Thanks for asking but no, I won’t be watching Christopher Nolan’s new film. Really I have nothing against Matt Damon running around shouting at other men, beset by irresistible women whose sole purpose is him, and occasionally mumbling something about his wife. But I’m reading Emily Wilson’s book about translating ancient literature (into English, rather than for IMAX) and it’s going to take more than a clammy Tom Holland* to drag me away.

Wilson is known for her celebrated translations into iambic pentameter of The Odyssey and The Iliad. In Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, she asks ‘How can we imagine the ancients, in all their strangeness and all their strange familiarity?… How can we read their surviving words without projecting onto these texts false ideas – such as the notion that they must be edifying, a model of logic and lucidity? How can we see them instead as the creations of once-living, complex human beings? Can their words be brought back to life in a new language – or must the dead stay dead?’

Her answers explore Sappho’s poetry, Demosthenes’ speeches, Greek and Roman comedies in all their rudeness, bordering on obscenity, love elegy, Stoicism and the war poetry that has inspired so much, Nolan included, apparently. Wilson writes with great erudition but the book is easy to read, conveying as it does the pleasure she finds in her subject and raising fascinating political and social questions too. Not to mention, drawing in references from Christopher Logue’s War Music – his tremendous book-length poem inspired by The Iliad – Émile Zola, Anne Carson, that song by Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B** and a nod to P.G. Wodehouse.

Honestly, I have nothing against watching large groups of men charging across wide plains brandishing weapons. It’s just that in the three hours that the film lasts I could have read Wilson’s consummate essay on translating The Odyssey and contemplated the principles to which she aspires, whilst nursing a wine-dark glass in peace.

Of course, it’s wonderful that people are going to the cinema, enjoying the spectacle and the shared experience, and then heading to their local bookshop to seek out The Odyssey or novels, poetry and plays inspired by it or books about Homer such as Homer-Haunted by Henry Power which I think looks brilliant. Power explores how these epics have been read and have shaped storytelling, culture and politics for centuries examining their influence on writers from Virgil to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Derek Walcott to the current Oxford Professor of Poetry, A.E. Stallings.

Truly, I have nothing against torn shirts that mask neither muscles nor clumsy dialogue but in three hours one can read (aloud, Homeric bard-style) Alice Oswald’s Memorial three times and find more with each reading. Oswald’s poem memorialises those who die with little more than a mention in Homer’s Iliad. She makes them unforgettable, affords each a biography, breathing life into the doomed. Or, I could turn to Meadowlands by Louise Glück, her Odyssey-inspired collection in which Penelope, the sirens and Circe have plenty to say for themselves (‘Some people are pigs,’ Circe says, ‘I make them look like pigs.’) and in which Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, is depicted with great complexity, guilty, despairing and developing a wry humour. And there would still be time to watch O Brother, Where Art Thou?

So, candidly, nothing against a film which will dominate conversation for a few weeks thanks to a poem that has endured for centuries, but may I recommend two stunning and very different novels with Homeric resonances?

Nymph by Sofia Montrone is set in a crumbling Italian hotel owned by Leo’s grandmother. Whilst helping her grandmother clean rooms and cook, Leo hoards the objects left behind by guests. Her father, an academic, sits by the pool in the unforgiving sun fully clothed and largely sozzled and recounts the story of Telemachus searching for his father, a man he barely knows.

Leo’s story, and that of her family and the hotel are told across two summers, eight years apart (each, incidentally and enjoyably, during which a football world cup is taking place). Montrone toys with the classical and ecological meanings of her title and weaves a beautiful, rather sweaty, story.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead sees the return of the magnificent Ray Carney. Like Odysseus, he is clever, resourceful, economical with the truth and seems to have (some of) the gods on his side. If you haven’t, you must read Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto before turning to this much-anticipated conclusion to the trilogy to find out the fate of the furniture salesman who is definitely going straight, definitely retiring from his shadier business… any minute now.

May I also suggest for younger classicists Marcia Williams’ comic strip style The Iliad and the Odyssey, such a fun and lively way into discovering these stories, with a cyclops to rival John Goodman in O Brother and The Odyssey by Liv Albert, which presents the story and its context in quite a lot of detail without being daunting and with vivid illustrations too.

For really young readers, there are even board and picture book versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Admittedly in twenty-two pages they don’t get into all the complexities of the epic poems but the drawings are great, providing somewhere between three minutes and three hours of monstrous entertainment.

If you do want a fun odyssey to watch, I loved The Last One for the Road. Exploring all the Homeric ideas of hospitality and homecoming, two men undertake a trip to pick up a friend from the airport. After just one more for the road. They are wily, unwashed and deceitful and you just can’t help rooting for them. It’s Withnail and I with gelato.

May your weekend be wine-dark,
Lizzie

*The actor, not the classicist, cricket player and defender of hedgehogs, who might stand a chance.
** Mummy, please don’t look this up.