Daniel Mendelsohn on The Odyssey, Film Adaptations, and Translations

In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation, premiering this week. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay cultural and intellectual life.  

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (2008). Mendelsohn is also the author of the essay collections Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (2012) and Ecstasy and Terror (2019), as well as Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2022), which were all published by New York Review Books. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.   

Next week’s episode will be a reading of Mendelsohn’s essay “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. You can read that essay and others by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

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Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm your host, Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm talking with Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn is editor-at-large of the New York review of books and has been a frequent contributor since 2000, covering everything from new translations of ancient Greek poets like Sappho to popular movies like Avatar. Last year, he released his own translation of Homer's epic, The Odyssey. Published by the University of Chicago Press. And we met to discuss it in all its complexity and enduring popularity, particularly in light of the impending release of the new summer blockbuster directed by Christopher Nolan and which he will review in a forthcoming issue. 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, it's structure, it's how it works on us. And going back to the Odyssey is sort of like going to, in some ways, ground zero of narrative world. So could you talk to me a little bit about how the Odyssey works at the level of narrative and the level form? And especially when you're translating it, how you had to kind of understand it differently.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Well, I mean, 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 you have 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 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 for them that weren't written down, but whoever put these works together in their final finishing stages was a very great author. But 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 10 years, and then interlaced with that through flashbacks 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 a... 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 24. 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. I should say, by the way, 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 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. You have to know where you are in time when you're, and it's confusing. You can forget, you know, that you're in the middle of a story within a story, within a storey, and then you have to sort of extricate yourself and know how to fashion that, you now, within your translation.

Jarrett Earnest: Because they're very complex, nested stories within stories. But it's done. When I was reading it this time in your beautiful new translation, it really struck me that how canny the opening setup is. First of all, the gods are talking and it's like you get these two directions that the story can go. One is Athena saying like, hey, can you like go send Hermes down to rescue Odysseus from the clutches of this woman who's got him? And the other is what's going on in Ithaca. And so instead of going where you really want to go with the hero, where the hero is in the sexy story on the island, you go with her to Ithica and you then are in this place where people don't know what's happening, what's happened to him. And thus the reader is aligned with the predicament of the sun, for instance, where it's like, we don't what happened to Odysseus. All right. And I think that that setup is so brilliant because it creates a logic and a momentum within the story that the characters are echoing the position of the reader.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Absolutely. I always tell my students, you know, if you want to know why a work works, rewrite it. You know, so if it had started in book, basically book five, you know, the, if the entire epic started with him on the island, wishing he were getting home, the entire thing would be different. Not, and I don't mean in terms of plot. I mean in terms of what you're talking about, which is where is the audience's emotional locus. Right, so that by spending four books, basically, either on Ithaca with the people who have been affected by his lengthy absence, the wife, the son, the people, the household servants who have remained loyal to him, you know, you're positioning the audience in a very specific way so that, by the time you do get to the actual hero in book five, you're happy to see him. You're sort of delighting in the fact that you get to know what's happening to him, finally, even though you started out like everybody else, which was in a state of ignorance, you know, so it's a very canny way to begin. Also, I mean, on a less sophisticated level, it's genius thing to withhold the hero from the audience, because what the first four books do, and this is also incredibly canny from the point of structuring a very long, very complicated narrative is until you finally get to meet him, which is four books in, five books in. You just keep hearing things about him. You know, in the first books you're in Ithaca, the first two books you are in Iithaca, people are convinced he's dead, the wife is in mourning, the suitors, you know, are trying to marry her, but you keep hearing about him, people keep talking about him And then in books three and four, Telemachus, the son, goes on this fact-finding mission and he interviews his father's war buddies from the Trojan War, and they have other stories. So by the time you actually meet him, you've heard a number of stories, some of which are contradictory. So what Homer has done by the time you get to the beginning of book five and you actually see this guy, is to create a burning interest on the part of the audience to know who exactly is this guy I heard. Fist story. This one thinks he's dead. This one is convinced he's coming back. Was he clever? Was he cruel? Is he gonna come home? You know, he's created so much anxiety, sort of narrative anxiety, that it lands you in a very interesting place when you finally meet him. And of course, there's, I think, a joke in book five when you do meet him, because everyone has been talking about him in these incredibly, you know, as it were, epic. Terms you know his war buddies all say he was so great on the battlefield and he was the best counselor and you always turn for him you know for advice and the everyone on Ithaca remembers him as his great king and you finally meet him and he's this schlump sitting on the beach weeping you know it's a fantastic sly reveal you know as if to completely undermine everything you think you know about this guy and that's when you start building him up again which is the project of the narrative, is to take this schlump who is a prisoner weeping and moaning every day on the seashore wishing he could get home and turn him back into the person that everyone remembers, the great king, the great warrior, the wonderful husband, and the father.

Jarrett Earnest: The sophistication is that that exact construct that you just beautifully described it it is Recapitulated and returned structurally over and over almost in a kind of like narrative edging Where you keep waiting for the the revelation or the introduction so over and Over Odysseus is somewhere and people don't know he's Odysseius and one person kind of has an idea and then finally you get the revelation and you it kind of does that over and over structurally until the largest reveal is at the end of the story.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Absolutely. And in fact, one of the ongoing devices is that he is often tricked into revealing who he is because he's listening to a poem about himself. You know, in books really six through 12 when he is a guest on the island of the Phaeacians, it's very canny that he bursts into tears when he hears the bard, the court bard. Singing a mini epic about the Trojan War and what he did in the Trojans War. So this is what I mean about the modernity of the Odyssey. It's incredibly self-reflexive that the thing that gets him to betray. So, but you know, he breaks down in tears listening to this little poem about the trojan war and it provokes his host to say, you know why is this affecting you so much? Did you know someone in the trojans war? And that's the moment where he reveals himself. So there's also this very canny undercurrent throughout the Odyssey. And this is peculiar to the Odyssey, and it is a poem very preoccupied with poetics, one could say, and how poetry works. And it is telling you what poetry does to us. It gets us to betray who we really are. So there is that as well. It's incredibly, there's something almost postmodern about the way it plays with its own awareness of what it is doing as a poem.

