Latest / Christians Reading Classics / Nolan's Odyssey and Epics with Jonathan Geltner, Eric Hutchinson, and Rob Wyllie

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Nolan's Odyssey and Epics with Jonathan Geltner, Eric Hutchinson, and Rob Wyllie · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:00
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• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Blown off course time and again, after he plundered Troy's sacred heights.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Speak of all the cities he saw, the mines he grasped, the suffering deep in his heart at sea, as he struggled to survive and bring his men home, but could not save them hard as he tried.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The fools, destroyed by their own recklessness, when they ate the oxen of Hyperion the sun.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that god snuffed out the day, their day of return.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Of these things, speak immortal one, and tell the tale once more in our time.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, now all the others who had fought at Troy, at least those who had survived the war in the sea, were safely back home.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Only Odysseus still longed to return to his home and his wife.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: The nymph Calypso, a powerful goddess and beautiful, was clinging to him in her caverns and yearned to possess him.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: The seasons rolled by, and the year came in which the gods spun the thread for Odysseus to return home to Ithaca, though not even there did his troubles end, even with his dear ones around him.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So recited various bards, sometimes in earlier Cape Greece, at a time when the alphabet was only a twinkle in some enterprising Greeks' eyes.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey, were written down later in the 6th century BC in Athens.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor at Mirror Orthodoxy.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And today it is a delight to talk about Homer's Odyssey with three poets who are also experts on various aspects of the ancient world.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: First, Jonathan Geltner is the author of a poetic translation of Claudel's Five Odes in the novel Absolute Music.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: He is a fiction faculty member at Ashland MFA in creative writing.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Eric Hutchinson is associate professor of classics at Hillsdale College.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: He is also a prolific poet and translator.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, Rob Wiley is Associate Professor of Politics at Ashland University and the director of the political economy program in the Ashbrook Center.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: In his spare time, he writes essays and really beautiful poetry and is a contributing editor at The Lamp.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, friends, thank you for being here.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, pleasure to be here.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Andrea.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: Pleasure for you.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I should add one more thing before we get started.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: When we were discussing this episode, Eric kindly emailed me some thoughts to add to the conversation today.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, I realized I should just like throw out my questions and use Eric's because they were so much better.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of what you're going to hear are questions that Eric suggested that we make sure that we touch upon.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: So to start with, my question for the three of you is what is an epic?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And why are so many of the best known classics of world literature epics?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this um this came up at our recent residency in in uh at Ashland, um briefly, but since some of us had seen The Odyssey um the weekend before, um, and since we had had uh Fred Durbin visiting to talk to us about his work, which is uh of a genre fiction nature, you know, fantasy and horror and Western, and he he's he's playing on various genres, some of which are the modern descendants of ancient epic, you could say.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um since all that had been going on, we we kind of talked about this a little bit in our in one of our fiction classes at Ashland.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh we were speaking about epic and also about uh the mythopoetic, this idea that um Tolkien, it's a neologism coined by Tolkien uh and Lewis um about a hundred years ago almost now, uh which is to say just poetry uh of myth or the making of myth, the fashioning of myth.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um so myth and uh epic, you know, two ancient Greek words, both of which uh connote a kind of story, storytelling.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um we were speaking about this and trying to think what is it that makes something really epic?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um and length is maybe enter into it a little bit, but you know, there were there were short epics, there were mini epics in antiquity too.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we talked about um how one of the defining features of it, of the epic and of the mytho-poetic, um, is that it seems to be sort of cosmic in scope, or or it it uh it has the capacity to sort of lay the groundwork for an entire culture's worldview or um understanding of reality.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um all the various religious uh and sort of proto-philosophical notions that uh might be sort of brewing and stirring about in a culture find their way into an epic story.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh and it sort of treats of the grandest and and profoundest themes available, um, sort of love and war, I guess, uh, to think of the title of something that might be a modern epic war and peace.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um the two, you know, the two possible grand themes.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh so that's something of what we we talked about.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um we also spoke at the residency um uh, I think in the context of narrative poetry, we were talking about narrative poetry one day, um, and we were thinking about how even though longer narrative poetry seems to be still available to us um in our contemporary literary moment, um, it was somewhat more questionable whether something that would qualify as an epic would be available to us.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, we don't really, it's kind of hard to say why that is the case, but one thing may have to do with this this um mytho-poetic quality that we um sort of anachronistically find in in ancient epic.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh uh that is something which tends to um uh come to us in my in our moment now through prose more often than through verse.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so another thing to say about uh epic, maybe at least in an ancient context, is that we associate it with verse, with with something that can be chanted, something rhythmic, um, because it's delivered orally, at least in its earliest uh uh versions that we know.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's kind of a little quick recap of some of the stuff that we said about Epic recently at at the Ashland residency.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: In a very different register, I think of a modern epic.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think of Ben Hur, I think of Gone with the Wind, and then maybe greatest of all, I think of Lawrence of Arabia.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: So when we think about the Odyssey as a movie, I think we think about the collision between literary epic and Hollywood epic, and Hollywood epic is whatever studios throw massive budgets, um, massive creative freedom off into directors and just massive casts at.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I understand this is the Christians reading classics podcast and not the Christians watching movies podcast, but I'm gonna position myself here as the popcorn munching uh Hollywood epic appreciator.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: And even though I sort of missed the maybe it's the case that these Marvel movies or these event, you know, Avengers movies or whatever they are are like the epics of our time, but I sort of missed the boat on those.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and so I I was I was really happy to go see this movie with some some popcorn and take an epic that I knew, of course, The Odyssey, um, and watch it get that Hollywood treatment.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, got my movie for the first time since, you know, maybe Oppenheimer came out, or you know, that that was going to be an epic on that epic scale.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we will uh spend a little bit of time later uh in this conversation talking specifically about the movie.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: I will add, as far as the movie experience goes, uh some theaters apparently had a special release uh popcorn bucket shaped like the Trojan horse.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And alas, Ashland did not, which I feel like we really missed out on this central experience.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Eric, what do you think?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: Well, okay, so uh I'm gonna give a a boring answer to this question.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, epic epic is a Greek word or comes from a Greek word, so the Greeks get to have priority here.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_04: So and an epic is a poem that is written in dactylic hexameters.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um that's that's basically what I'm gonna say.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_04: So in at least in the ancient world, you know, in in terms of discussing genre, formal features are really the main thing that um that uh that are in play in terms of saying what kind of thing a poem is.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_04: So in in antiquity, you I mean we tend to associate the word epic with, you know, these huge uh scale tales about uh about kings and gods and monsters and that sort of thing.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um in the ancient world, there are a lot of kinds of of epics.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: There's that so didactic epic is a hugely popular genre.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: You think of things like uh Hesiod's Theogony, the works and days, Virgil's Georgix, um, and a lot of lesser-known poets as well.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um didacticism sort of gets a bad rap now, but um the folks in the ancient world certainly wouldn't have agreed with us about that.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_04: And so the thing that unites all these different kinds of epic in antiquity is simply the formal feature of the meter in which uh in which they are written.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um so that's the first thing that I would want to say.