Daniel Mendelsohn on The Odyssey, Film Adaptations, and Translations

One of the things that is a recurring tension in your writing over the years in very different forms has to do with narrative and the power of narrative, its structure, its how it works on us.

And going back to The Odyssey is sort of like going to, in some ways, ground zero of narrative-

Yeah

... world.

Mm.

So could you talk to me a little bit about how The Odyssey works at the level of narrative and at the level of form, and especially when you were translating it, how you had to kind of understand it differently?

Well, I mean, you have to, you have to have a sense of the global structure, even when you're working at the local level in a translation, because your sense of what the global structure is going to help you when there are cases when you have choices.

So you have to, you have to think you know what it means and how it's constructed all the time.

The Odyssey, what's remarkable is about, I think, The Odyssey and The Iliad.

So these are the two oldest literary documents in the Western tradition, and they're already incredibly narratively complex and achieved, you know.

They seem, you know, like Athena to have emerged fully grown out of the head of the Western consciousness.

So that's one of the weird anomalies about working on these works.

I mean, there must have things that came before them.

Well, of course, we know there were things that came before them that w- weren't written down.

But whoever put these works together in their final finishing stages was a very great author, you know.

So, but what-- The narrative, I think, of The Odyssey is particularly interesting because of its complexity.

It is telling essentially two stories at the same time, the story that occurs in the present, which is how this guy gets home from the war finally after, you know, roaming around for ten years.

And then interlaced with that, uh, through flashbacks, uh, primarily, are the story of everything that happened before the principal narrative.

I think people, when they think about The Odyssey, they think, "Oh, it's an adventure story," and they, you know, may have heard of the Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters and, you know, Circe and Calypso, and they tend to think that's the whole Odyssey, whereas in fact, it's just four books out of twenty-four.

So there's an incredibly skillful, and I would dare to say, sort of modern awareness of the possibilities of narratives and these sort of elaborately interlaced chronologies, which seems to be something that we would expect from a contemporary writer.

You know, I should say, by the way, that's, that's why I have always thought, since they announced that Christopher Nolan was going to be making this movie of The Odyssey, that he's actually the perfect person to do it if he sticks with his strengths, because he is a filmmaker who has always shown a great interest in convoluted narrative.

But I think that's-- it's something you appreciate more when you're translating, just because the act of translation sort of brings you more deeply into a text than any, anything else, really.

The elaborateness of the narrative finessing, I think, is something you really appreciate, and you certainly have to be aware of that because you have to know where you are [chuckles].

You know? You have to know where you are in time when you're-- And, and it's confusing.

You can forget, you know, that you're in the s- in the middle of a story within a story within a story, and then you have to sort of extricate yourself and, and know how to fashion that, you know, within your translation.