Jarrett Earnest: And that particular construct, that scene that you point out to is very particular in that way. I had that same experience reading it this time where it's like he is encountering a story of his own experience and they're like, they obviously can't be the same thing because one's a story and one was his experience. And there's something in that disjuncture or the meeting or the reflection of those two things, which is about what art is. Totally. Bye. Totally.

Daniel Mendelsohn: And how it relates to life. Absolutely, complicated. And this is that sort of other overtone that is thrown off by this very elaborate, complicated playing on the part of the poet. Complicated by the fact that he is himself both a very good storyteller who is compared explicitly to an expert poet at times, and a very Good liar. So, you know, that you I was going to say you could write a book. People have written many books about the way that the Odyssey is interested not only in poetry and poetics, but in the relationship, one could say, of speech to truth. The fact that you take your hero and make him both attractively clever and dangerously, disingenuously, often a liar. Takes that game to another level. You know, you're now playing four dimensional chess with respect to these themes of poetry, poetics, truth, and falsehood. So it's super interesting, and that's what I mean. It's incredible that this is one of our first works in our tradition because of the, not only the sophistication as you brought up at the beginning of its construction, but the incredible sophistication of its concerns. You know, it's people. So of course, as you know, Jarrett, I'm being interviewed a lot right now as the translator of this new translation and also as the author of my memoir about reading the Odyssey with my dad. I've been interviewed a a lot about, you know the film and what I think about the film and all of that. But one of the-

Jarrett Earnest: before the film has come out.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Before the film has come out. Be clear. Right. Exactly. Yes. And I'd like Nolan very much as a director, but how one could possibly get at this element of the work, which we're talking about, is the real challenge. And you're going to laugh, but I think actually the people who did it were the Coen brothers with, oh, brother, where art thou? Where they translate everything we're talking about right now into this ongoing thing about performance. And the radio station and the songs that they're singing, which I thought was a very clever way to sort of get at this aspect. But people always think of it as an adventure story. So, apropos of being interviewed and all that, so somebody wants me to write a piece right now about the competition between Iliad fans and Odyssey fans. And they gave me some material to look at. And the Iliads people, You know, we're all saying, oh, the Odyssey, it's just an adventure story. It doesn't have nearly the depth of the Iliad. And I thought, really? You know? So there's a lot more than just a fun adventure.

Jarrett Earnest: Going back to the idea of it as being a first, like something, I myself am super, I'm not super interested in firsts. To me, a lot of firsts that we have are culminations of very long process that we just don't have access to. We don't know about. And I love, you know, Bataille says something similarly about like cave paintings, which is like, these aren't the first paintings. This is the culmination of a huge thousands of years because they're so sophisticated. You don't get more sophisticated than it.

Daniel Mendelsohn: They're the ones that didn't get a rate.

Jarrett Earnest: And so in terms of how we might think about The Odyssey in relationship to this expanded literature as a classicist that we just don't have, like it's remarkable that we have these two books, but they also are in a dialog with a whole lot of stuff that we don't. We don't know. So how do you make sense of that? How do you explain that as like a real classicist?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Well, I think I mean, it's a really interesting subject, you know, and I always remind my students that we always have to be very careful about making grand statements, you know, about the classics based on what we have, because we don't have most of it. So as a scholar, my actual field is Greek tragedy. And Sophocles wrote 120 plays of which we have Euripides wrote 80-something plays, of which we have. 18. And so can we even talk about Sophoclean tragedy for all we know the other 113 were very different, right? So you always have to be incredibly careful about making statements, you know, based on the extent material, you can make certain claims. And that's certainly true, you know, even more so the case with Homer. Because everything that preceded him was purely oral. I mean, Homer was ultimately written down, even when that happened, is the subject of very heated debate with significant variations. And so I think you're very right to bring up, this idea that they are the first surviving written down works that we have, but they are responding, and clearly within the poems, there are traces of... This responsiveness to earlier works. You know, there are traces in the poems of allusions to and invocations of stuff that we just don't have anymore. So I think it's very important. So we only have what we have and we have to do something. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, so as you're aware and many people listening are aware, you know these poems were very likely composed orally. Which is a concept that is very hard for us to wrap our minds around and probably over generations of these sort of bards in some kind of guild maybe who expanded on one another's work. You know, I tell my students, you have to think of Homer like a wiki. People just keep adding on, they expand, other people intervene, they don't like what the other guy said, they erase it, they substitute, you know, I think they came, I think these works came together something in that fashion. So we don't know, we can only surmise. And at some point, what does seem clear to me, and this is again, just me, I mean, people disagree about this. At some point a person who knew how to write got a hold of this mass, this incredible mass of material, in what form we don't know, and pulled it together into the written form that we have. And if you're a strict, as we call them, oralists, you could say that just the act of having written them down falsifies what they were, because they were plastic and constantly evolving. Right? So they were artificially, one could say, frozen at a certain point after which they stopped developing, and that's what we have. So it's super interesting.