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_04: The kind of thing that we're talking about is a specific subdivision of epic, the kind of thing that deals with um you know reggae set proilia, kings in battles, these these large sort of civilizational um uh events that occur, the kind of thing that we get in Virgil's Aeneid, for example.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_04: Um, or they're used to investigate um matters of of divine and human relation.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_04: You have things like Milton's Paradise Lost in the in the modern period, but also um I mentioned Hesiod, so I'll just say mention the theogony again.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so if we want to talk about that that specific um that specific subdivision, I mean, yeah, these are sort of uh um world-building and world-forming uh narratives.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um the the public aspect of them is very important too, and I think that's that's one thing that's easy to get lost in um in our own day.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_04: So with Homer, you want to think, for example, of of a bard, you know, chanting these lays before an audience of some kind.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_04: And so the the role of the audience is very important in thinking about ancient epic.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and that's obviously not really true for us in the way that we sort of encounter literary epic now because we tend to just read it, you know, sitting in a chair by ourselves or maybe talking about it in class or something.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_04: But there's no sort of performative aspect to it as there uh as there would have been for at least for a long time in the ancient world, which is probably one of the reasons why we sort of make that very easy uh transition from thinking of epic as a specific type of literary genre to using it as a word that describes anything sort of huge and large scale with lots of explosions and action and and that kind of thing.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_04: And the easiest way that gets transferred to a sort of public setting now is is through the movies, um, which is one of really the only ways, probably, in which people experience some kind of spectacle together.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, sports is the other, is the other big one.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_04: Although I will say that they're even trying to, they, it's always them doing things.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: They are trying to sort of take that away from us too at the movies.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know what it's like where you guys live, but I was kind of shocked, I don't know, several years ago when I went to our local theater and found that the the regular chairs that are not really all that comfortable had been replaced by these like giant recliners that you can sort of go all the way back in and put your feet up and everything, um, which I think you know was supposed to make the experience of going to the movies more attractive because attendance was down and that sort of thing.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so movies used to be the sort of one one of the only public things maybe that we would do together.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_04: But now, like when you go to the movie theater, it's like your living room, that sort of intensely private area has just been transposed into this other place uh into the theater.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_04: So even that has gotten a little bit questionable as a as a kind of truly public venue where you know where people kind of experience things together.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_04: But um that was just sort of a rambling and I'm not sure entirely coherent answer.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_04: But um I do want to put in a plug for the hexameter, uh for or or more broadly, the formal features that make that make something belong to this kind of poetry rather than another.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_04: So whether we're talking about dactylic hexameters in the ancient world or iambic pentameter or whatever, um, that it's not insignificant that the the kinds of literary works that we call epic do have this almost sort of, they have this sort of repetitive, almost hypnotic, entrancing effect if you were to actually read them out loud or try to imagine the experience of hearing someone chant these things, an almost sort of ritualistic uh kind of feel to it, that is not the same as reading a novel, for example, even if you read the novel out loud or watching a movie or whatever, even though those things are kind of analogs to the type of storytelling maybe that we have in view with with the epic.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_04: So the the this is the last thing I'll say.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_04: The formal feature is one of the things that makes um poetry, epic poetry, ancient epic poetry, early modern epic poetry kind of alien to us in a way that I think is really helpful to draw attention to um instead of making it kind of too familiar.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think that's a very good point, Eric.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we we don't our our generic terminology does not rely uh on um features of language in the way that that um it did for the ancients, like you're discussing where you've you know you've got epic, you've got elegy, and these are differences in prosody that we're really talking about there.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um but at the same time, I would say we have a much greater profusion of generic terminology than the ancients had, um, partly because of the development of prose literature, but um so that makes something like what I was alluding to, uh a discussion at Ashland make a little more sense.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we can you can write a long poem in blank verse that is narrative.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh I read a great deal from Aurora Leigh while I was there.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's not an epic.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we can have a thing like a novel in verse.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we talked a bit about those.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: So um these are, you know, classifications that were not around when um the epic took form, um, however we want to define it, most broadly according to its meter, or maybe somewhat more precisely um according to its subject matter.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: But um, you know, so it's it's interesting to think about how these genre terms change, how their value changes over time.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, one thing to note about that term epic is that um, at least for us moderns, and for quite a long time, it has very high status.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: It connotes sort of the greatest aspiration for a literary author to work your way up to it.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, certainly in the medieval, early modern period, to take Virgil's career as an example, you know, there was very much this sense of, well, you start out on bucolics, uh, on the sort of pastoral poetry um of his bucolics, and then you work your way up maybe to the didactic poetry of the Georgics.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then uh because they were making a distinction between the Georgics and the Aeneid, um, and then finally, maybe if you're ambitious and skilled and successful, you you might be able to produce an epic poem.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: But um they, you know, I think the generic terminology sorted into a kind of hierarchy or maybe multiple hierarchies um over time.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: And and so when we're when we talk about epic today, we're referring to the top of that hierarchy or one of the hierarchies.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh and it's so so difficult of attainment that that you know many people don't even attempt it.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's uh perhaps even considered impossible, um, at least in certain forms.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um if I can say that without confusion, since we're talking about forms or genres.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, like famously in the among the modernist poets, the high modernist movement, you have um sort of uh an acknowledgement of the impossibility of writing a properly modern epic.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um you you have uh you know, on the one hand, you have like someone like an obscure author now, although not so obscure if we've mentioned uh Lawrence of Arabia.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Charles Dowdy was an English Englishman who wrote um something called Travels in Arabia Desert in prose, archaic prose in the late 19th century.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what let T.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: E.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Lawrence do his thing later on in Arabia.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: But um Dowdy also wrote this epic called The Dawn in Britain, and it's about the foundation of the British Isles, or it's about the British Isles at the time of Roman conquest and the advent of Christianity.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um and he wrote it in the in his own crazy sort of epic verse form, which is a it's basically blank verse, but um he had a very unique style, let's say, of using language.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that's 1906.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And he he at least uh thinks that um this is possible, this is a thing that can be done, should be done, worth doing.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then you fast forward like half a generation, and it's the wasteland by T.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: S.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Eliot, this sort of testament to the ruins of uh civilization, the confusion of it, maybe we should say, and the impossibility of constructing something grand, like an epic.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um you have Ezra Pound's Canto's project, which would go on for you know much of the 20th century, um, ultimately ending in his sort of despairing cry of I cannot make it cohere.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we have these great aspirations uh in the modern period to produce poetic epic, let's say, leaving aside cinema for the moment.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh but uh generally this sense that like for some reason it's not uh possible, even though it remains sort of at the top of the hierarchy of of genres.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's um uh unless one is willing to admit um the prose versions, you know, when we get these giant uh sort of genre fiction uh projects that that we now call things like fantasy or epic fantasy is a genre of fantasy.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh heroic fantasy, it's also or high fantasy, it's uh also sometimes called.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um so high, the term there is just indicating to you what what kind of status that that um epic quality has in our contemporary understanding usage of the term.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: So one uh way in which all of these debates that you've just described, Jonathan, play out is in the stories of Odyssey translations, really translations of ancient epics into modern English.