GoKawiilWho’d have thought Helen of Troy would cause so much trouble?
Earlier this year, certain quarters of the internet spun out at news that Kenyan-Mexican Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o was rumored to appear as the impossibly beautiful Spartan noble Helen—whose face, it was later written, launched a thousand ships—in Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Hollywood Homeric epic, The Odyssey.
The confirmation of her casting in May kicked off another wave of conniption fits. One YouTuber seemed to seriously suggest that the nation of Greece should file a lawsuit against Nolan. (On what grounds, exactly?) “Helen of Troy” rocketed up the trending topics on X, with the website’s trillionaire owner claiming that Nolan “has lost his integrity” and had “desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award.” Such a feverish reaction to the idea of a fantastical ancient queen being played by a Black actress has become grimly predictable. History, literature, and even completely made-up myths have become fodder for reactionaries, cranks, and amateur historian content creators with names like @RomanHelmetGuy, all contesting vague ideas of “Western culture.” (@RomanHelmetGuy did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Few people know more about these squabbles than Emily Wilson. An Oxford-born, Oxford-educated classicist (with another degree in early modern English literature), Wilson’s modern translations of Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have themselves been staging grounds for culture war consternation. It’s an issue she seems to approach with the resolve of a grizzled veteran—or just an exhausted one. When I say the words “culture war” in our interview, Wilson, now the department chair of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, pats her hand over her yawning mouth, exaggeratedly. Bo-ring.
The dust-up around Wilson’s Odyssey, published in 2017, starts at the beginning. In the original Greek, the story opens with a description of its hero, Odysseus, the wayfaring Ithacan king. He is first described with the Greek word polytropos, an untranslatable adjective meaning something like “many-turned.” “It’s a very rare epithet,” Wilson says. “It’s a striking choice. It’s also a choice that hints at the layers and twists and turns of this poem, in the journey, in this protagonist. In a way, it's a promise: you’re not going to be bored by this poem. And you’re not going to be bored by this protagonist.”
Previous Greek-to-English translations had rendered polytropos as “various-minded,” “skilled in all ways,” and “the man of twists and turns.” Wilson goes for a simpler, arguably more evocative word: “complicated.” The choice raised the ire of a class Wilson terms “armchair classicists,” who saw complicated as somehow "pejorative" or even an “abomination.” Wilson herself was called “woke,” a “feminist leftard,” and worse. “Complicated is not an insult!” she insists. “Obviously it’s not. Though some people love to wig out online.”
Criticisms of Wilson’s Odyssey—the first major translation from a female scholar—followed their own predictable pattern. Her language was too modern, too plain. Her translation afforded sympathy to previously monstrous figures (like the dreaded cyclops) and dignity to slaves, swineherds, and the servant women summarily slaughtered, near the poem’s climax, by Odysseus and his wimpy son. Where others framed these killings as a result of the women’s inequity—Fagles, in his popular translation, and the one I read as an undergraduate studying the classics, called them “sluts”—Wilson found little in the original to support these sorts of value judgments. No victim-blaming here.