Jarrett Earnest: Could you talk a little bit about the role of translation in that, as this ongoing, in your book, an odyssey about your memoir, you talk about what it meant to you to be a teacher and a link in an unbroken chain of 2,500 years of engaging with this material, bringing it into the present. And translation is one of, and adaptation are two major forces that keep something in the culture.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Absolutely. I mean, I think. When you are a translator, you are engaged in a monumental task that you know is going to have a limited shelf life from the minute you start, right? Because the target language is always evolving. The original always remains the same. And you know that 50 years from now, English won't be what it is now and somebody else will need to translate. And in fact, if you look at the history of the translation just of the Odyssey since the end of World War, And I think there have been 38 translations into English. They are at least about once every five years. So it is a bit of a paradox that you know you're engaging on something that you know is evanescent. But I think that is fine. It's because the thing itself was constantly evolving. And you do really, I think, as a translator, you know, my beloved mentor in publishing and friend Bob Gottlieb used to say you always have to remember that criticism is a service industry. You know, you are doing something for your reader who either doesn't have the expertise that you know or doesn't the time to study or whatever, you're giving them something. You're giving what you know. And I think the same could be true of a translator, right? You know Greek, they don't, and that's your responsibility. In the case of what we were talking about before, about the nature of this beast, which is very strange, I, so in my translation, I very self-consciously sort of try to preserve the markers that are in the text that are traces of its oral composition, which not everybody does by a long shot. So the, in the original, there are verbatim repetitions of certain. Stock phrases, whole lines, even whole passages of several lines are repeated verbatim. This is clearly a tool for an oral reciter to sort of fall back on, you know, to sort hang on to these stock moments while they're figuring out what to say next, so to speak, especially if they're composing, you know while they are performing, which is how we think it happened. And a lot of people eliminate the verbatum, trance. You know, the verbatim passages of verbatum repetitions, because it does feel odd, you know to us. You don't need them in a written language, you now. But I think they're very important. You know, I think this is an archaic object and it should feel like an archaeic object. And obviously that's a personal choice, but because I am so, one could say, both intellectually and sort of emotionally, attached to this idea of these works, as oral and as survivors of a mode of creation that has been totally lost, really. I think it's just really cool to remind the reader that this is not like a poem you would write today. But again, people don't do that and they create very successful translations. This is a personal choice. But I do think it is quite neat to sort of remind your reader that these guys had to remember all this. They had to memorize these things. So of course you're gonna want some repetitions. What if you go blank, right? What if your on stage doing the Helen of Troy scene in book four and you go, blank? Well, you can always throw in those seven, have somebody serve dinner and then that's automatically five lines that you know by heart, right. So I think that's really interesting. I think people get it, you know.

Jarrett Earnest: On this reading, one of the things that really struck me, and this is partly because of my own interests, I mostly am engaged with the visual, is how much this is a poem about appearances and people's ability to recognize or not recognize someone based on their appearance. And I think lot of those kind of epithets. Are also related to that because they are descriptive of a characteristic of a person, but they're not necessarily visual. And I think your translation of what's traditionally referred to Athena as gray-eyed Athena and that you, in the introduction, you make this wonderful disambiguation around your decision to translate it as bright, allied Athena because it's about a quality of her vision. It's like a characteristic of like her intelligence. And that that isn't necessarily like, well, she has gray eyes. Yeah.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I mean, one of the things that I really worked on for my translation is to sort of, you know, I always love when you read these articles about, you know great old masters that they clean, you know the varnish off, and it turns out they weren't all dark brown. They had these very bright colors like the Sistine Chapel. I mean I was trying to do that with the epithets. So we have gotten so used to certain translations of these stock repeated phrases, usually descriptors for characters, like gray-eyed Athena or winged words. And so I thought, what really is that? What does that word mean? And actually this word glaucopies, so opies means your face or your eyes, and glaux can mean gray. It's where we get the word glaucoma from. But it's a primary meaning is about gleaming, gleaming eyes and a glaux, and it means that because glaux the root word is an owl. So that's why I wanted her to have owl bright. So I translated it not as gray-eyed Athena but as Athena of the bright owl eyes because as you pointed out just now and I think it's great thing to notice it's about how she looks at you. I think the Epithet gives her subjectivity. And as I always say, when I'm talking about my translation, I live in the Hudson Valley, sometimes I'm in a barn and you feel these creepy two yellow eyes looking at you from the corner. It's unnerving, right? Athena's stare is unnerveing. You do not wanna be the object of that unless you're Odysseus, whom she happens to like. But she is an uncanny. Goddess and a powerful goddess. So it's not that she's pretty and has blue eyes. It's that she stares at you the way an owl does. And an owl is a bird of prey. And when it fixes you with the stare, it usually has one thing on its mind, right? So I just was trying to sort of recuperate what these things might have felt like to a archaic poet who knows what an owl looks like and knows what that stare does to you. You know, the same thing with winged words, which is another phrase that has worked its way into the English language. Whereas I think he's not thinking about words flying around like the elephants in Fantasia. I think, he's thinking of the fletching on an arrow that the words are whizzing at you like arrows, right? So I played with that as well. So it's sort of very interesting to try to imagine, You know, Rosie Finger Dawn is this sort of Edwardian. Prettification, but when you think about it, what does daybreak look like? It's a gray sky with these violent streaks of this incredibly luminous pink color. She's streaking. One thing I played with at one point was she's, Dawn is streaking the sky with pink fingers. I think he wants you to think of what that. Streakiness looks like in the sky. So it's fun to sort of play with these, and there are so many translations and some of them have so effectively worked themselves into our own language. The wine dark sea, right, to take a very well-known example. There's nothing about darkness in the Greek. Zero. Nobody knows what this epithet means. It literally means having a face like wine. Well, go figure that out. Right. You know, and I say, well, is it a California red? Is it a, you know, is that a, is it a perky French Sancerre? Is it as infantile? I don't know. And in that case, I actually just decided to translate it literally, because I think it's quite beautiful to say the sea with its face like wine. I don, I think he's actually thinking of the, the way, remember Greek drinking cups were shallow. And I think he's thinking about the play of light on the surface of liquid as it glitters and gleams. And that's why it's wine faced. I don't think it has anything to do with the color or the darkness. So it's fun to try to figure these things out.

