What to Read & Listen to After Seeing The Odyssey
I’m currently doing the thing I do after seeing a movie (The Odyssey) I really enjoyed or found interesting: digging into related media. Yesterday I had an hour in the car, so I listened to this episode of The Daily podcast with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson.
I think it’s quite odd to think that one book or one translation erases the others. I mean, if people prefer some other translation or if people want to read the Greek, I would love for them to do that. I think it’s great. I have no desire to legislate about which versions of “The Odyssey,” or of any ancient text, people want to engage with. So I think there’s something quite strange about the idea that the canon doesn’t have room for many, many different interpretations, translations, engagements, reinventions.
I’ve also flagged this New York Review of Books podcast with Daniel Mendelsohn, another NYT podcast with Madeline Miller, and this WNYC podcast with Emily Wilson for future listening.
As for reading, Wilson and Mendelsohn both did contemporary translations of The Odyssey within the past few years: The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (I loved this, read it aloud to my kids) and The Odyssey translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Actor Stephen Fry recently did a more approachable reimagining of The Odyssey. The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds is even more accessible, especially for younger readers.
Miller is the author of two great novels based on the Iliad and the Odyssey: Circe (my personal favorite of the two…I love this book and tell everyone to read it)1 and The Song of Achilles.
Other novels based on Homer’s works: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
Mendelsohn also wrote An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic back in 2018; it sounds really interesting:
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician’s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.
Do you have any recommendations for podcasts or favorite Odyssey translations/retellings?
I would love to see a $200 million blockbuster adaptation of Circe directed by, say, Céline Sciamma, Sarah Polley, Chloé Zhao, Celine Song, Patty Jenkins, or Greta Gerwig…no shortage of great options. ↩
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Derek Thompson interviews classics professor Karen Ní Mheallaigh of Johns Hopkins about how the Odyssey continues to influence literature and culture on a recent episode of his Plain English podcast.
Thompson had translator Emily Wilson on his podcast and Substack asking "What Is Lost When We Make 'The Odyssey' Modern?"
It's a podcast aimed at kids, but The Odyssey episodes from Greeking Out are fun and super accessible.
Two things:
1, from your keyboard to Hollywood’s ears—I’d pay so much money for a Zhao or Gerwig Circe!
2, all the discourse has me hankering to rewatch the 2004 Troy, also a movie very of it’s time and a pre-GoT Benihoff behind the script has me curious for a revisit
Please please please check out the "Songs of Penelope" trilogy (Ithaca, House of Odysseus, Last Song of Penelope). It's the whole story told from the point of view of Penelope/maids/other women/goddesses. Claire North writes like a dream.
I highly recommend Mendelsohn's "An Odyssey." I had read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey earlier this summer when I was lucky enough to be traveling through Greece with my girlfriend's son, a classics professor. Mendelsohn's really gave me a good idea of what a classic scholar actually does every day, and his sometimes thorny but always still loving relationship with his cranky dad made for a touching, funny, erudite, and intense story. Looking forward to the movie.
It was also fun to re-watch "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" for the Odyssey callouts.
The BBC radio comedy/history series "You're Dead to Me" did an episode on the Iliad and Odyssey recently:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002y8t3
It's only a hour for the podcast version or there's a half hour broadcast version.
A fun book to read to see what happens next is 1177: the year civilization collapsed by Eric Cline. (The Odyssey takes place during the end of 13th/beginning of 12th century).
Great book detailing how interconnected the Mediterranean economy was and the effect the Sea Peoples (only one of many factors) had on the collapse. before I read it I had no idea how much the greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians were economically and culturally interconnected. Great read.
This is very niche, admittedly. But it's one of the main reasons why I was excited to see the blockbuster this week.
When I was a kid, I spent a great deal of time playing a PC game version of the Odyssey, where the main character was the terrier Wishbone. I haven't played it in probably 25 years so I hope it holds up.
I remember that Wishbone episode, and I had the Wishbone book, too!
Omg Wishbone was one of my all time faves (and his little paws on the bow are still memorable!) It’s here for the interested/nostagic
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