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Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, is to retranslate the ancient Greek epic poem from scratch less than a decade after the publication of her acclaimed version.
The announcement comes after Wilson attracted controversy this summer with a scathing assessment of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation of the Odyssey, which she slammed for its “abysmal” writing and lack of sex scenes.
Wilson’s 2017 translation became a bestseller and was praised for making the 3,000-year-old epic poem modern and accessible.
“I’m now retranslating the Odyssey from scratch, with an approach closer to that of my translation of the Iliad, using somewhat more lines than the original, enabling more varied word-length and pacing,” she told the New York Times.
“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” she told the AP. “I’m about halfway through.”
Nolan cited Wilson’s 2017 translation, including its opening sentence, “Tell me about a complicated man”, as an influence on his adaptation of the poem, released in July this year and starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway.
Nolan’s adaptation took the global box office by storm, making $264m (£196m) during its opening weekend, marking the director’s best ever opening. Book sales saw a huge bump too: UK print sales of the poem increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period in 2025, after the film’s release in the middle of the month.
Wilson made headlines for her attack on Nolan’s version. Writing in the London Review of Books, she said: “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great … The writing is abysmal.”
She continued: “None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible,” adding, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Her criticism attracted strong reactions, including from novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who accused Wilson of “haughty superiority”.
Wilson’s decision to retranslate the poem predates the row over the film. In an interview recorded in the spring for the ancient-history podcast Instant Classics, she discussed her desire to return to Homer and approach the poem differently from her first translation.
“I’m proud of my Odyssey translation … I think there are lots of good things about the kinds of compression and choices that I was forced into,” Wilson said then.
She has indicated that she will “probably” keep the opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man”. Wilson also added that her original translation relied too heavily on the word “slave”, when more precise terminology could have better reflected the different forms of enslavement depicted in the poem.
The new translation will also give readers far more of Wilson’s scholarly commentary. “I’m also going to quadruple the number of endnotes because endnotes are really fun to write,” she said.
While Wilson’s decision to retranslate Homer’s poem is unusual, it is not without precedent.
“Translators quite often rework or rewrite their own previous translations,” said Matthew Reynolds, professor of English and comparative criticism at Oxford University. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning completely rewrote her translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Ezra Pound repeatedly revised his translations of Guido Cavalcanti, and Yu JongHo (유 종호) translated Jane Eyre into Korean first in 1970 and again in 2004.”
He added: “It shows that translation – especially literary translation – is not just a matter of right or wrong, good or bad, but a continual exploratory process of interpretive reimagining and re-making.”
Wilson’s new Odyssey does not yet have a publication date.