Jarrett Earnest: The other thing that's particularly canny as an association with the owl eyes with Athena is that also it speaks to an other than human intelligence that you experience when you're seeing an owl or an animal that's like this, and it gives you a sense of what the experience of the divine is like in this world, where it's not just like a person, even though she appears. Disguised as all these people like people that you know and there's this interesting thing where people are talking to someone and then they can have an awareness oh that's a goddess or they don't understand that right and i think that there is something that cuts really deeply about not just disguises but like how appearance and identity work in the poem

Daniel Mendelsohn: Totally. Totally.

Jarrett Earnest: Would you talk to that about that?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Oh yeah, no, it's super interesting and I think your point is so, so well taken. I think we, you know, just because of the way popular culture works, you know, when we see representations of these myths, you know, the, I mean, certainly the gods are humanoid, but you're missing the point if you think that they are like us in any other way. They're uncanny. And you're very right to point out that there are, and it's essential to the core theme of the Odyssey. Remember, you brought up before this thing about recognition. The whole point of the odyssey is that when he gets back home, finally, after all this schlepping around, he's in disguise, because he wants to test people to see who's been naughty and who's been nice while he's away. And then, of course, the great moment, the great reveal is when he finally sees his wife again, and they have to... Recognize each other, which turns out it's a very funny passage. And they're both kind of resistant and not trusting. This word, recognize, comes up all the time in the Odyssey. And I say it's thematically crucial, not just because of the final recognition and the fact that he finally has to, as I mentioned before, he has to finally be recognizable as the person who left. He has to go from being this schlump on the seashore to the king, to the husband, to the father. But it does have to do with the gods because people in the Odyssey say, you better be nice to strangers because you don't know whether it's a god in disguise testing you. And we can think of famous Greek myths about the gods who test people. And that's the whole point of the Odyssey. And the suitors are told. You bet, you know, Odysseus is pretending to be a beggar. They say, you better treat this guy nice because you know he could just be a god testing to see whether you're obeying the laws of hospitality. So this idea of recognition is absolutely crucial but the gods aren't like us. And there are many passages in both the Iliad and the Odyssey that suggests that even though they like to get down and dirty and mess with us, they don't think like us and I think that's very important to You know, I think their epithets point to that. Zeus, who presides over the gods, you know, is the god who marshals the clouds, right? He has control over the heavens. It's an awesome, it's a brilliant and kind of beautiful epithet, right. He marshals, the clouds. He plays with the weather, you know. You don't want to mess with these. People. They may do cute things and fall in love with mortals and mess around, but you're making a mistake if you think they are like us. And in fact, what is interesting is that, you know, in the Odyssey, most of the gods are absent. It's not like the Iliad where they're all over the place. They have sort of receded. You really feel that the Odyssey is a kind of mopping up operation for the gods. They've stopped being so interested. They want to end the war. They want get this guy home and they don't want to think about us anymore. And there are many examples of their uncanny, and even with each other. And we are told, to come back to your point, for example, when Hermes, at the beginning of book five, has been sent down, as you mentioned, to rescue poor Odysseus and to tell Calypso, who's been holding him prisoner for seven years, he's gotta let him go. We're told that gods always recognize one another.

Jarrett Earnest: That's right. That's one of the things that make them a god.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yeah, right, that gods always recognize. They cannot disguise themselves from each other. And so this question is always hovering. How do you know who somebody is? Is it a visual thing? You know, and what's interesting on that subject, and it's just another element of the Odyssey that is itself so uncanny, is Helen of Troy, who is the subject of a lot of debate right now because of the whole Christopher Nolan movie, you know, is ink. Incredibly uncanny, but particularly with respect to recognition and disguise. So she doesn't, Odysseus many times disguises how he looks. We're told from the very beginning, he's very good at disguising how he look,s and even goes so far as to beat himself ruthlessly in order to look like a street person, to look an abused beggar when he needs to infiltrate Troy. Helen of Troy, we learn in book four, can disguise her voice to sound like any female, any wife of any of the Greek soldiers who went to Troy. So this whole bit, and that's weird. That's really weird. She tries to get the Greeks who are hiding inside of the Trojan horse the night before the fall of Troy to reveal themselves by mimicking the voices of their wives whom they haven't seen for 10 years to get them to reveal themself. So this whole business of covering up who you are, but of recognizing others, disguising your voice, disguising you face, it's central to the Odyssey. And that's why, so that's to come back to this point about translation, that's I'd like to translate these epithets both trying to be authentic, but also when Homer repeats them, I repeat them, because it goes to a central idea about identity. This is who you are. You may disguise yourself, blah, blah blah. At that, I always make the same joke. Menelaus, Helen's poor, cuckolded, mortal husband, you know, is identified as, you know Menelaas' lord of the war cry. And even when he's having breakfast, he's, you now, that's who he is at some essential level. So it goes very interestingly to the Greek idea of identity. And that's why I think these epithets are important. They're not decorative. One

