Was There Ever an Original Version of 'The Odyssey,' and Do We Need to Worry About What Homer Would Think?

A new Hollywood adaptation from director Christopher Nolan has renewed public curiosity about "The Odyssey," reviving a question that has puzzled classicists for generations: what, exactly, counts as the "real" version of Homer's epic? The oldest physical fragments of the poem that scholars have recovered are already more than two millennia old, yet the tale of the wandering warrior Odysseus circulated by word of mouth long before anyone wrote it down, making the search for a single authoritative "original" something of a moving target.

For centuries, that question was academic for anyone who couldn't read ancient Greek. English speakers had essentially no way to encounter the poem directly until the early 1600s. Relief finally came around 1615, when playwright and poet George Chapman produced the first complete rendering of the epic into English, opening the floodgates for the countless retellings that followed.

Chapman's translation left a mark far beyond its own era. Roughly two hundred years after it appeared, with several rival English versions already circulating, the Romantic poet John Keats came across a borrowed copy and stayed up reading through the night. He was so struck by the experience that he sat down and composed a poem the very next morning describing how deeply the work had affected him.

Since then, the field of available English translations has only grown more crowded, and each new version reflects its translator's own interpretive choices as much as Homer's original Greek. Classicist Robert Fitzgerald rendered the poem's opening invocation as a plea for the muse to "sing in me" and tell of a man versed in every manner of struggle. Robert Fagles instead called on the muse to sing of a hero defined by "twists and turns." Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation drew wide attention for its clarity, opted for a far plainer introduction, simply describing him as "a complicated man."

Those differences are not arbitrary stylistic flourishes — they stem from a single, notoriously slippery word that Homer uses to characterize his protagonist at the very start of the poem: polytropos. The term fuses the Greek root for "many" with the root for "turning," and translators have wrestled for centuries over whether it best conveys cunning, versatility, moral ambiguity, or simple hardship endured along a winding path home.

That ambiguity is precisely why scholars resist the idea that a single "correct" Odyssey ever existed. Because the epic began as oral performance, reshaped by generations of bards before it was ever fixed in writing, even the earliest surviving manuscripts represent just one snapshot of a much longer, fluid storytelling tradition. Every subsequent translation effectively continues that same process of retelling, adapting the material for a new audience and a new era rather than reproducing a fixed, original text.

That tension is likely to resurface as Nolan's film brings Odysseus's journey to a new mass audience unfamiliar with the poem's textual history. Whether moviegoers walk away curious about Chapman's pioneering translation, Wilson's modern rendering, or simply the ancient oral tales that preceded them all, the underlying lesson remains the same: there was never one definitive "Odyssey" to be faithful to, only an evolving chain of storytellers — Homer included — each shaping the tale for their own moment.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine