child, and hence accumulated a store of trivia about them, but I was young and it never occurred to me at that time that one could read translations of original texts. People just kept giving me different books that basically were retelling the same things from the same sources.
After the Iliad and Odyssey, I also read a bunch of Greek tragedies; I was going to read some Roman tragedies too, because one of the books I bought to get a Wilson translation of a Greek tragedy had some of both, but I didn't actually read any of the Roman ones. I'll probably get around to it at some point.
But I have been thinking I wanted to reread the Iliad and Odyssey already in the last few months, even before news of this adaptation, and then the other day I stumbled upon a video on YouTube where the classicist Mary Beard touted her podcast, Instant Classics, and said they were going to be hosting or... doing?... a reading-the-Odyssey series and talking about it soon, and I thought that sounded neat. Maybe I'll look at some of the older podcast episodes as well.