Jarrett Earnest: effect of that as I was reading is, as you said, we're having this conversation in the run up to an extremely culture war like disagreement about an adaptation, like a blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey, which has not yet come out. And all the controversy from the point of view of everyone who has not yet seen it. Has to do solely with the casting of various characters based on how they do or do not look like the way that one imagines that they should look. And my feeling is on this reading of the Odyssey that there's a huge latitude for how these people can appear. That seems like complete nonsense. Like the criticisms are nonsense, basically.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's a movie. First of all it's movie, I don't care. As you know, I've had very often written about cinematic adaptations of classical Greek and Roman texts for the New York Review of Books. So, and I will be writing about the Odyssey for the review. What is so interesting, especially given what we said that how much of the Odyssey is about recognition and blah, blah, what? That you actually have no idea what most of these characters look like. They're almost never described in those terms. Ever. You know, it's quite interesting. So there are certain epithets that are used in this culture for a beautiful woman, but they're standardized, right? So white-armed is one, lovely ankles is another, talk about Edwardian, right, you know? And so, but does anyone know what Helen of Troy looked like? No. You have no idea. You just know that she's beautiful. And in fact, all of these Bronze Age heroes represented in both the Iliad, they're all gorgeous. But you have no idea what they actually look like. I always say they're like soap opera actors. They're generically beautiful and indistinguishable. So to have, I mean, it cracks me up, to have these bitter online debates and I follow some of them about what Helen of Troy looks like, so yeah. Does Nolan making a provocative choice in using this beautiful African actress to play Helen of Troy? Sure, he's having some fun, but why not? She's beautiful, that's all I care about. And people are arguing, the ships are not authentic, the armor is not authentic. And you could say, authentic to what? You know, it is, in its own time, a fantasy tale. And as any classicist will tell you, It's a hallmark. Just talking about material objects, it's a hallmark of Homeric composition, that he mixes up material objects from vastly different periods of the evolution of Greek culture. So, I mean, one could, I think, argue that there is nothing to be authentic to. It's not like you're making a civil war, you know, movie about the American Civil War, and you decide to use revolutionary war uniform, you know. I think, just to have fun. The key thing is that it should have a kind of impact. So it's interesting. I just, I can't take these conversations seriously. And, you know, clearly because so many of them are motivated by an unattractive politics. I mean, I think Elon Musk has gotten into the debate. Well, they're totally bad faith.

Jarrett Earnest: And you also don't believe anyone actually cares. Like, you don't, I don't believe these people actually care about Homer. You know what I mean? Like Homer's desecrated. It's like, what are you talking about? Yeah, you don't care about that.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yeah, right. Don't make me pretend like you do. I think, and I mean, to come back to how epics look on film, which is something I've written about often over the years, I've said many times, quite often, these blockbuster movies, which have enormous resources at their disposal, like Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great biopic, which I reviewed for the review. And they spent all this time and money, you know, getting certain details right. You know, the curling of the Persian emperor's beard and all of that. And they missed the point of the story. They wanted to get all this historical quote unquote accuracy. And no one ever seems to have asked themselves, you know what made Alexander so charismatic, right? So this film is totally inert, even though they recreate the battles very authentically and whatever. So I'd much rather have. Something that goes a little bit out there in terms of, and I'm gonna put this in quotation marks, accuracy or authenticity, but gets the spirit of the thing. That's why, as I mentioned before, I thought Nolan could be good. He's interested in wacky, twisted narratives. That would play to his strengths. I just hope he sticks with it. A lot of directors get very reverent when they're dealing with a classical material and it's always portentous and heavy and. The dialog is always excruciating. Another debate online is apparently Telemachus, Tom Holland, refers to Odysseus as daddy. And people have gotten their knickers in a twist over this. And they say, oh, that's not what they sounded like. Well, in fact, in the Odyssey, Telemheus uses a word that could very persuasively be translated as daddy, atta. Which is a Greek affectionate nickname for a father, Pops, Papa, Daddy, he does use it, right? So a lot of these people just don't know what they're talking about. And you do hope that Nolan will sort of get what makes the Odyssey interesting, find a way to put that. I don't care if the armor doesn't look exactly like armor from the year 1150 BCE, I honestly don't. And if it looks like Batman armor, I just really don't Care. If he gets... The soul of the story, that's all I care about.

Jarrett Earnest: There is something about these like epic film versions of classics or like Greek and Roman classic stories that I think speak to an important way that these stories continue to live in the culture and like they're about being adapted. And in your review, you wrote this wonderful review of Troy in 2004, which with Brad Pitt, which is kind of like the stripped down nihilist version of the. The Iliad. And I want to read something that you wrote that maybe we can open up in light of this new film. You say, there is nothing at all wrong with toying with Homeric or epic characters and storylines. The classical canon is full of works that do just that. And if we were to dismiss on principle wholesale reconfigurations or adaptations of Homer, we'd have to start by junking among much else, Aeschylus' Orestia, Sophocles' Philoktides, Electra and Ajax, Euripides effigenia at Alice. And on in the Trojan women. This is why, although Benioff makes some startling innovations to myth as we know it, beginning with the deaths of Menelaus and Ajax during the first major engagements between the Greeks and Trojans, and ending with the murder of Agamemnon during the Sack of Troy, all of which demises wreck havoc with the extant tragic canon, it is pointless to criticize Troy on the grounds that it is not faithful to the text of Homer, as so many critics have done. Most of the action in the film, at any event, is not based on the Iliad. But instead recapitulates almost in its entirety, the narrative once relayed by those lost epic poems of Troy, filling its nearly three hours with everything from pretty Paris's abduction of Helen to the widescreen destruction of the Trojan Citadel itself. So already within the classical world, this thing of adaptation and retelling and recapitulation is part of what the work is about. Yeah. One thing I want to ask you about the writing that you've done because you have as a critic paid particular attention to these kind of schlocky mainstream films and I feel part of the frisson is like to have a serious person who is an expert in classics taking seriously the subject matter, but without becoming pedantic about it's like, oh, this isn't really like that.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yeah, yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: So, but what does it mean for you to want to engage these films?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Well, I want to engage them because, you know, I, a person who participates in popular culture, I absorb it. I consume it. I was raised with it. I've written about it often. I take it seriously. You know, as I always say, you, know, Greek tragedy was a popular genre. Everybody went to see it. It was like the movies, you now. So I take that very seriously. I mean, that said, I think if you're going to undertake what you claim to be a serious adaptation, then I'm going to hold you to a certain standard. But as you point out, the standard is not accuracy in some pedantic way. And as I'd never tire of saying, the Greeks were the first people to mess around with Greek myth. We think there is a thing called Greek mythology, like a book by Edith Hamilton. And the Greeks didn't have Edith Hamilton, they were always playing with their own myths, as we know, because there are many different versions. Look, played by Euripides. Featuring Oedipus and Jocasta. She doesn't kill herself after she finds out that she's married her own son, which is how Sophocles Oedepus ends. She's still rattling around the palace years later. You could do whatever you want. You could make, you know, Odysseus in Greek tragedy is always a bad guy. He's always a mustache twirling villain. So it's a ridiculous standard to hold films to. You know, and that's why I say you need to figure out what the spirit, the animating spirit of a work is. That's much more important. But I love movies. I watched toga and sandal epics when I was growing up. It's part of what made me interested in these cultures. You know I used to get special dispensation from my parents back in the day when if you wanted to watch something you had to be sitting in front of a television at a certain time. To watch Cleopatra once a year, because it came on during dinnertime on channel seven, and I was allowed to miss dinner so I could watch Cleo... So I absorbed classical culture. They are incredibly efficient delivery vehicles for our sense of the grandeur and the excitement of a lot of these mythic narratives. So I take that seriously. A lot of people are gonna, they're gonna get details wrong. Agamemnon doesn't. Die at the end of the Trojan War, you know, blah, blah. But who cares, you, know, if you, I think it's a great way to start getting excited about these cultures. But if they present these works as serious, then I'm taking them seriously. And it's fun to write about, because I do think they have an impact. They have a real impact. So it's, do I need Troy to exactly replicate Homer's Iliad? No, but... You have to take seriously that the Iliad thinks it's about heroism. And if you constantly knock the idea of heroism, you're gonna have a very strange version of the Ilyad, which is where I thought Troy fails. The warriors in the Ilya take very seriously the fact that there is a thing called heroism and that's what they want. And if your construct your whole movie around the idea that it's all a load of crap and we're just being, bamboozled by our evil leaders, then I don't know what your movie's gonna be about. So that's a kind of authenticity I am interested in.

