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Has Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of summer 2026 deliberately ignored the fact that The Odyssey was conceived as a poem? If so why? And does it really matter? Pele Cox and I are your referees for Homer v Nolan.
It starts with a spoiler alert because even though the original is 2,500 plus years old there are plenty of people who don’t know the story or, rather, stories, plural. It’s complicated. Listen at your peril!
Poems
- The Odyssey – translation by Robert Fagles; Penguin Edition.
- The Odyssey – translation by Emily Wilson; Norton.
- The Odyssey – translation by T E Shaw aka T E Lawrence (of Arabia); Wordsworth Classics.
- Siren Song by Margaret Atwood
- Omeros – Derek Walcott.
- Ithaca – C P Cavafy
Notes and further reading
Nolan’s blockbuster isn’t the first visualisation of Homer’s Odyssey. Nor are any of the others films that have been made over the years. That honour may well go to The Sculptures at Sperlonga discovered in 1957 in the grounds of the villa of the Roman Emperor Tiberius and thought to date back to the 1st century AD. They’re well worth a look.
Pele referenced the work of the academic Ann L T Bergen and the Barbara Clayton book A Penelopean Poetics Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s Odyssey.
Ulysses by James Joyce got an honourable mention – especially Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.
And so did Ithaca by C P Cavafy who we discussed in our Forbidden Love episode which, if you havent heard it yet we think is well worth a listen (but then we would wouldn’t we)?! There’s a great reading of Cavafy’s Ithaca by Sean Connery that’s worth a listen too, although our view, for what it’s worth, is that the Vangelis soundtrack rather gets in the way of the words.
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