Christopher Nolan has offered a translation of the Odyssey into the language of cinema. Specifically, into the IMAX dialect, the most verbose of those projected onto a movie screen: Image MAXimum was its name, before shrinking into the apocope of the brand. Faced with this other British creator reading Homer, how can one not remember that article by the young Borges, “The Homeric Versions,” where he reviews, one by one, the translations of Homer made in those other islands? Those of Buckley, Chapman, Cowley, or the one done under the direction of Pope, responded, to varying degrees, to the debate over how close to the original text a translation must be. Whether it must be literal or whether, released from the obligations of the original language with its prosody and its tropic and adjectival tradition, it can break away and establish a genuinely new text—like one who founds a republic upon the ruins of a kingdom, sparing themselves the superfluous vulgarity of beheading the sovereign or the reckless oversight of leaving him wielding the scepter
The Odyssey: Notes on Translation
The language—the language into which Nolan translates—has a particularity: into it, one translates from all other languages at once, from all readings simultaneously. This means that fidelity here is owed less to the language as such, than to the orthopedics of narration, to the fierce obsession with fixing texts in the clay of their origin. As if there were anyone today—Nietzsche being dead, and the Gods dead with him and because of him—who knew what fear smelled like in Troy, what the greedy babble of Penelope’s suitors sounded like, what the exact size of young Telemachus’s ambition was, and what the melodious and syncopated songs of the sirens promised, whose close-pressed thighs offered their iridescent scales to the sun that scorched the cliffs!
None of that is known anymore except through the successive readings of the legend and the hyperbolic poetry of the epic. Everything is oblivion and, as in Brodsky’s poem “Letter to Telemachus,” very soon, in both time and memory, not even Odysseus himself knew who had won the Trojan War. He forgot it while chewing lotuses alongside Calypso for seven consecutive years, just as we forget the world’s offenses and the epic of living by smoking joints in La Barceloneta in seven and a half drags.
Nolan, then, has translated the Odyssey. His resounding version is charged with the poetry of the language he speaks—a poetry, as we have known since Eisenstein and Vertov, whose hexameters are measured on the editing table. It is a splendid version, rabidly ancient because it is rabidly modern. It would have astounded Homer.
Blind like the swineherd Eumaeus, Borges would have listened to Göransson’s hypnotic music—a music without orchestras for a world where orchestras did not exist—and perhaps he would have wondered, as I do, what to do with an Odysseus who apostatizes his cunning, the metis that praised him as a hero and brought him back home. An Odysseus who marches into exile instead of enjoying the warrior’s rest. How can we fit into our idea of the world, forged by literature and the cult of heroes, a translation that alters the hero’s destiny in this way?
Nolan—and this is something only translators know, or know better than anyone—has created a new work by telling the one he read. To translate is to decide, and his is a translation full of decisions. They are a bit like those of Circe, daring and erratic, and a bit like those of Odysseus himself, who embarked on a journey to a place that no longer existed. They are the decisions of one of the colossal artists of our time. “All islands look the same when you travel too long,” Odysseus tells Telemachus in Brodsky’s poem. Translations do not. And this one, of course, does not either.
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