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And because of the new Odyssey film, sales of Odyssey translations are now 76% up over what they were last year, which is pretty impressive.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So for those who are either thinking about picking up an Odyssey translation for the first time, or maybe they've just picked one up and they're figuring out how to get started, what translation or translations of the Odyssey do you particularly recommend?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And what advice do you have for someone who has just picked up this epic to read for the first time?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: The first translation of The Odyssey I ever encountered is is the one by Richmond Lattimore, which I still think is really good.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_04: I had never, and this was in college, I had never read Homer before I was in college.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Homer before I was in college, but I certainly had never read uh anything by Homer.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so in a class that I had, actually, I don't know that that was the first one.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_04: I had I had had uh an English class where I read it and I don't remember what we did in there.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_04: But um the first one I remember um uh looking at, um, and actually, now that I think about it, in the class it was Lattimore's Iliad that was assigned.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_04: But anyway, the the first the first translation of of the Odyssey that I really sort of remember reading uh is is Lattimore's.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_04: And I think it's good in a lot of ways.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_04: It preserves some of the the kind of strangeness of Homer for a modern reader, doesn't domesticate him uh him too much.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um the uh I just finished and I'm working on a review of it right now.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_04: The the the new one by um by Daniel Mendelssohn.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and this is my new favorite.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_04: This is a brilliant, uh, brilliant translation.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's really, really good.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_04: Um I think I think that is is the new kind of gold standard for uh I mean there are many, many translations of of the Odyssey.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um so Emily Wilson's sort of bizarrely has generate, in my opinion, has generated a lot of controversy.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: I don't really understand.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: There are like hundreds, if not thousands, of translations of classical text.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_04: I don't remember at any point anyone making the news for any reason, or people getting sort of very passionately up in arms about it the way that they did for this one.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_04: Um there's a lot to be said for that.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_04: Um the versification is nice.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_04: I've read several books of it out loud to some of our kids.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it it reads really well and has sort of good movement and is good for sort of oral uh uh oral reading.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um the thing that's really great about uh about Mendelssohn's is that um he uses these long lines that sort of imitate the Homeric hexameter.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: He uses a sort of kind of he uses a six beat line to represent the six feet of the Homeric hexameter.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so it allows him to include things that you have to exclude if you're writing in pentameters and trying to keep to Homer's line divisions, for example.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um so it allows for a really high degree of faithfulness or or or accuracy.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but he's also a good writer.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so in literary terms, the translation reads really well.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_04: There are passages that are really beautiful in it.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so I think like if you're if you're just encountering the poem in English, and even if you're encountering it for the for the first time, his translation is comprehensible, um, but it also is uh is really lovely, reads really well, and is really accurate.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that's the one I would recommend um uh that that people use because I just I just use it in a class this summer um and found that it worked, it was great.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_04: It worked really, really well.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that's my new favorite.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: I would agree with that.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: I reviewed it when it first appeared for Mirror Orthodoxy, and um I agree the meter really made it sound like an epic, but also um the introductory essay at the beginning, that alone is already worth the price of the book.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's really good.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_04: And his and his discussion of what he's doing as a translator is is really useful, I thought.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: I know what my next read of the Odyssey will be.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: It'll be this Mendelssohn translation, so I'm I haven't read it, but I'm pleased for the recommendation.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's interesting.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: Eric was saying how Dectilic Exameter is proper epic.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um Emily Wilson tries to do it in in iambic pentameter, much more common English prosody.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um that first line, you know, tell me about a complicated man is uh I didn't I didn't get through Emily Wilson's translation, it's not my thing.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um the fact that so many people seem to have is remarkable.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_03: And um if that has reignited uh desire to um um re-explore the Odyssey in in in verse and and in translations with a lot more verve than you know the Lattimore that I've always read.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, well, you know, fair play, that's that's great.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I wonder I wonder if the con there is some connection.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Emily Emily Wilson is certainly from a famously colorful uh literary family um and and of complicated people.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I wonder I wonder if um I wonder if some of that fact that her translation made the news and is it is it quote unquote woke, is it, you know, is it political or something like that, that that anticipates so much of um the hubbub uh uh surrounding the new Nolan film.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um and you know, Eric's point made me think about the fact that we, you know, there's something about the current culture war where, you know, Homer is still going to be a flashpoint, and it's not necessarily just because it was a Hollywood blockbuster.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: There was already a you know WW Norton translation of it that attracted the same kind of discourse, even though I think a lot of people that wrote about that Emily Wilson translation didn't read the whole thing through, and probably like me, you know, sort of faltered out at about you know book three or so.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_04: And what's especially funny is that then she appears not to have even liked the movie very much.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: So she blasts it.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, tell me about a complicated man.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: That the Times literary books um review is called An Uncomplicated Man.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: And she and it one of the fascinating things about the about the hubbub in the in the in the discourse, so to speak, is how Emily Wilson has now come around on the right flank of the culture blasting um Nolan's decisions, while someone like Tom Holland, um, not Tom Holland the actor, but Tom Holland the uh the historian, right, is sort of in in Nolan's camp.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so was he a fan of it?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't see what he had said about it.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: There is there's been an there's been a sort of interesting uh uh churn.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um well and I I first encountered Wilson as a translator through her um uh versions of Seneca's tragedies, which I've used in class a ton of times, um that were they're published in the Oxford World Classic series.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um and Seneca's tragedies are much less frequently translated than uh than Homer.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so to have a really you know a good translation of Seneca's tragedies that that read really well um is is fantastic.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_04: And she's to be commended for that, if for nothing else.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_04: So anyway, it's it's the way that this is all sort of working out is kind of humorous to me.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: So let's uh turn to the epic itself.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Walk us through this.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: What are the main themes that we should pay attention to?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, I mean, it's famously a kind of tripartite book or story or however you want to put it.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh the the parts that uh tend to get assigned in like high school classes, I mean, at least it was for me at a public high school in the 90s.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh I I guess maybe that's not happening so much um anymore, probably.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: But um I do that would have been the first time I encountered it, I think uh ninth grade, maybe tenth, no later than that.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't know what translation it was.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: It would have been terrible.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it certainly didn't capture my ears.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I did read some of it uh as a high school student and the parts that are um you know that that they're gonna show you in at that stage uh to introduce the thing uh is uh gonna be the adventure part, the romance part, basically, I would call it.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: Now that's that's terribly anachronistic, but um maybe not so terribly anachronistic.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, romance uh as a genre um is is born in antiquity, much later in antiquity, but uh it is an ancient genre.