Jarrett Earnest: Also, if a movie makes people go back and read The Odyssey or any book, that's a good thing. You know, like there's no nothing wrong with that. However, I did find myself recently having a kind of strange reaction where I saw a recent article that was called Can Art Teach? And I thought, okay, what's this about? And it says, what the role of didacticism in art? And I looked and it was like about a television show. And I was like, wait, so, wait you're talking about TV. And that's entertainment. And that doesn't mean it's not categorically mean that it's art. It also just means that it is like subject to different criteria and evaluations than art in my terms. And I wonder if because you're, how because you are so rooted in the way that this functioned within its classical context, that relationship between art and entertainment and literature and spectacle, how do you think those things in relation?

Daniel Mendelsohn: Well, I've always, I mean, I think probably, I mean I would hope that one of the hallmarks of the criticism that I've written over the past 35 years, a lot of it for the New York Review, I don't like to categorize, you know, I don't like to say, oh, you now, this is art, this is literature, this, partly because, you know think about the Ili and the Odyssey. Everyone, we think it's fancy and high and something for academics. And if you appreciate it, it means you're one of the smart people and all of that. But, shepherds and blacksmiths sat around listening to this stuff back in the day and they ate it up. The same as I mentioned for Greek tragedy. This was public entertainment on a grand scale. We think if you're interested in Greek tragedy, you're a fussy intellectual or an avid theater goer or whatever. So I've never bought into the high-low thing. I think they're the things that are serious. I think Breaking Bad was a serious work. And I think there are things that are not serious and quite often I enjoy the ones that are not as serious as we all do. But I don't like to get involved in saying what, and I hope that's reflected in what I've written. I think the first question you ask yourself as a critic is A. What does this work claim that it is doing? B, does it do the thing that it claims it's doing? And C, the interesting one, is what it claims to be doing worthy in some sense? Is it meaningful? And I think that can be true of a television show. I think it could be true of an epic poem. I think if it could true of whatever. And so I think. If we imagine ourselves into a state of thinking about the classics, which for us is high literature, as popular literature in its own time, it will cure us of some of these potential, you know, help us avoid some of these potential intellectual pitfalls or critical pitfalls. Now, there was a thing that was higher, fancier literature for the Greeks and Romans. But a lot of it was accessible and people enjoyed it. And certainly everyone owned Homer and everyone knew Homer, everyone. So I do think it's interesting to think that way, to get out of the high-low bind. And it's a good way to walk into this movie business.

Jarrett Earnest: In the history of criticism, in terms of critics who are taking seriously popular culture or kind of redeeming some aspect of popular culture, very often that position or sensibility has in some way that's not necessarily reducible, but nevertheless been present in queer writers and the criticism of gay artists and gay writers. And I wonder how you relate to that within your own work.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Well, absolutely. I think being gay is inextricable from my critical stance. And I think, as I often say, it's great training to be a critic because when you grow up, well, I'm serious. And what I mean by that is when, certainly for someone of my generation, say growing up in the 1970s as a teenager, before things, you know, changed a lot. And I think when you grow up gay, you have a secret. You're very, you become adept at codes, I would say. You know, things are saturated with meaning for you in a very particular. Way you're looking for signals all the time and that's certainly true you know if you were a gay teenager in the 1970s where there was no internet you had no idea how to connect to people you didn't know if somebody was gay you were terrified of trying to find out because if they weren't you would get beaten up you know all that stuff from my high school experience but I do think it's great training because you know also because you are falsifying yourself quite often for public consumption, you know. Until you get out of the closet, what you start to understand is that the surface of things does not necessarily correspond to the content. And that is great training for a critic because you want to read deeper all the time. You know that what you're seeing isn't the totality of what there is, and that gives you a kind of. Interesting edge and it becomes a route for inserting yourself into things, teasing out meanings that might not be obvious to other people, which is basically what a critic does for a living, right? You are trained to sort of see the stuff that maybe a less trained person isn't going to see. What are the patterns? What are these secret meanings? So I'm not joking when I say, you know, having been a gay adolescent was great. Training to be a criticism. And also in a sort of more obvious way, I would say, you're standing on the edge looking into the center. I mean, that's how I felt, certainly, as a gay young person in the 70s and 80s, that you are not part of the dominant culture and you never will be. And so you relate to the dominant cultural. As an outsider, which is also great training to be a critic. Because you should, as a critic, be suspicious of the dominant narrative. You should be, to paraphrase Ian Forrester's great description of Constantine Cavafy, you should be standing at a slight angle to the universe. That is the correct position for a critic because if you are either complicit in or unconsciously absorbed by the dominant discourse, then you're just in advertising. And you're not in criticism. So I absolutely think that my being a gay person is absolutely central to the way I look at things, and therefore is central to to the fact that I am a critic, I would say, even more so than the fact that I'm a writer. I would say it's absolutely central, it is absolutely conditioned how I relate to material.

