Earlier this year, reports circulated that Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o was rumored to portray Helen in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Hollywood adaptation, The Odyssey. When her casting was confirmed in May, it triggered a wave of intense hostility. One YouTuber even suggested that Greece should sue Nolan. The topic “Helen of Troy” trended on X, with the platform’s owner accusing Nolan of losing his integrity and “desecrating” the epic for an Academy Award. This feverish reaction from self-appointed defenders of “Western culture”—often represented by accounts like @RomanHelmetGuy—has become a recurring trend.
The View From Emily Wilson
Few people understand this environment better than Emily Wilson. As the department chair of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson’s modern translations of Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have frequently been at the center of culture war controversies. When the term “culture war” comes up, she dismisses it with an exhausted sigh. Her 2017 translation, which described Odysseus as “complicated,” sparked outrage among armchair classicists who labeled her “woke” or a “feminist leftard.” Wilson maintains that “complicated” is not an insult, though online critics chose to interpret it as one.
Translating vs. Interpreting
Wilson’s work differs from traditional translations by treating characters with nuance rather than assigning blame, particularly regarding the enslaved women killed in the poem’s climax. Richard Whitaker, a classicist at the University of Cape Town, criticized her approach, arguing that academic translators have a duty to represent the value systems found within the original text. Whitaker accused Wilson of prioritizing creative license over faithfulness and attempting to force modern, anachronistic biases onto ancient source material.
The Burden of Legacy
Wilson insists she took great care to match Homer’s original structure, maintaining the exact count of 12,109 lines and transposing the original dactylic hexameter into iambic pentameter, the rhythm of Shakespearean drama. In her forthcoming book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, she reflects on the challenge of translation. She notes that grafting contemporary values onto ancient texts is often unconscious, as translators struggle to see their own cultural assumptions. She argues that the concept of “Western civilization” is a 19th-century invention developed to justify colonialism and empire rather than an accurate reflection of ancient Greece.
Moving Beyond the Noise
After experiencing targeted harassment, Wilson deleted her X account in 2024 and now prefers to focus on engaging with students and readers who are genuinely interested in Homeric myths. She is currently working on an expanded translation of The Odyssey. Interestingly, even Christopher Nolan has engaged with her work. As Wilson puts it, there is a whole world of readers beyond the toxic swamp of the internet who are still eager to discuss the timeless complexities of Odysseus.
