Emily Wilson, the University of Pennsylvania classicist whose 2017 translation of The Odyssey sold more than a million copies, is now rewriting it — a decision she has described as very controversial. The new edition will be longer than her original, and Wilson says she has already identified flaws in that earlier work, including what she now sees as an overuse of the word slave to describe enslaved characters in Homer's poem.
Wilson made the announcement months after publicly denouncing Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film adaptation of the epic, and the timing has fueled speculation about her motives. According to The Mercury News, Wilson is currently about halfway through the new translation, which was reported by the outlet's Hillel Italie following a photo session with Wilson in Philadelphia on August 26. She was the first woman to publish a major English-language translation of Homer's epic, and that 2017 edition became both a bestseller and a culture-wars flashpoint, translator Kate Deimling has noted, adding that a full retranslation — as opposed to routine corrections in later editions — remains rare among translators.
A Blockbuster Built on Her Opening Line
The friction with Nolan traces back to the director's own words. Nolan publicly cited Wilson's translation, and specifically its famous opening sentence — “Tell me about a complicated man” — as inspiration for his film, according to the Mercury News. That line was itself a landmark choice: it renders the Ancient Greek epithet polytropos, literally many-turned, a term earlier translators had rendered as man of twists and turns or skilled in all ways of contending, according to Columbia University.
Nolan's $250 million adaptation opened in theaters on July 17, going on to set a single-film box office record at Hollywood's TCL Chinese Theatre with more than $4.1 million in ticket sales over its first 37 days, as Hoodline previously reported. The film, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, drew crowds from Fort Lauderdale to Grand Rapids and fueled a scalping frenzy at a Lincoln Square IMAX in New York.
The Review That Started It
Wilson did not hold back once she saw the finished film. In a 4,200-word London Review of Books essay titled An Uncomplicated Man, published in August, she argued Nolan's movie turned Odysseus into a reluctant warlord and flattened Homer's epic into an action movie lacking narrative depth. Per the Mercury News, Wilson also criticized the film as at times incoherent and, separately, as grandiose and superficial.
Nolan has not responded directly to Wilson's criticism, per the Mercury News, though he has spoken out more broadly against amateur criticism that he says lacks essential cinematic background. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates weighed in too, criticizing Wilson's reaction to the film as haughty superiority, according to the same report. Wilson, for her part, told the outlet she has zero control over how people receive and interpret her work.
The scholarly pushback against Nolan's film did not stop with Wilson. Ethics scholar Kathryn Lawson, writing for the Institute of Art and Ideas in August, argued that by giving Odysseus a modern conscience, Nolan diluted Homer's warning about unbridled power — a critique grounded in political philosophy rather than literary craft.
Why a Second Odyssey, Not Just a Revision
Wilson says her translation methods have grown more sophisticated since 2017, and the new edition will reflect the differing social worlds embedded in Homer's poem — a nod to the fact that Ancient Greek uses different terms for different categories of enslaved people, a distinction she says her original translation collapsed. She is aware that having two recent editions from the same translator could complicate life for teachers who assign her work, per the Mercury News, but she is pressing ahead anyway. She will probably leave the famous opening line, complicated man, unchanged.
This is not without precedent in Wilson's career. In September 2023, W. W. Norton & Company published her verse translation of The Iliad, for which she abandoned her strict line-for-line rule from The Odyssey to allow extra lines capturing the epic's battlefield chaos, according to The Guardian. Her original Odyssey had matched Homer's text line-for-line across exactly 12,110 lines of English iambic pentameter, a formal constraint that gave the translation its famously brisk pace.
Essays, Percy Jackson, and Cardi B
Wilson's academic standing was cemented in September 2019, when the MacArthur Foundation named her a Fellow with a $625,000 grant for making ancient literature accessible while examining the social assumptions embedded in translation. She holds undergraduate and master's degrees from Oxford and a 2001 Ph.D. in classics and comparative literature from Yale, and she now chairs Penn's Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.
Her essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, arrived in the UK from Profile Books in June and reached American shelves via Liveright Publishing on September 1. The collection, per the Mercury News, includes a long section on translating The Odyssey, assessments of modern editions by Daniel Mendelsohn and Robert Fagles, a discussion of the slut-shaming of Helen of Troy, and a tribute to the Roman poet Catullus. In the book, Wilson praises creative retellings such as Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles and Alice Oswald's Memorial while criticizing popularizers who simplify classical texts to build public personas — a category that reportedly includes Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, for which Wilson has expressed disdain. Riordan declined to comment through a spokesperson at Penguin Random House, per the Mercury News.
Wilson has also drawn unexpected comparisons in her public talks, discussing celebrity, the Percy Jackson books, and Stoic philosophy, and arguing that ancient comic poetry and hip-hop share common ground in obscenity and poetics — she has pointed to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's WAP as an entry point for discussing the tradition. Echoes of antiquity, she says, can turn up in unexpected places. Bookseller Peter Simon said Wilson's new approach to the Odyssey is bound to be thrilling, according to the Mercury News, as fans and scholars alike wait to see how her revised complicated man compares to the version that reshaped how English readers encounter Homer.
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