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's coming out of uh stuff that you can find in the epic material.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's maybe you know uh even indistinguishable from it in some respects.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, Odysseus' adventures getting back home as opposed to like the Telemachiad part at the beginning, uh or his actual nostos at the end, um, his return home tends to be the part that um is gonna be most famous and that is the most entertaining, I suppose, because you've got uh this mission, a quest, uh a journey, you know, and you've got various uh fantastical obstacles um uh in the way.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and you can sort of watch him um progressively fail to overcome them adequately.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um so it's got it's uh it has a bit of an interesting story arc that way.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, instead of what we might think of as like a hero's uh steady uh increase in success, Odysseus is, you know, it's a much choppier uh story, the the romance part, the adventure part, uh until eventually, of course, he's uh he's alone.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh but then manages to uh return in you know um with some degree of his former uh dignity and aura and power, thanks to uh uh some of his last encounter before he gets home.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: But um yeah, I mean I guess that's the main thing I would note about it if I were presenting it to students.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I've never actually taught the Odyssey, although I have taught the Iliad.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh Caroline Alexander's translation of the Iliad, which I really enjoyed uh and and it was great to teach with.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I wish she had translated the Odyssey too, but we don't have that.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I would, yeah, I still, I mean, I just kind of love romance in general as a genre that the literary romance, so you know, uh basically an adventure story, um, usually combined with a love story.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that's sort of where my own focus on it goes whenever I have to present it to someone new, or if I did have to do that.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think though that uh what is probably so that's a more entertaining, more superficially like that's the entry point.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and because it um sort of in media's race uh storytelling, then uh uh it's an easy way to get into the poem.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um but maybe the aspect of it that actually you know really feels uh more profound to a lot of people is this question of uh heritage and and and home that is uh framing the whole thing.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: You have his son who's ill at ease in a difficult situation, and um and then you have his actual return home eventually, uh Odysseus's, that is, uh, and and how he has to restore order and sort of the question, huge haunting question, and this has been the one that everyone has picked up on for thousands of years of what will happen afterwards, you know, whether he'll really be able to remain at home.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that is a question that the poem itself raises for him.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's what people, poets, other authors, imaginative writers, uh subsequently have really been haunted by this sense that you know the Odyssey ends, Odysseus has returned, he has restored a kind of justice and order.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: You would think uh story's over, all is well and good now.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that is manifestly not the feeling that uh many people have uh at reaching the end of this story, which is I think one of the more remarkable things about it.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I can I'll jump in here.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I mean, I think in in the main, yeah, I mean, the Odyssey is a homecoming poem.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, this is signaled in the proem in the open in the opening lines of of the poem.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_04: It's one of a broader genre of of uh of epics called the Nostoi, which we don't have anymore, but this is this is that kind of a story.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_04: It's a homecoming story.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and this is why I find the you know the relative proportions of of the Odyssey really interesting.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, um Jonathan's exactly exactly right.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like when we think of the Odyssey, we tend to think of things like the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus Eaters, all the really exciting stuff, you know, that happens in the Nolan movie that these take up a huge proportion of screen time.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: The funny thing in Homer is that they don't.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_04: All of those really famous stories are in books nine to twelve, and they're all told as a flashback by Odysseus.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, they're part of these mo very motivated stories that he tells the the Phaikians to secure his own own homecoming, totally absent from the movie.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but those are all told sort of in retrospect afterwards.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_04: Half of the poem is Odysseus back in Ithaca, and more than half of the poem takes place in Ithaca in the palace and its environs, if we think of the stuff with Telemachus at the beginning.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_04: So, what Homer seems to be really concerned about is this homecoming and what it takes for Odysseus to secure um possession of his house and to get his family back at the end of it.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_04: That seems to be where he focuses most of his uh intent uh attention.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I just think that's really interesting.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_04: The the proportions that we get in Homer are not the proportions that we might have expected from the kinds of stories that we're that we're familiar with.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_04: But that's where a lot of the like the subtlety happens and all this stuff with disguise and subterfuge and all those kinds of things.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um and and so I mean I think that's the the main the the main thing that the poem is about is about homecoming, and I would echo what Jonathan said about justice, sort of the manifestation of justice, the re-establishment of order when he gets home.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_04: And one of the really fascinating things I think about Odysseus as a hero, compared to what we are probably predisposed to think about heroic literature or heroic narrative, is uh this this is this is really alien, and I think it's really important to kind of try to wrap our minds around this.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_04: Odysseus does not change, in my opinion.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_04: He does not develop as a character.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_04: He's the same guy at the end that he was at the beginning, and he uses the same kinds of tactics at the end that he had used throughout his life and throughout the rest of the story.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_04: This is one of the ways in which Homer's Odysseus is is utterly different from Nolan's Odysseus.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_04: And that's not, I'm not saying that to prejudge which, you know, that one is bad and the other is good, or we you can't have both or something.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's just to make the sort of analytical point that the type of hero that we have in Homer is a completely different, um, he's uh built different, as the kids say, I guess, or used to say, um, not that long ago.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, he's a different kind of guy from the very introspective, brooding, um uh guilt-wracked person played by Matt Damon.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_04: Odysseus is is the same as he ever was.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's signaled in the first line of the poem, and it carries through all the way to the end, in my opinion.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: So that's that's a also a useful uh something useful for thinking with in terms of saying, okay, well, how does heroic literature change over time?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_04: How does our conception of the hero change over time?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_04: Because I think as a modern audience generally, we don't want that kind of hero.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_04: We want our our our heroes to have some kind of of arc, you know, to to some some kind of development that we can see um and and maybe use in it in an exemplary fashion for ourselves or something.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so it's just it's it's kind of cool that we have these instances that that don't do that, and yet they are at the fountainhead of whatever it is that we mean when we think about like heroic literature or heroic storytelling.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great point.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: I I would say that's true of nearly all literature before the modern novel.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't this whole idea that characters are supposed to grow and change over the course of a story and deepen or something is is a pretty modern notion.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, sure, you can find um instances of it going back uh probably quite far, if depending on how you want to read certain things.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but even take something like Dante, take the commedia.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, yes, that is itself of a cosmic progression.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: But the character of Dante uh in that poem is Dante at one particular moment in his life, he's he doesn't actually improve over the course of the poem.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a retrospective look at uh a sort of place he was sort of stuck in at a certain time in his life.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe even something like that, you could see it as like a transformational moment in the the hero's life.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but uh it's it's he's still rather static, at least the way I I've always experienced Dante.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's I mean, and so Odyssey is another great example of it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but like I say, you know, there are maybe instances of it uh even in antiquity of this like changing hero or character.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I don't know, Achilles in in the Iliad, even is like kind of hard to tell.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like, is he going through uh alterations in his character?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh or are we just seeing like different sides of him that are always there?
