Who Owns the Odyssey?

Critics at Large | The New Yorker · Jul 16, 2026 · 50m

In its nearly three-thousand-year history, the Odyssey has undergone as many twists and turns as its protagonist does on his journey home to Ithaca. Its origins as oral poetry suggest countless revisions before it was even put into text—and many more followed, as translators have wrestled with how best to express Homer’s ancient Greek verse in their own languages. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider the latest rendition, a film adaptation by the director Christopher Nolan. The movie’s two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar budget…