As Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey sails into view, epic both in scale and emotional heft (Editorial, 10 July), it is interesting to note that Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film The Return strips the poem of gods and monsters to reveal Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) traumatised by war, emotionally and psychologically bewildered – an ancient precursor to post-traumatic stress disorder. Penelope (Juliette Binoche), as wife and mother, has her own inner demons to contend with in a male world immersed in physical prowess and killing. Both have been hollowed out by their experiences.
Perhaps Homer set out to tell a good story, but in doing so revealed so much more, not least the futility of war and in the words of Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!”
Alex Dickie
Edinburgh
• Your editorial states that the Greek polytropos is “skilfully rendered in Emily Wilson’s recent translation as ‘complicated’”. The most accurate rendering of polytropos is Richmond Lattimore’s “many ways”. “Complicated” loses the dual essence of the Greek: many ways as in much travelled and ingenious, inventive, cunning, resourceful, evasive, wily, slippery …
Wilson abandons Homeric hexameter and turns it into alien (for Greek) pentameter – familiar to English ears but devoid of poetic resonance with Homer. Lattimore brilliantly sustains a six-beat line in English throughout his translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad. Read them for a true sense of the originals.
Darryl Accone
Johannesburg, South Africa
• The fact that thousands of people all over the world, especially youngsters, will be talking about Greek mythology, Greek history and Greek values of the pre-classical age will be a breath of fresh air in a world where everything seems to be so inane, so superficial, so pecuniary and so transient.
Roberto Breña
Mexico City, Mexico
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