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't I'm not sure how to take it myself.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh I think it's it's just a great point Eric raises.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like modern readers look for that, they want to see how the character is is is uh changing and learning and growing.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh so like when I did teach the Iliad, like that's what they were looking for that.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, show me somebody who's improving over the course of this story, and it's like I don't know.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: They're kind of all just you know spelling their own doom, like character is is destiny, right?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um so uh it's it is something to appreciate.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: We'll have to talk about when we get to the movie, though.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not I don't my recollection of the movie, the Nolan film, is actually not so much that the Odysseus' character really uh changes or learns anything.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: I he divulges more of why he is the way he is to the audience as we go through the film, but that's a little different from um actually watching him change, uh, I I think.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: But that's maybe my recollection's off.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, maybe you guys read it a little differently.
• 40:40
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• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a question to continue about the changes of Odysseus.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and this question is specifically for Eric.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: As you noted, there are various versions of Odysseus in antiquity.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so my question for you is what should we make of these?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because it seems like there were different adaptations already of Odysseus uh by the Greek tragedians, uh Seneca later on, and so on.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so in the ancient world, I mean we have um uh we have, I mean, if you want to be really sort of schematic about it, we have the tradition of the good Odysseus and the tradition of the bad Odysseus.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um and and in Homer, we get, I think, mostly what is supposed to be the the good or the ennobling picture of Odysseus, as opposed to something like uh the Philoctetes of Sophocles, or especially the way that Ulysses is characterized in Virgil's Aeneid.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the really fascinating thing, I think, about this is that the good Odysseus is good and the bad Odysseus is bad, typically for precisely the same reasons.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, so he's always a trickster figure, he's always very sort of wily and cunning.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're on his team, that's good, and you like that.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_04: And so, you know, the Greeks like in the Iliad generally like Odysseus, even though some of what Odysseus is shown doing in the Iliad, like in the episode with Dolan, and you know, is is is by objective standards perhaps not so good.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um, whereas if you don't like him, like if you're a Roman reading uh reading Virgil's Aeneid, then exactly that sort of tricksiness of uh of Odysseus or Ulysses is why you would hate him, or or think he's sort of a low, mean, um uh base figure.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I would want to relate this, I think, to what Odysseus is already the very first time that we meet him in the Odyssey in the first line where he is polluter poster.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_04: He is many turned or many turning, he's he's a guy with a lot going on.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, that's right.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um he's he's uh this is this kind of contradiction uh or or um shiftiness is at the heart of who Odysseus is and makes him, I think, uh kind of the prime uh uh possibility in um in the w what we might call the sort of the European literary tradition for uh for Or this kind of the shape-shifting where he can go authors can take him in a number of different directions because that's really at the heart of who Odysseus is as a hero.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so this makes him very malleable in one sense.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_04: He can be turned into a hero, he can be turned into a villain.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um but he's malleable because in a in a deeper sense uh he's malleable in that way, in a deeper sense because he's not.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: In other words, he always is who he is, and who he is is to be shifty, tricky, right?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_04: A uh a man in disguise who delights in in uh in cunning and deceit.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_04: And so this makes him um useful for a lot of different things, I guess, is is what I would say.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_04: That's why he's such a rich source, I think, of adaptation um for centuries and centuries and centuries.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_04: You know, because he's he's sort of the ultimate man of mystery in some ways, I guess.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know, I guess that's what I would say about it.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a really uh helpful reminder of what makes him so attractive to storytellers since antiquity and of course now the film.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: So switching gears to Nolan's Odyssey, uh in his commentary about it on X, the translator Daniel Mendelson said the following Imagine a hundred million big screen adaptation of Moby Dick, in which Ahab is a jovial, pale fellow, well-met type, adored by his crew, suddenly tormented by moral reservations about the wailing industry.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, it's an adaptation.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Who could complain?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, what were your impressions of the film, all three of you?
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: What stood out?
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I I think that is uh perhaps a little un unfair uh to Nolan.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I I want to tie this back to what um Eric said about the fact that Odysseus doesn't change, right?
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_03: And Jonathan suggesting this would be very difficult even for a novelistic adaptation, much less a three-hour movie.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's a sense I think you get from the ancient Greek poets that the gods are changeling.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I think that's very difficult to from for a you know modern Christian or post-Christian secular audience to sort of wrap their heads around changeling gods, right?
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: So so I'd agree with Eric that I think Odysseus does not change in the course of the Odyssey.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, I you know, I think he discovers nature in the middle of the Odyssey, uh, the nature and name of Moli, the the the herb that that Hermes gives him to escape Circe.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_03: So he discovers that there's some knowledge of nature that makes him unchanging.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: That, of course, is sort of Leo Strauss's interpretation of the Odyssey.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so you have something that makes him, somehow he doesn't change despite all of the sort of changing whims of the gods that are going to change him.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: But changeling gods and unchanging man is such a difficult, that's a very difficult lift for anyone, right, that's raised in a culture of divine immutability, which is one thing I think that atheists maintain, even if you reject Christianity, there's no sense that the cosmos is capricious and sort of has, you know, changes its mind about you from day to day.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so I think we're the cultural appropriation of the ancient Greeks, which is going to go on and on and on, and those adaptations, those are a lot different than Ahab, right?
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_03: Melville is writing, right, you know, Ahab is a biblical character.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: You don't have to translate that out of, yes, yes, you know, Christopher Nolan just made a sword and sandal retelling of Oppenheimer, where the Trojan horse is a nuclear bomb and he accidentally destroyed civilization and now he feels guilt.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: He does, I think, change because he somehow reconciles his guilt and finds a way forward, but maybe not to be king.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_03: So he shuffles off the stage.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_03: So can can we forgive him for that?
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I think if we see how much difficult it is to put the real Odysseus on screen uh versus Ahab.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I just point out this is very difficult to do.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, I don't know if people have seen the 1954 Kirk Douglas Odysseus where Silvana uh Mangano is the plays both Penelope and Circe.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um you you can you can do various things Nolan actually has the gods, and I don't think does such a bad job.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_03: Hollywood tends to get rid of the gods.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_03: So um if you really want to make it a poem of of homecoming, or sorry, a movie about homecoming, you could do what the um the Uberto Pasolini movie with Wraith finds as Odysseus did uh just two years ago.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_03: For some reason, I'm not sure why that didn't get more buzz.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_03: But that's the one.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's book 13 on, and it gives a story of more integrity, but it's a it can be a completely naturalistic psychological account of his homecoming.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's not a bad film, but but Pasolini does not try to take on the gods.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when Nolan takes on the gods, the gods become Christianized, they become part of the moral regeneration or Odysseus overcoming his guilt, which of course, you know, is total nonsense from a Greek perspective.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: But how can you make a movie audience in America like reconceptualize their whole idea of the divine, you know, just to just to crush a bag of popcorn and watch the awesome special effects of your movie?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's much more difficult to have a film adaptation of the Odyssey than it would be to have a film adaptation of Moby Dick.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: I think we share much more of a religious sensibility and culture with Melville than we do Homer, and yet it's still part of our inheritance, and yet we're still going to continue to reinterpret it and reinterpret it.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's signaled from the very beginning where we have a rapper rapping his staff on the stage, and you know, hey, this is for us, and we're gonna do it our way, and uh it's going to be something that makes sense to modern audiences.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it's that's going to transform uh the source material fundamentally, but you know, my attitude is, you know, who cares?
