How Could I Forget Odysseus?

“An ambitious adaptation of the Odyssey, enacted by us children.” Photograph courtesy of Emily Wilson. Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning. In 2017, to accompany her translation of the Odyssey, which was excerpted in issue no. 221 of the Review, Emily Wilson wrote a piece for our website in which she recalls performing in a children’s production of Homer’s epic at eight years old. It was this turn on the stage that inspired Wilson’s early encounters with the text she would come to translate. “I loved that Odysseus could transition so easily from being somebody to being nobody, and back again,” she writes. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost … Later that year, the Review published a series of “snapshots” on our website, taken by the translator Daniel Mendelsohn on a cruise designed to retrace Odysseus’s steps through the Mediterranean—a cruise Mendelsohn took with his eighty-one-year-old father. “Odysseus wanted to know the minds of men,” Mendelsohn wrote. “In a certain sense, he’s the first anthropologist in Western literature … I found my father’s indefatigable recording of everything endearing … I thought it was really funny, when we got there, that he was taking pictures and making notes about the ship. I said, Really, Dad? And he replied, Everything is part of this experience. Which was a very Odysseus-like attitude, actually.” In 2024, the Review published an excerpt from Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s epic. It is he whom Zeus now orders you to send on his way with all speed, For it is not his fate to perish here, far from his loved ones. Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, among others, served as a source for Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation of Homer’s epic, which premiered in theaters this Friday. This week, to mark the occasion of Nolan’s film—and to give you a chance to catch up with this “complicated man”—we’ve unlocked Wilson’s and Mendelsohn’s translations from the archive. From Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ Book I Homer, translated by Emily Wilson “Daughter!” the Cloud God said, “You must be joking, since how could I forget Odysseus? He is more sensible than other humans, and makes more sacrifices to the gods. But Lord Poseidon rages, unrelenting, because Odysseus destroyed the eye of godlike Polyphemus, his own son, the strongest of the Cyclopes—whose mother, Thoösa, is a sea nymph, child of Phorcys, the sea king; and she lay beside Poseidon inside a hollow cave. So now Poseidon prevents Odysseus from reaching home, but does not kill him. Come then, we must plan: How can he get back home? Poseidon must give up his anger, since he cannot fight alone against the will of all the gods.” From issue no. 221 (Summer 2017) from The Odyssey, Book Five Homer, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn When he reached the island at last—it lies off at a great distance— He emerged from the violet-dark sea and then made his way onto Dry land, until he reached an enormous cave where the nymph Of the beautiful braids had her dwelling. There, inside, he found her. An enormous fire was burning upon the hearth. From issue no. 248 (Summer 2024) Emily Wilson is a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Last / Next Article Share