‘Abysmal writing… I’d be ashamed’: Emily Wilson whose Odyssey translation inspired Nolan pans film

Christopher Nolan has said that his $250 million epic, The Odyssey, was shaped by the opening line of Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation: “Tell me about a complicated man.” The director praised the “genius” and “inventiveness” of Homer’s hero, insisting that Odysseus was “not just a soldier” but “an amazing strategist, a very wily person.”Now, Wilson has seen the film, and she is not too impressed. In a searing 4,000-word review for the London Review of Books, “An Uncomplicated Man,” the classicist and University of Pennsylvania professor eviscerates Nolan’s blockbuster, arguing that it strips the epic of everything that makes it great.“I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation,” she writes. “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of t