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's a B plus movie that finally got me to go to the theater.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I that's a great uh great point uh about how how actually far we are from um uh from the world of the the pagan Greeks.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I saw I saw someone posting on like Substack or someplace um a something about how um Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespearean story are are like the best that there is, the King Lear.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and um and it reminded me of this ridiculous line.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry, I'm gonna out myself as a lowbrow person, uh uh from Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, great film, uh, in which in which uh a Klingon character opines that you have not really heard Shakespeare until you've heard him in the original Klingon.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it just reminded me that it so the congruence of these things in my mind uh makes me think that sometimes you know it it could be that we're we are now as Westerners, as modern Westerners, Christian or post-Christian, we are now so far from our origins in in pagan antiquity that without perhaps realizing it, that it can actually sometimes take a non-Westerner like Kurosawa to have you know a really insightful take on some of our uh mythopoetic material or or literary material um that uh that can seem far from us now, even Shakespeare can seem that way sometimes.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but um yeah, I just think that's a fascinating, like just to consider how how alien Homer's world actually is to us is is a really uh fascinating thing.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um the one quick point I would make about my uh takeaway from the film, uh or something I noticed about it uh that was very interesting to me, uh is uh a very distinctly modern thing that that he did was have the characters uh be self-conscious of their historical moment.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: This is not something uh that anyone before contemporary, you know, modern times could have done.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because one of the things that defines us as moderns, what makes us modern, the very word itself indicates this, is uh that we are historically conscious in a way that previous eras simply were not.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_02: They they may have had somewhere another notion of of history of um perhaps a kind of euhemoristic uh you know notion of decline over time, but um we we like situate ourselves constantly, we're doing this in relation to previous uh periods uh in our own history, um, uh and even in relation to uh imagined or hoped for futures or dreaded futures perhaps.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and this is just an utterly modern thing to do.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: So to have the characters in this film like aware that they're living in the Bronze Age um and and like lamenting its um its collapse, which they have apparently precipitated uh through through um their their sort of systematic violation of what gets called Zeus's law in in the movie, um is uh really fascinating.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_02: Move.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it totally signals like this is a modern take on the story.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's not to say that Homer, well, Homer, whatever, the milieu that we get these poems from, uh, wasn't preoccupied with uh changes in civilization over time, because you know, this is the Homeric epics are full of things that clearly do come from the Bronze Age, from Mycenaean civilization, and also things that are much more clearly like eighth century or so, uh, long after that civilization had passed.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_02: So um they're mixing it up and thinking about it, you know, in their own way.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, whoever, you know, is responsible for these these epics as we have them, but um, but not in that really straightforward and self-conscious way that that Nolan's doing in the film, um, you know, in which we sort of learn that, you know, like we're all the thief people, really, because we've we've broken Zeus's law.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: It is it is didactic uh and edifying in a way uh that uh um can modern literature seldom aspires to be literature or cinema, whatever, uh seldom aspires to be.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't tend to shy away from this.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we're familiar with like politically motivated um art, artistic expression in various media.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think that uh generally we regard such stuff as like inferior work, less ambitious.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think Nolan was trying to be serious and ambitious and do it at a high level, even if he only scored a B.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he's you know, it it was actually quite aspirational, I think.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that is something that, like as Eric was talking about earlier, the ancients did appreciate a certain degree of edifying or didactic uh material in their epic and other literature.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_03: So um I don't know.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_03: That was if you haven't seen the movie, what Jonathan's talking about is they're the they're hyper conscious of the sea peoples having destroyed civilization and then spoiler alert, they were the sea peoples all along.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um and this this hits, you know, according to medieval Irish chronicles like the Book of Invasions.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a descendant of the Sea Peoples.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so the cultural appropriation is fine.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: And imagining the late Bronze Age collapse is something we've always done.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's very difficult to imagine yourself as an ancient person with no historical consciousness.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: So you have hyper-historical consciousness that the people have at the time.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, that's not part of Homer's world.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_03: And there's something didactic.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_03: This is a movie for those of us who risk losing civilization.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think it can't stick the landing.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_03: There's one line in a Matt Damon voiceover at the end.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_03: People have to encounter this in song because they're can't they can't read.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_03: This is about the collapse of literacy, right?
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, that's ironic because we're watching a Hollywood blockbuster.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's a movie.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_03: There's not a single piece of written material or literature in the film.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_03: And if anything, the film is trying to bring an oral culture to life.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it couldn't quite stick that landing.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_03: But that ambition, I would also say that I think as a Hollywood adaptation, if you're trying to do something for a large audience, this was the right direction to go.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_03: And audacious and didactic.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_03: I think that the didacticism that you've been talking about, about uh being um an element of epic, being an element of poetry uh from the beginning, having that, you know, even in the time of the you know, Socrates at the Homeridae, people that that derive moral lessons from this book, but do it in a way that's changed.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_03: I think Nolan misses ultimately, but I think he misses in the right direction, um, even if many of the uh uh the moves he has to make to get us there, you know, the gods help those who help themselves.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, I know Theodore Adorno calls Odysseus the first bourgeois, but now we got Ben Franklin as Odysseus.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, what are we doing here?
