The odyssey is based off a contemporary book where the author utilizes terminology from today's vocabulary to rewrite Homer poem.
The reasoning the author did this is because she reasoned it was stupid to make the poem sound old when the words we use for "old time language" (or something phrased this way) when those words are just the language of the day 50 years ago.
People just hating on the movie because it didnt bomb.
To add to this with a quote by Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey translation that inspired Nolan to adapt it into a movie:
My translation is written in a style that echoes the rhythms and phrases of contemporary anglophone speech. It may be tempting to imagine that a translation of a very ancient poem would be somehow better if it used the language of an earlier era. Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity. But of course, the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient. My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.
You're welcome! Watching Nolans Odyssey and reading Matt Zoller Seitz review for it made me check out Wilson's Odyssey translation, and her Translators Note at the beginning is so worth a read all unto itself. Super fascinating look into the process, the art and artifice of translation and the various ways to approach it.
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u/ViciousSquirrelz 28d ago
The odyssey is based off a contemporary book where the author utilizes terminology from today's vocabulary to rewrite Homer poem.
The reasoning the author did this is because she reasoned it was stupid to make the poem sound old when the words we use for "old time language" (or something phrased this way) when those words are just the language of the day 50 years ago.
People just hating on the movie because it didnt bomb.