‘The crude language of Maga folks’: Joyce Carol Oates criticises Emily Wilson for criticising Nolan’s Odyssey

The novelist suggested Wilson should have been ‘a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful’ towards a film-maker who may have helped boost her book sales Mary Beard on The Odyssey and how empires fall – Stateside with Kai and Carter The off-screen drama surrounding Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster version of the Odyssey stepped up a gear overnight, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates sought to defend the film-maker from an attack by classicist Emily Wilson. Writing on X, Oates took issue with the style as well as the rhetoric of Wilson’s essay published earlier this week in the London Review of Books, in which the academic, who published a landmark translation of Homer’s epic poem in 2017, wrote that Nolan’s film lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” and had “nothing convincing to say”. “Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” said Oates, “this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of Maga folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers. “One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a