The translation for our time
The Odyssey: A Gen Z Translation
Like it or not, it’s told in the language of the day just as it was so many years ago.
“Ayo, muse, talk about this absolute main character who was doing side quests for actual years after he gatekept, gaslit, and girlbossed the whole city of Troy. This man traveled the entire map, met some major NPCs, and honestly went through it. He was just trying to secure the bag and get his boys home safe, but his crew was low-key sharing one brain cell. They literally ate the Sun God’s cattle, major L, so Helios revoked their life subscription. Anyway, the gods were all chilling on Mount Olympus having a mid-off, except Poseidon, who was a certified hater and kept coping, seething, and malding because Odysseus completely wrecked his son’s eye. Anyway, start the stream wherever, goddess.” From the start of the truly epic poem, translated
The argument
Homer was not a writer
Homer is credited as the writer of The Odyssey, but Homer himself was not a writer. Instead, Homer created an epic (as in real long, but perhaps, also real good) poem that told the story of Odysseus (which is not a coincidence, the word odyssey comes from his name). Generations then repeated these epic poems until someone decided to write it down. This seems like an obvious thing to do nowadays, but it was probably controversial at the time. Socrates and Plato lived about 300-400 years after Homer, and Plato (quoting Socrates, follow along now) said that, basically, writing things down is bad because it means you won’t work on your memory and your memory will get bad. Imagine if someone reincarnated Socrates and made him watch a bunch of 15 second TikToks? He’d probably drink hemlock juice all over again (or, like, overdose on sizzurp).
The point is, The Odyssey has been getting reinterpreted and reimagined for over 2,750 years. Each time it was retold, some material was undoubtedly lost, and so even the ‘original’ Greek version is not the exact same as the one Homer used to perform. And that’s before we start translating Greek into other languages.
There are many, many translations of The Odyssey into English. Each one of them loses something compared to the ‘original’. The Greek version is written in a dactylic hexameter, which sounds like a nickname you would give to a pterodactyl, but is actually a rhyming scheme. For example, the word orange is known as being difficult to rhyme in English (unless you are Eminem, who is, if you think about it really hard and also not too much, basically the Homer of our times). But in French it’s a lot easier, even though the word is still orange, because the French just straight-up don’t bother pronouncing half the letters in their words and so one can easily rhyme orange (oh! RAHNJH) with eat/mange (MAHNJH). Can you imagine if eat and orange rhymed in English? That feels completely like the low-quality rhyming couplet you’d expect to hear on the radio.
The point is, and I’m getting a bit longwinded here, like my buddy Homer, there is no such thing as a true translation. Every translation loses something. There are people who have adapted The Odyssey to keep the poetic flow, but does so at the sacrifice of the story. There are people who have adapted The Odyssey to keep the story, but have done so at the cost of the poetic nature of the ‘original’.
Why I made it
The Odyssey is a poem about table manners
One last note before I let you get to the text. My name is Chris Weiss and I’m writing a culinary thriller called The Last Bites. It’s about a chef asked to cook a final meal for a man on death row who seems to know things about her that no stranger should. She has five days to decide if he’s worthy of this meal that she’s not even sure she can still make with the resources that she has.
In many ways, it ties into the themes of the Odyssey. Circe transforms her dinner guests into pigs to be eaten. Odysseus’s men are killed by the Sun God for eating food that is not theirs. Zeus’s law is to treat strangers well because any given stranger could really be a god in disguise.
It’s been 2,750 years and the question remains the same: What do you owe a stranger? Because, what if they’re not really a stranger at all?
If this idea interests you, the first three chapters of The Last Bites are included at the end of The Odyssey and you can find more information about The Last Bites on thelastbites.com.
Fine print, briefly
Questions you’d reasonably have
Is it really the whole thing? Yes. It’s about 104,000 words shorter, but all the action is there. You do miss out on some extended similes and feet washing, but that’s life.
Is it accurate? All fax no cap. If the prior sentence confused you, then you might find the public domain Samuel Butler translation to be more your speed.
What does it cost? Monetarily, it costs nothing. However, your time is valuable. Only you can decide if you have the time to learn of Odysseus’ epic journey.
Doesn’t Christopher Nolan own The Odyssey? No. The underlying poem, the thing the movie is based on, is public domain.