I’m More Excited Than Ever to Teach The Odyssey

I don’t want the college students I teach to go from having had a good time at the movies to a pedantic and entirely unseductive siren song of a thousand “well-actuallys” when we cover The Odyssey this school year .

我不希望我教的大学生在本学年报道《奥德赛》时，从在电影中度过的美好时光变成迂腐且完全没有诱惑力的一千首“实际上是”的海妖歌。

That’s why my goal in the classroom is to indulge and appreciate the vision of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, while also surprising my students with a quirkier, more bizarre version that unfolds over hundreds of pages.

这就是为什么我在课堂上的目标是沉浸和欣赏克里斯托弗·诺兰大片的视觉效果，同时用数百页的更离奇、更奇异的版本让我的学生感到惊讶。

Nolan’s Homer offers us a deeply compelling vision of a man who sees himself complicit in a world that war has changed, because, as he says, “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entirely.” But Nolan misses the language, the epic similes, the eroticism, the hero who freaks the hell out when his wife suggests they move his bed.

诺兰的荷马为我们提供了一个令人印象深刻的愿景，一个男人认为自己是战争改变的世界的同谋，因为正如他所说，“烧毁特洛伊的城墙就等于彻底烧毁世界。”但诺兰怀念那种语言、史诗般的明喻、色情，以及当妻子建议他们搬走他的床时吓坏了的英雄。

When I first read The Odyssey , what I found most compelling was how much Odysseus wanted to feel it all.

当我第一次读《奥德赛》时，我发现最引人注目的是奥德修斯多么想感受这一切。

As Alfred Lord Tennyson poeticized him , this is a man who longs equally for the domesticity of Ithaca and the “untravell’d world whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move.” While Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted by deep regrets and thinks a successful quest will redeem him, Homer’s Odysseus is like a shark.

正如阿尔弗雷德·丁尼生勋爵 (Alfred Lord Tennyson) 所诗化的那样，这个人既渴望伊萨卡的家庭生活，又渴望“未曾踏足过的世界，当我搬家时，它的边际就会消失/永远永远”。诺兰笔下的奥德修斯深感悔恨，并认为成功的探索就能救赎自己，而荷马笔下的奥德修斯就像一条鲨鱼。

He must keep moving or die; the poem ends not on the resolution of his domestication, but the question of whether or not he can ever be tamed.

他必须继续前进，否则就会死；这首诗的结尾不是解决他的驯化问题，而是提出他是否可以被驯服的问题。

That’s why he listens to the siren’s song— not just to survive the terror, as Nolan implies—but because it is pure and unfiltered experience, a noise that could destroy you but that you might live through.

这就是为什么他听海妖的歌声——不仅仅是为了像诺兰暗示的那样在恐怖中生存——而是因为它是纯粹的、未经过滤的体验，一种可能会摧毁你但你可能会活下来的噪音。

My favorite moment in The Odyssey is when Odysseus begins crying when he hears a Phaeacian bard tell his story while he listens, anonymously, in the audience.

《奥德赛》中我最喜欢的时刻是，当奥德修斯在观众中匿名聆听时，他听到一位菲亚斯吟游诗人讲述他的故事，他开始哭泣。

It’s here that Odysseus reveals himself and tells the story of his travels.

正是在这里，奥德修斯展现了自己并讲述了他的旅行故事。

In Nolan’s adaptation, Odysseus has selective amnesia and comes to terms with the trauma of war by remembering his story to Charlize Theron’s Calypso.

在诺兰的改编作品中，奥德修斯患有选择性失忆症，并通过向查理兹·塞隆饰演的卡利普索回忆自己的故事来接受战争的创伤。

But in the poem, Odysseus hasn’t forgotten who he is; he just can’t handle the fact that he is not that person anymore.

但在诗中，奥德修斯并没有忘记自己是谁；他只是无法接受自己不再是那个人的事实了。

That’s what makes him “polytroupos” which Robert Fagles translates as a “man of twists and turns.” As the Talking Heads once sang , “I’ve changed my hairstyle / so many times now / I don’t know what I look like.”

这就是他成为“polytroupos”的原因，罗伯特·法格尔斯将其翻译为“一个曲折的人”。正如会说话的头像乐队曾经唱过的那样，“我已经改变了发型/现在改变了很多次/我不知道自己是什么样子。”

Since Odysseus’ story has never gone out of print, nitpicking the representation of his travels in translations and adaptations is a timeless project.

由于奥德修斯的故事从未绝版，因此在翻译和改编中对他的旅行的表现进行挑剔是一个永恒的项目。

The 1954 Ulysses with Kirk Douglasis gloriously silly yet often revels in Homeric energy; the 1997 TV miniseries is sometimes corny with its celebrity cameos but is accessible and exciting.

柯克·道格拉西斯 (Kirk Douglasis) 主演的 1954 年《尤利西斯》极其愚蠢，但却经常陶醉于荷马史诗的能量；这部 1997 年的电视迷你剧有时因明星客串而显得老生常谈，但其实很平易近人、令人兴奋。

All the way back in the 1720s, Richard Bentley, the arch-classicist of his age, famously called out Alexander Pope for his bestselling translation, which featured cadenced rhyming couplets that read practically Seussian in the face of the original Greek.

