The Current - Your Odyssey crash course

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

The Odyssey hits theatres today and we’ve got you covered. Christopher Nolan’s widely anticipated adaptation of the 3000 year old text is selling out cinemas. Guest host Piya Chattopadhyay gets the Odyssey 101 from Thom Roach, a professor of History and Literature, and hears why the epic story’s themes resonate today.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. A wife? A son. And then go home. Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated film, The Odyssey, hits theaters today. The epic journey of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, as he makes his way home after the Trojan War, features a star-studded cast. Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, and Matt Damon as Odysseus, who described this as a dream role.

It felt like a special moment, like something that, you know, these moments don't come along in your life. It's one of the great roles, if not the great role in Western literature, and I had a chance to play it. So what is it about this nearly 3,000-year-old doorstopper of a storm that audiences and storytellers alike continue to return to? Tom Roach is a professor of history and literature at Bryant University in Rhode Island. He joins us today from Provincetown in Massachusetts. Tom, Good Morning. I know the broad strokes of the Odyssey. I have to confess, I've never actually read it. So for those who are unfamiliar or whom it's been a few years since they were in literature class,

what is the Odyssey about? Give us a basic plot line. Basic plot line. I would say it's a story about a family torn apart by war and essentially three characters. So Odysseus is the father. He's the warrior. He just won the war, and he's trying to make his way back home to his wife, Penelope, who is at that time being courted by a number of suitors who have essentially taken over the home. And the son, Telemachus, who is trying to find his father also because the father's been absent for so long. So it really is a story about a family trying to reunite after a war. This is a poem that dates back, you know, 2,700, 2,800 years. When you first heard that Christopher Nolan was going to take on this epic, what did you think of that? My first thought was like, oh, no, can this be actually made into a film? Because then thinking about all the new technologies and the, you know, the cinematic spectacle that we've come to, that we've whatever developed.

I think I was really getting really excited about it. You know, essentially, I think the reason why it might be so relevant in today's world, you know, I think a lot of us can relate to a story about a family trying to reunite in a war-torn world. And I'm really excited to see how Nolan deals with that issue and also, you know, the cinematic spectacle of all the monsters that Odysseus encounters, because that's what I left out in the plot summary. Because, you know, the great part of the Odyssey, too, is that it's an adventure story. It's about the father Odysseus encountering various obstacles along his path home.

And some of those obstacles are divinely ordained, like the gods, you know, try to prevent him from getting home. And others are like these fantastical creatures like the Cyclops or the Sirens or the Lotus Eaters or various others. And I'm really excited to see those on the big screen. Excited now, apprehensive before. And I want to kind of lean into the apprehension and ask you, what do you think some of the biggest challenges are when it comes to telling this story? It's not in English, first of all. That would be one. Yeah, that's a really good point.

There's a recent translation by a woman named, I believe it's Emily Wilson. Emily Wilson, yeah. Yeah. And she really makes it nice and clean and straight. I think the difficulty is like, I don't know, in some ways capturing the audience, right? Right? Because when I read The Odyssey for the first time when I was 19 years old, it was a translation that was really opaque and really difficult. But now I'm really a big fan of this new translation because it's really clean and it really just kind of like gives you the information. So I think one of the biggest challenges in sort of, you know, interpreting this, translating this, bringing it to the big screen, would to make it accessible, to make it as complex as the original text is.

I love the monsters and the spectacle and the big bang boom of cinema, but at the same time, these characters are very strange and very complicated. I mean, Emily Wilson starts for translation is like, tell me a story about a complicated man, because Odysseus is complex. And so to capture that complexity and not just turn it into sort of a cardboard character, I think would be a big challenge. Christopher Nolan, the director, he's been getting a bit of pushback for his use of contemporary language in this film. and I just want us to listen to what he had to say about it in a recent interview. When you look at the ancient world, people tend to view it in weird ways. There's a lot of cultural prejudice. There's a lot of, yeah, they're sort of elevating it because it's old, you know, whatever it is.