Jarrett Earnest: I want to open that up a little further because I am particularly interested in the history of gay male identity in relationship to the classics. And there is a moment, I mean you've written for the review about Oscar Wilde as a classicist, but his teachers, John Addington Simmons and Walter Pater and this group of mid-century translators who were looking at classical culture and it became a screen. Within which they could imagine a queer identity that had never quite coalesced before. Maybe it didn't have the need to coalesce in those terms before, but it also seems like there's something inextricable about the formation of gay identity and the classics.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Well, I mean, I think there's a sort of an obvious, as you were speaking, Jarrett, I was thinking of, is it this great story by Henry James, the author of Beltrofeo, which is basically about Simmons, right? Which is interesting, because of course, James himself is living under the radar. But I think, yes, the classical world becomes a screen for the secret male homosexual, not least and most obviously, because this is a culture in which erotic activity between men is at a certain level, totally fine and unexceptionable. So it provides a space for, particularly the closeted gay person, to, I don't know if aspire to is the right word, but to project onto, you know, it's a screen. So that's, look, it certainly why I got into this business, the classics business, you know as a 12 and 13 year old, and I thought, oh, you now, how great. You know, I was reading those Mary Reynolds novels and thinking, this is terrific. There was a place where you could have a boyfriend and nobody, you know, beat you up in the back of the high school. That is clearly the central attraction. But also, you think material culture, you see, you can be who you are. Say you're a mid Victorian closeted gay guy. Because as it enthusiast for the classics, whether literary, for the reasons I was just mentioning, or artistic, because there's nothing wrong if you're studying Greek statuary and appreciating a lot of statues of naked men. I mean... That's a sort of very clunky way of putting it, but I think that's basically what it's about. So you can be an art historian and no one is gonna think there's any strange when all you do is pay attention to statues of naked youths, right? So I do think historically, Greek. Civilization in particular has offered a kind of refuge, you know, for the closeted gay man historically. And that's why these writers attach to it. I don't accept myself, you know from that model a hundred years after Simmons and all of those people. And I think a lot of people would tell you the same. Tell you the same story. So I think my own connection to the classics, you know, begins not as an intellectual event, but as a psychological event. You know, I knew there was something about this culture that was okay for me, to put it in a very elementary way. I sensed that this was something where I could exist. And that drew me in before all the subsequent, you know. All the subsequent stuff, poetry, Homer, Greek tragedy, you know, all of that, but I think it's very primal. And I think there's, it is a big subject and certainly open for exploration. I mean, people have written about this, certainly.

Jarrett Earnest: Part of why I've posed that sort of two-pronged question to you is I just want to get a sense of how you relate as a classicist and as a gay man to the polarization and elevation of the classics or Greek culture or whatever, the idea that people have of classics as a right-wing culture war space? Like, what's going on?

Daniel Mendelsohn: I mean, I don't, I have to say, I'm less exercised about this than a lot of my colleagues. I mean it is a fact that, you know, ignorant right-wing people, you know, mostly bros, have adapted, you Symbols and elements of, or appropriated, I think one could say, some of the esthetics of classical civilization for their movement. So these guys marching on Washington on January 6 have pictures of Roman helmets on there. I don't really get that exercised about this. They're ignorant. They don't understand what this stuff means. They think it's cool. They want to be like Roman soldiers with, you know, abs and pecs on their breastplates. And I don't know, you, know, people have spent a lot of time. I mean, we know there are elements of classical culture that are not attractive, but I don't think that's really what's animating them. I just think you can dismiss these people. They're ignorant. They don't understand the classical tradition in its entirety. And the fact that they paint them, you video. They wear Roman helmets when they're rioting in the capital, it doesn't bother me particularly because they don't know about, you know, all the other stuff the Romans did. So I don't, I don,t it doesn,t bug me. I know it really gets to a lot of people. Somebody just wrote a whole book about this, but I don t, as some of my colleagues do, think that it is a reason to trash the classical tradition as somehow enabling this. And I say that as someone who knowledge is that you know both the Greek and Roman civilization had extremely unattractive aspects. But I just don't think there's a causal relationship. I could take any culture. I mean, people have written about this so interestingly. It is interesting that particularly Roman iconography, say, has been, as we know, appealing to fascists. It goes back to Mussolini for obvious reasons. And I don't know if you remember, There was that incredibly. Interesting book that came out when I was in grad school in the 80s by Klaus Tavola. Of course, male fantasies. Part one and two. And this sort of, yeah, the sort of idealization of this sort of stylized hyper masculine, you know, body as the site of fascistic energy. You know, there is a lot of interesting stuff to be written on this subject. But I, you now, I say if people don't understand the classics and they want to think that they're Roman soldiers when they're you know, trying to destroy the American democracy. It doesn't make me go think, oh, you know I need to reevaluate the classical tradition because I think the classical tradition has been already subject to very piercing and useful critique. I just don't really think this stuff is that bothersome.