早在 1720 年代，当时的古典主义大师理查德·本特利 (Richard Bentley) 就曾因亚历山大·蒲柏 (Alexander Pope) 的畅销译本而闻名，该译本以抑扬顿挫的押韵对句为特色，在希腊原文面前读起来几乎是苏斯式的。

Pope wanted to write translations of Homer for his age, and he admitted that he found the original text “a wild garden,” one that his precise, jingly, but often stirring heroic couplets could provide with an Augustan order.

波普想为他的时代翻译荷马史诗，他承认他发现原文是“一座野生花园”，他精确、动听但常常激动人心的英雄对联可以为奥古斯都提供一个秩序。

“It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer,” Bentley reportedly fired back.

据报道，本特利反驳道：“波普先生，这是一首漂亮的诗，但你不能称它为荷马。”

The translator Emily Wilson said essentially the same for Nolan’s adaptation some 300 years later.

大约 300 年后，翻译家艾米丽·威尔逊 (Emily Wilson) 对诺兰的改编作品也说了同样的话。

“Why can’t gods speak in a way we understand?” Matt Damon’s Odysseus asks Zendaya’s Athena in the film.

“为什么神不能用我们理解的方式说话？”马特·达蒙饰演的奥德修斯在影片中询问赞达亚饰演的雅典娜。

Wilson implied that the director asked this question about The Odyssey itself in her controversial London Review of Books piece.

威尔逊暗示导演在她颇受争议的《伦敦书评》文章中就《奥德赛》本身提出了这个问题。

Yet even amid sick burns and faint praise, Wilson ended her review on an optimistic note, calling Nolan’s Odyssey an “event to celebrate” because it reenergized public interest in the poem.

然而，即使在病态的烧伤和微弱的赞扬中，威尔逊仍然以乐观的态度结束了她的评论，称诺兰的《奥德赛》是一场“值得庆祝的事件”，因为它重新激发了公众对这首诗的兴趣。

Like its hero, the poem itself is “polytroupos”—twisted and turned.

和它的主人公一样，这首诗本身也是“polytroupos”——曲折的。

And like Pope’s translation, Nolan’s adaptation doesn’t so much smooth The Odyssey out, as demand further attention to Homeric wildness.

与波普的翻译一样，诺兰的改编并没有让《奥德赛》变得更加平滑，而是需要进一步关注荷马史诗的野性。

That’s what I want my students to take away from it.

这就是我希望我的学生从中学到的东西。

Homer’s Odyssey is not merely complex; it is brutal .

荷马的《奥德赛》不仅复杂，而且复杂。这是残酷的。

Nolan projects the trauma of Troy’s destruction onto a moral consciousness that doesn’t exist in the poem.

诺兰将特洛伊毁灭的创伤投射到诗中不存在的道德意识上。

After they leave the coast of Troy, Homer’s Odysseus and his men wage war on the Cicones not because his men need food and supplies, but because these enemies fought alongside the Trojans.

离开特洛伊海岸后，荷马笔下的奥德修斯和他的部下对西科内斯人发动战争，不是因为他的部下需要食物和补给，而是因为这些敌人与特洛伊人并肩作战。

“We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us,” Odysseus explains without regret.

“我们娶了他们的妻子，并平等地分享他们的财富，”奥德修斯毫不遗憾地解释道。

In an episode not included by Nolan, the Spartan king Menelaus explains how he and his men got information about Odysseus by holding down Proteus, an “ancient sorcerer” who “changes shape to every animal on earth, and then water and holy fire” until he reaches his original form.

在诺兰未收录的一集中，斯巴达国王墨涅拉俄斯解释了他和他的部下如何通过按住“古代巫师”普罗透斯来获取有关奥德修斯的信息，普罗透斯“改变了地球上每一种动物的形状，然后是水和圣火”，直到他恢复原来的形状。

There’s no simple way to think about The Odyssey and its wild dissonances that somehow come together into coherence.

没有简单的方法来思考《奥德赛》及其狂野的不和谐音如何以某种方式融合在一起。

Passed down through oral tradition, inscribed somehow and reproduced, collected in medieval manuscripts, and translated by hundreds of different hands, it’s impossible to wrestle The Odyssey into its protean form .

《奥德赛》通过口头传统传承下来，以某种方式铭刻并复制，收集在中世纪手稿中，并由数百位不同的人翻译，不可能将《奥德赛》变成千变万化的形式。

I hope my students leave any class setting where we’ve discussed Odysseus doing their own wrestling with these interpretations.

我希望我的学生们离开我们讨论过奥德修斯与这些解释进行斗争的课堂环境。

Because from poem to novel, from recitation to film, from Ancient Greece to English, The Odyssey will always change shape, and that’s what makes its darkness so strange, its narrative so exhilarating.

因为从诗歌到小说，从朗诵到电影，从古希腊到英语，《奥德赛》总是会改变形式，这就是它的黑暗如此奇怪，它的叙述如此令人振奋的原因。

Andrew Black is an English professor at Murray State University.

安德鲁·布莱克是默里州立大学的英语教授。

His scholarly interests include 18th-century Methodists and the music of Kesha .

他的学术兴趣包括 18 世纪卫理公会和凯莎音乐。

You can read his blog posts leading up to the film here .

您可以在这里阅读他在拍摄这部电影之前的博客文章。

Primary editor: Jackie Mansky | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard

主要编辑：杰基·曼斯基 |二级编辑：莎拉·罗斯巴德

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