When you go to the poem, what you find is something that's really earthy and grounded and accessible. And so for me, in building the world of the film, what I talk to all the actors about is, like, I just want to, I want to center it on that and make it feel very fresh for modern audiences. One of the things, the words that people are picking on is that the word dad is used in this film. What do you think of that? Is it okay to be incorporating contemporary language and elements when adapting historical texts? You know, I do actually. I teach, I also teach, oh my God, I'm totally spacing on the name right now, the Assyian epic that even predates the Odyssey. Oh, my God. Gilgamesh, of course, the epic of Gilgamesh. And I teach a translation of that to my students. again, when I read that as a young person, it didn't stick. It didn't hit. It didn't like resonate. But with this translation that I teach, it really comes to life. And the students really understand

and they really empathize and they really get into these characters about the friendships and, again, the adventures and all this stuff. So, you know, I'm not a purist in that sense. And I think if someone can translate it for a modern audience by using modern language, you know, so be it. As long as people are sort of like getting the meat and potatoes of the story and getting the complexities of the characters. The Odyssey is so often touted as a foundational text when it comes to storytelling. Where else do you see its influence in popular stories today? Oh, there's so many good ones. Actually, the most recent one that I encountered actually won the Pulitzer Prize here. It's a novel called Les by Andrew Sean Greer was his name. And this is a really

funny take on The Odyssey. It was sort of like loose, hilarious, and sort of very sarcastic, very ironic, because the hero is sort of, the hero Odysseus, is really sort of pathetic because he's an author who's sort of washed up, had one hit novel, and now he'll just take any sort of author event that will come his way. So his, the adventures, instead of like encountering the monsters or what have you, he travels from one sad author event to another. And each one is a riff on Odysseus' adventures. So it's a really clever reimagining of The Odyssey, and it was like a perfect beach read it on the beach, literally. So I found that one really fun. The Cohen Brothers, O Brother Where Art thou, was also a great one, of course. And Madeline Miller's 2018 novel,

Searcy, where she does sort of a feminist reimagining of the character, Circe in the Odyssey, which is also really great. And, you know, the sort of granddaddy of them all is James Joyce's Ulysses, the 1922 experimental novel, which was sort of like bringing the epic to a sort of modern stream of consciousness, you know, it was a really formal, obviously, I mean, we can talk about Ulysses till the cows come home, but like, you know, that was like the most, consider the most important modernist novel by many critics. The actor and author Stephen Frye recently did this project where you reimagined and retells the timeless tale. for modern audiences. And his final book in the series is Odyssey. And he really talked about how Odysseus remains a hero for our times. What do you think the Odyssey still has to teach us about the current moment we're in?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I believe anyone can connect with the Odyssey because it's really about finding our home, finding our place in the world, navigating the various obstacles that obstruct our goal. But, you know, it's a, so if it's a story about the search for home in a war-torn world, I think today it has a special resonance in regard to things like even the refugee crisis or immigration, migration, due to climate change. So in the story, what I like is that we want this hero to find his way home. We identify with him. We root for him, right? So with any luck, the film might encourage audiences to identify with the homeless, with the wanderers, with the ones who are sort of seeking. seeking a home after being displaced. So if it can generate empathy for, let's say, refugees, immigrants, and sort of the homeless, like that could be a very positive thing. But I do think that speaks to the modern world right now. That's a very, obviously, a very important issue in the

present. Another really related and important theme is the importance of in ancient Greece, the word is xenia. And that just means hospitality about sort of taking in strangers, being open to foreigners. And according to Homer, at least according to classicists, that Homer believed that Zinia was a way of gauging the level of a society's progress, that like the greater a society's openness to foreigners, the more civilized it is. And we only learn of Odysseus' adventures because he has taken in by hospitable hosts, right? Like the the fiatians take him in, he's naked, he washes up on the shore. The first thing I do is feed him, clothe him, and sort of get him settled, without even knowing his name. And he wants to remain anonymous because he doesn't want to say,

like, I'm the king of Ithaca, you know, like he wants to just say like, and they say, tell us your story. So that's where we learn of his adventures. And on the other hand, the suitors who are abusing the hospitality of Odysseus's household, you know, they get their comeuppance in the end. And so order needs to be restored when people are inhospitable, right? So that concept of being open to strangers, open to foreignness. I think that's also a really important concept for the modern world because I think we sort of lost our way in that regard. So I think we can see, you know, this type of hospitality and personal relationships, but I'm thinking more like the bigger picture of national level, you know, maybe we've lost our way. And I'm hoping maybe the audience might positively affect

because it might prompt us to reconsider the importance of hospitality. We will leave it on that note. Tom, I know you're looking forward to seeing this film, as there are many people. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks so much. Tom Roach is a professor of history and literature at Bryant University in Rhode Island. We reached him this morning in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30am at all time zones.

You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca.c.com slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.