The Humility of Hindsight

A New Take on an Old Tale

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has returned an ancient story to the center of popular culture, and there is something magical about that. A tale carried forward for thousands of years, through oral performance, written text, translation, classrooms, paintings, plays, and films, and still, they can suddenly feel new again.

Nolan is not simply placing Homer on a movie screen. He is retelling Homer through the language of contemporary cinema and through our current ideas about heroism, gender, power, family, violence, and home.

This film is not a direct adaptation of Emily Wilson’s translation, however, Nolan has cited her 2017 version as an influence. Particularly, he's noted her striking opening description of Odysseus as “a complicated man.”

This connection brings me back to Wilson’s translation, which first caught my attention when it was published. Wilson was the first female classicist to publish a complete English translation of The Odyssey. As someone who runs a book club centered on female authors, I found that genuinely exciting.

What stayed with me, though, was not only who was doing the translating. It was a reminder more generally that words shape what we are able to see.

Most of us encounter an ancient story through language chosen by someone else. Once a translation becomes familiar enough, it can begin to feel permanent. We stop hearing it as one person’s collection of decisions and begin hearing it as Homer himself.

But every translator must choose. Is Odysseus clever, cunning, resourceful, or complicated? Does a sentence sound ceremonial and distant, or immediate and alive? Are the women in his household maids, servants, or enslaved people? When women are punished, does the English describe what the Greek says, or add moral judgment that makes their treatment appear more justified?

Change one word and the scene moves in a different direction. Change enough words and the reader may encounter a different man, woman, or moral universe.

Wilson’s description of Odysseus as “a complicated man” does not tell us in advance that he is undoubtedly our hero. It leaves room for intelligence, deception, adaptability, suffering, selfishness, and contradiction. Elsewhere she uses direct language about slavery where more comfortable terms can soften the power relationship. She also resists adding sexually derogatory language about enslaved women when those insults are not present in the Greek.

These may look like small differences. They are not. Words tell us where to stand when we look at a character. They tell us who deserves sympathy, whose pain counts, whose behavior appears natural, and whose punishment seems inevitable.

That is part of the magic of culture.

Culture is not something sitting safely behind us, finished and preserved. It is carried forward through retelling. Every generation inherits words and stories, then handles them with minds shaped by a different world. We like to imagine that language simply describes reality. But language also directs attention. A word can make a person sound like a servant or an enslaved person. It can make an act sound brave or brutal. It can turn a complicated human being into a villain, a victim, or a symbol.

The words we choose do more than communicate what we think. They help create the pathways through which thought becomes possible.

Wilson did not uncover a perfectly pure version of Homer untouched by interpretation. No one can do that. Instead, her choices reminded readers that earlier translators had also made choices, even when those choices had become so familiar that they no longer felt like choices at all.

A familiar story can begin to sound timeless.

But sometimes what sounds like timeless Homer is also the sound of the century that translated him.

Nolan translates the story again, this time from poetry into cinema. He makes choices about what Odysseus looks like, what Penelope’s waiting means, which moments deserve spectacle, which silences matter, and what kind of man a contemporary audience is prepared to recognize as a hero.

His version belongs partly to Homer’s world and partly to ours. This realization has led me to think about the humility of hindsight. The humility of hindsight remembers that none of us speaks from outside culture or time. We understand the world through the language available to us, the knowledge our era has produced, the relationships we have lived inside, and the assumptions that feel normal because they surround us. We see this when we encounter old cigarette ads, an interview from decades ago, a movie that has aged poorly, or a Facebook post uncovered from a time when social media still felt more like a passing fad than a permanent public archive.

The artifacts remain, but the world around them disappears.

Sometimes those words reveal harm that deserves to be named. Context does not erase consequences. Sometimes they also reveal a person speaking from a cultural moment that had not yet developed the language, understanding, or awareness that came later.

The challenge I find culture navigating now is learning to hold accountability and context at the same time. Can we say that something was wrong without pretending that people in the past were standing in the same place we are? Can we recognize growth without erasing what came before it? Can we examine another era without becoming too impressed with ourselves simply because we arrived later?

The uncomfortable truth is that some of our own language will almost certainly sound limited or even indefensible someday. We do not know which words future readers will roll their eyes at or which assumptions they will find impossible to understand.

That should not stop us from making moral judgments. It should make us more curious about the relationship between words, thought, and the worlds that produce them.

The Odyssey has survived not because it has remained unchanged, but because people continue to find ways to carry it forward. Wilson’s translation belongs partly to Homer and partly to 2017. Nolan’s film belongs partly to Homer and partly to us.

Every retelling contains traces of the original, traces of the person telling it, and traces of the culture listening. We do not simply inherit stories. Through the words and images we choose, we help decide what they will mean next.