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, but trying to make this our story, I think, uh, despite the fact that that results in a few cringe-inducing moments for the shrinking, literate audience of these movies, uh, I think is the right direction to go.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe the reason I I like the movie is because I appreciated that that audacity.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_04: I will say, so I I think there is something to what Mendelssoys in the quote that you read at the beginning of this.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um and this this is gonna be a pedantic point, but I don't I am a pedant, so I don't really care.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um the the my biggest issue with this is the fact that it says at the end of the movie, based on Homer's Odyssey.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_04: That's what sort of like, I don't know, you do whatever you want with Odysseus, that's fine, you know.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_04: Like, and he can be all things to all people.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, he's he's been many things to many people over the course of the centuries, but to say that the movie is based on Homer's Odyssey, when in fact, at every crucial point in the narrative, the movie is anti-Homeric, in my opinion, or it subverts what Homer is actually saying or wanting to say about uh about Odysseus or anything else that's happening.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, just as one example of this, the fact that Odysseus forgets while he's on Calypso's Island, he forgets that he's married, he forgets that he has a son.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_04: That is that's not just intention with Homer.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_04: That is absolutely opposed to everything that Homer says about Odysseus.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_04: So, so so for me, if he had said like inspired by Homer's Odyssey, or a response to Homer's Odyssey or something, like I would, I would be um uh a little bit less irked by that than than based on.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_04: And again, I know that this is a small point, but it is odd to me that, like, I mean, I think what Mendelssohn is is is is getting at is that there, if we're talking about adaptation, if we want to use that word, this is an adaptation of this story, this is an adaptation of this book, then it's probably true that there are limits to the liberties that you can take.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um, that's not so much the case with myth itself or with with narratives themselves.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_04: And so we have accounts in the ancient world of, I mean, famously, what causes uh what gets the Greeks over to Troy is Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_04: However, there are also alternate versions in the ancient world that Iphigenia wasn't actually sacrificed.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_04: She was whisked away in a dinner deer was substituted and she was saved.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_04: There are traditions in the ancient world that of so again, the other thing that causes the Trojan War.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_04: Helen.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we have traditions in the ancient world that, in fact, Helen never went to Troy, right?
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_04: So that's a big misunderstanding.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_04: So Helen was never you can do these kinds of things with mythic stories.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I and that's fine, and whether I think it's fine or not, it happens.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_04: This is just what occurs.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I think that's different from you know saying that this is based on this one specific account.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_04: You know, like I wouldn't call Virgil's Aeneid an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_04: I would call it in a lot of respects a response to Homer's Odyssey.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_04: But there are ways in which Virgil himself is deliberately anti-Homeric, like in Book Three of the Aeneid, which is the wandering book, he he has Aeneas go by all of these places that um where Odysseus or Ulysses had just been, but Aeneas stays at a distance from him, sort of waves to them from afar, and doesn't get kind of entangled in the same problems that that Odysseus had.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_04: Well, so Aeneas is not Odysseus, and in some ways he is a kind of superior version of the kind of guy that Odysseus or Ulysses might have been, in Virgil's opinion.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_04: So that's not an adaptation of the Odyssey, in my opinion.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_04: That's a response to it.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so anyway, those those are just a couple of thoughts on that.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_04: And and and for a different way of looking at the character that is in some ways maybe a little bit more faithful to Homer, think of uh uh George Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill and O Brother Where Art Thou, that does get at a lot of the sort of lighter side of the character of Odysseus, which is really funny because as I understand it, neither of the Cohen brothers had read the Odyssey when making O Brother Where Art Thou.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_04: They only knew it sort of through its reception in like the literary and artistic tradition.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_04: And the only person who had read it was Tim Blake Nelson, who had been a classics major at Brown um when he was a college student.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_04: But anyway, that that's a nice kind of counter counterbalance in terms of getting at you know aspects of the traditional care the wiliness of the character of Odysseus or Ulysses that that I miss a bit in um in Nolan's telling.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um but again, obviously these are things are all in the public domain, right?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_04: And so people can do do with them whatever they want.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um I just I I do think it's worth pointing out that he's he's telling uh there are a number of uh you know incidents that come from the Homeric poem, but that are retold in a way that I think is actually quite contrary to uh to the source that that he's using.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: Eric.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: Which hey, you know, it's a free country.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_02: Can I can I ask you, based on some of what you just said, what did you make of what to me is the single most interesting word in the film?
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_02: It appears on the screen uh at the very beginning, a time of apparent magic.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, the whole phrase, apparent magic, both words.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um that struck me as maybe the single most unhomeric thing in the whole in the whole thing.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um even more than the weird historical consciousness and what they do with um Odysseus's character.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like you were just talking about a time of apparent magic, you know, where we've got a divorce here between appearance and reality.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we've got which is about like the most unhomeric thing I can think of, and uh the and and magic.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_04: Like I'm just yeah, I missed that when it set it on the screen.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_04: And I I I don't know, because there's there is magic that seems more than apparent in the movie, like in the Cersei episode.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_04: Like that seems real in I mean, even on the on the film's own terms.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I mean, he really does go to the underworld as far as I can tell.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's not the underworld, the outer world, whatever.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_04: He goes to the land of the dead.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and that seems to be that seems to be real as well.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_04: So I don't I don't know.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, to have a phrase like that almost, you know, it sounds like ah, this is back when people were much more ignorant than than we are now, and they attributed supernatural causes all kinds of things that we wouldn't do.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_04: But but I I don't know how that works in terms of the movie itself, which seems to include some of this stuff.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, I don't I don't really know what to what to make of that.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_04: And and kind of famously, I mean Homer doesn't do a lot with magic as we tend to think of of that term anyway at all.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_04: Although Circe is a witch, but there's not a whole lot, it's not like this um I mean it's not Harry Potter or something.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all of the witches are minor divinities.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: Cersei is a minor goddess.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what she is.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_04: They're all divinities, yeah.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I even using the term magic, like that that's much more like you'd think of, you know, I don't know, the the Lord of the Rings or a Wizard of Earth Sea or something.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's not the kind of thing that Homer even is, anyway.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_03: So I I don't think it implies there could be a time of um unapparent magic.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_03: But I I thought that was a nod to Oppenheimer.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_04: But I could see I haven't seen Oppenheimer, so I don't know.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_04: Does does he do something with magic in that movie?
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_04: Or does he talk about it?
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_03: I think the idea that um, you know, scientific wonders hidden at a quantum level, you know, hidden at a cosmic level from our from our realm of perception will be possible so that we live in a time of mag magic that's not apparent, which are you know, have unleashed the horrors of the 20th century or something like that.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I yeah, like Jonathan, uh this it's it's the insipid of the film.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_03: And and It's it's a weird one.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_03: I think this is why, you know, is it fair?
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_03: Is it fair to what do we expect from Christopher Nolan as a reader?
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe Christopher Nolan just kind of whiffed on the meaning of the Odyssey because he assumes there has to be guilt.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and in his retelling, these things, so Christopher Nolan is just an anachronistic reader projecting a modern sensibility upon the Odyssey.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_03: Do we give him a pass?
