It is the mechanical nature of the novel that makes it epic.

Emily Wilson is set to translate The Odyssey into English from scratch, although a publication date has not yet been set. Her previous version, published by Norton in 2017, became famous for two reasons: one concerning the general public, who discovered its existence when Christopher Nolan stated that it had inspired The Odyssey; the other for those in the know, who turned up their noses at the translation of ‘polytropon’ – which, in the opening lines of the most classic Italian Odyssey, Pindemonte’s version, reads ‘of many-form ingenuity’ – as ‘complicated’, a term that sounds a bit like a description of a ‘situationship’ in a Facebook bio. Although the new work is not billed as a revision of the previous one, but rather as a completely new version from scratch, the translator has already announced that she will retain ‘complicated’ (those in the know say she has already got past the tenth canto). As readers of Il Foglio—where the piece first appeared in Italian—will know, Emily Wilson’s fame is, however, also due to a scathing outburst in the London Review of Books aimed at savaging Nolan’s film, with arguments for which there is no space here, save for the one concerning the fact that Ulysses and his companions move through the narrative arena like automated puppets, without the impetus of any inner drive: Ulysses returns because he must return, Penelope waits because she must wait, the suitors gorge themselves because they must gorge themselves. Regardless of whether this detachment benefits or detracts from the film, it is nevertheless worth revisiting Mikhail Bakhtin’s Aesthetics and the Novel (Einaudi, 544 pp., 29 euros), in which the Russian critic distinguished the epic from the novel precisely on the grounds of its mechanical nature; the characters in epic poems act within a framework of predetermined actions, behaving in accordance with unshakeable objectives set by absolute values. The Odyssey may well have been a controversial film, but it is certainly not a novel, with characters who agonise and act within a framework of possible alternatives from which they must choose with anguish. Let us hope that the new translation takes this into account. After all, it is precisely this inscrutability—which stems from the inevitability of actions—that makes Ulysses, in our eyes, more than just complicated; he is utterly, utterly complicated.