Jarrett Earnest: I think that's why when we were talking about the criticisms that have already been circulated around the new Odyssey, one of the reasons it's so hard to engage with them is that they don't, they're not grounded in what they purport to care about. So it's like, you don't care about this. Like I, how can I talk to you about the way the classics work if that's not the thing?

Daniel Mendelsohn: That's why I can't take it seriously, ultimately. They say, so Elon Musk has gotten his knickers in a twist over the casting of a black woman as Helen of Troy and he's posting 10 times a day on X. She is betraying the classical tradition. Well, I can get upset about this because he doesn't know anything about the classical traditional. So, as you say, these people don't even know what they're talking about.

Jarrett Earnest: I guess that the real question here is the extent to which this remains alive, like our understanding of history of any text of any artwork is that it's, it's an open question. Like it's back and forth. And like, for me, there's a lot of stuff I want to pull. I love, uh, of, you know, the satiricals, one of my favorite books and it's just like two gay guys, two gay, guys running around like stealing each other's boyfriend back and forth and like a lot a dick jokes. It's like, that's ancient Rome.

Daniel Mendelsohn: Yes, that's also ancient.

Jarrett Earnest: That's why these guys

Daniel Mendelsohn: that's why I'm saying I can't get upset about it because they literally do not know what they're talking about. So even now I saw Ann Coulter has gotten into the fray about, you know, the Odyssey movie and it's betraying the great Western tradition. But how can you engage these people? They don't know they don't what they are talking about and, you know, a lot of the energy, I mean just based on my own following of a sampling of social media. Threads about the movie and blah blah blah. You know, it's a lot of guys, it is a lot guys who actually don't know anything about anything and they're offended by the idea that this doesn't fit, you know, their kind of comic book version of what The Elite and the Odyssey are about. So they're not gonna listen to an expert opinion because it's not rational. They're not motivated by rational, let alone intellectual. Considerations, right? So betraying the Western tradition, they're just begging a whole lot of questions right there, which we know about and they don't care about because they just have some vague notion of what the Western Tradition is. And if you tell them that the grand classical tradition, you know, includes the satiricon and a lot of other wacky texts, they don't about that, you know. A lot of it is really very silly, but it is a measure of something, the some stakes for some people that, you know, this movie or Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey to come back to our thinking about translations has enraged a lot of people who think that they have an allegiance to the classical tradition when they don't actually know anything about the classical tradition.

Jarrett Earnest: My last question, given this is what we've done is like sketch out a lot of backdrop and terrain upon which both your new translation of the Odyssey and new Hollywood version of the odyssey is coming out and given those those two facts or those two vistas as a critic going in because you haven't yet seen the movie nor have written your piece but you will, as you approach it, what is it that you feel... That your essay, your piece of criticism, needs to do.

Daniel Mendelsohn: I don't, it's very interesting, Jarrett. A thing I think I pride myself on is whenever I encounter the thing that I'm going to be writing on, I try to empty my head completely. I try make myself totally open to the thing. Now, some people won't believe that, but I just think if you walk into it with an idea, a notion, it's never going to useful. And whether that's Mad Men, you know, I remember, which I did not like, unlike most people. You know, remember when I got those DVDs, which it was at the time, from Bob Silver's and I got the whole, you now, all three seasons or whatever, you I was excited. I was like, oh, everyone says this is so good. I think you have to walk in ready to be excited. Absolutely. Now, of course, because it's the Odyssey, it's a thing that I've been involved with, you know in different ways professionally my whole life. I certainly have ideas, but you know, when I sit in a movie theater or a screening room for the first time, I'm like ready to be dazzled. No, I think you have to do that. And if it's a book I'm reviewing, I want it to be great. You know what? It's not fun to read something you don't like or to watch four seasons of something you don't t think. Believe me, it's not funny. So when I walk into things, I' m like, yay, hit me. You know, so I don't, I'm, as I said, I'm open to the idea. I think potentially he's the right guy for the job. I don't care about the casting. Let's see if we can have some fun. I think you have to start that way. You can't sit there super-silently saying, oh, there's no way this movie is gonna be as good as the Odyssey, you know. Well, obviously it's two different animals. We know that from the get-go. I would rather go in thinking, let's see. How this very talented filmmaker is gonna take this very complex work and try to extract from it something that is worth, you know, becomes a good film experience. That seems to be the right way, not is it gonna be as good as the Odyssey or is it going to get every little thing from the Odyssey? Cause you know that's not gonna happen anyway. But I always felt that I don't do things, I don't accept assignments if I think I already know what my response is gonna be. Because the nicest thing that anyone ever wrote about my own criticism in a review of one of my collections is something like, you know, reading these pieces is like, having a front seat to the drama of Mendelssohn figuring out what he thinks of the thing. And that is what I try to do. Like, I don't know, if I know in advance, it's gonna be flat, because then you're just slotting things in, checking off boxes, does it do this? And I'm like, I don't know. I went to see Avatar, I remember. And everybody was always complaining about the politics of it, whatever. I said, I just want this thing to wash over me, and then I'll see what I think. And I think that's what you have to do. I think what makes the criticism fun to read is like, how is this guy thinking about this? But it can't be interesting if you think you know what you think before you even see it, which is why. You know, to finish with this crazy internet conversation, it's hilarious that, you know, everyone has an opinion about this movie two months before it's come up. They've dismissed it, they hate it, it's all wrong, blah, blah. I don't know. You know. Literally, because we haven't seen it. It's hilarious, but also somehow emblematic of that kind of conversation. It's the opposite of criticism, one could say.

Jarrett Earnest: You can read many of Daniel Mendelsohn's essays with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants access to our complete archive going back to 1963, all searchable on our website. You can subscribe today for a discount at nybooks.com slash plsub. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Earnest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew Aucoin, and it is a production of the New York Review.