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_03: And um I'm not in I I'm inclined to uh admit Eric's uh uh pedantry, which I think is more than you know, I think it's a good point.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because of things that Nolan does, like, you know, Nolan sets himself up as an artful writer from the very beginning.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_03: This is a time of apparent magic.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, you know.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_03: And and this is why, you know, there's something about the movie that he's sort of like a uh maybe this makes you a very successful film director.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're you're kind of um um an ordinary, uneducated person's idea of a very smart guy.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_03: But it wouldn't have been that expensive to have a few people that really knew the book to try to like sand a few of the rougher edges off um for the um you know the the the very tiny audience that we represent.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure Emily Wilson would have happily consulted had she been asked.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_04: Well, and I I mean I wonder too, you know, if she made a buck off this movie, as you pointed out.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, and it seems like if he really wanted to challenge his audience, because I think at least superficially, that's one of the things maybe that the movie is supposed to do, you know, um uh look at how bad whether it's war or trickery, and look at how how terribly, you know, Odysseus feels about this in the aftermath, and maybe you should do a little self-reflection too, or something like that.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_04: Um if he really wanted to challenge his audience, he might have gone in the other direction because one of the things that I think is is a marked feature that is odd about uh maybe uh would strike many folks now as odd about the Odyssey is that I don't see any indication in Homer's Odyssey that Odysseus feels badly in the least about the Trojan War or about trickery or about deceit, about killing.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um and the chief moment of this, which is is still like is unsettling to me every time I read it, you know, we see this guy who is um uh longing to get back home, be reunited with his wife, be reunited with his son.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_04: And when the nurse Eurycleia sees his scar and makes a big noise, he is absolutely ready to do violence to her if she's going to ruin his plan at that moment.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_04: And this is his childhood nurse, uh an old lady.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_04: And he will not hesitate to put her down if she is going to get in in the way of his plan.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_04: I find that extremely unsettling when I read it, but that's who Odysseus is in Homer, and the audience might have been challenged a little bit more to say, well, what if there is a world in which uh in which people kill and don't really feel too badly about it, and in which they use deceit, trickery, subterfuge to achieve their own ends, and don't feel too badly about it, and we make them heroes.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_04: W what about what about that?
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, and that's a way that audiences really have to go, oh, here's something that's really totally alien to my preconceptions and and and what I'm thinking, that I now have to to to sort of contemplate.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_04: And that might have been really interesting, but it would have made for a very different um and and in some ways less tame movie, I think.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_03: The moral challenges to Homer are ancient.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_03: And and you don't just see that in the many versions of the myth, uh, of the myths, the alternative versions and the moral implications of those.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_03: You also see it, I think, in Plato Socrates, you see it in Thucydides, that maybe there is something about the divine, even if it's not clear what it is, that should establish some moral limit.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_03: And after we do that, whether it's the Athenians sailing to Syracuse, you know, maybe we've done something deucer, maybe we've maybe we've um broken some sort of order.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there is a sort of internal challenge among the ancient Greek philosophers who uh are not keen on Homer and are not keen on those that derive their moral lessons from Homer and are doing some talking back uh to the poets, right?
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_03: And to some degree this is artful.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, Plato Socrates and the the quarrel between the poets and the philosophers that he sets up, say in Book 10 of the Republic and elsewhere.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, we could make we could make a lot of hay about that.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_03: But but home, the the idea that Odysseus feels no guilt has uh challenged people, uh, and not just you know, Christians or secular people or those of us that are guilt-wracked and you know, overly compassionate or soft or whatever we are.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but it also, you know, there was an ancient Greek challenge, there was an early Greek challenge to that as well.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_03: And um, and that's why I think that Nolan is maybe dipping back into an older well um when he builds up these themes.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, he's trying to make them play with us.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_03: So Zeus's law is um treat others how you would like to be treated.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_03: So Zeus is Jesus, I guess, and and Odysseus is Ben Franklin, I guess, because the gods help those who help themselves.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_03: And these and I so and he's making it our story, and I'm kind of squirming in my seats because it's a little cornball um for me.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, it's a lot, it's very corny.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but but I think I see what he's trying to do.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_03: And um, and then maybe you shouldn't say that it's a straight-up adaptation of the Odyssey, but if it makes more people read the Odyssey, yeah, right, absolutely.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, and and then Mendelssohn's translation, which sounds like the best one, and I'm gonna go reread it now.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I might not have had you know the movie not come out and we we come back and look at it.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so um, you know, and I I he in Mendelssohn, I think even in what Nadia read, right, has this well we should expect so little from him, but I think we could expect uh read Lombardo, because I think my children have absconded with my Mendelssohn translation, the plot becomes and I I uh very much agree with what Rob just said, and I want to echo and emphasize that.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you know, we can quibble over this and that, and I'm and I'm obviously happy to do that, but the fact is this this movie has gotten tons of people interested in Homer, in uh in reading Homer, maybe in learning Greek, you know, which is tremendous.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_04: That's a really fantastic, uh, fantastic thing.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_04: And so the fact that this movie exists means that um a whole huge group of people who might have had zero interest in Homer or the ancient world at all, now suddenly they're like, Oh, that's kind of cool.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_04: Or maybe I'd like to learn something about that, which I think is just is is fantastic.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, my friend Steve Neper, who also came out for the Ashland MFA Summer Residency, compared it to Baz Lerman's Great Gatsby.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because he said that Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby was the last time that something in the high school canon got the big Hollywood treatment.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, interesting.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think this compares, I think Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby was kind of a lurid mess that I didn't see it, you know, that did not love the story and it was just very roaring 20s lavish scenes or something like that, in that sort of oversaturated Lerman camera work or something like that.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think that that's might have made us more interested in the story, the way that those of us who are like, oh my gosh, look at what that Vandal Christopher Nolan did to our, you know, the Western inheritance.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'm obviously pushing back against that reading here.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I think that makes people more interested in the story and go back and discover what the Odyssey is really like.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_03: I I first encountered it in high school in that Robert Fagel's translation.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we read it after Salman Rushdie's Haroon and the Sea of Stories, which I thought was just kind of precious.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought I was too old for it.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_03: I was, you know, 14 years old or something like that.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then we got to the Odyssey, and I thought, this is the good stuff.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I've sort of always loved the story.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, later I read it, I think, in a better translation and and and studied it uh at a deeper level and found out there's, you know, that this is, you know, part of a much longer poetic tradition, much and and philosophically controversial from the very beginning, uh, and sort of got a little dirt under my nails.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I I hope that this movie invites other people to do that too.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it might.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um and in a way that's more difficult than getting people interested in in Moby Dick, which which I think is is easier to see the philosophical stakes of just by reading it.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_03: I think understanding the philosophical stakes of the Odyssey are quite and the story and what what problems it raises for uh man and the gods.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_03: And um, yeah, so as a sort of Hollywood epic that brought in the gods, and maybe the gods were more like Thucydides' gods or more like Plato's gods, were more like the Christian god than they are Homer's gods.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_03: I I think that's right.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_03: But if they get people interested in those questions, you know, okay, you know, I'm well, maybe I give maybe I give them an A minus, Notia.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_03: No, I still I'm gonna stick with the B plus.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_03: There was too it was too cringy at times.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you all for joining for this conversation.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So many thanks to Jonathan Geltner, Eric Hutchinson, and Rob Wiley for this conversation.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we hope if you haven't picked up your translation, whatever it is, of the Odyssey to reread this summer, that you will soon.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.