What It Really Takes to Get Home
At the beginning of his epic poem, Homer takes 21 lines to introduce the name of his hero, the name our hero has had to warp and conceal to survive, the name that sounds in Greek like “nobody” (“oudeis”) and “suffering” (“odussumai”).

At last, in Phaeacia, Odysseus can reveal it.

Laid bare by grief, warmed for the first time in years by an authentic taste of kindness, he can start to speak his pain aloud. He can begin to know himself, and to let us know him.

All the poem’s finely woven strands converge in that moment, and Homer starts to show us what it really takes to go home.

Spencer Klavan in the WSJ’s “Free Expression” explains that readers won’t get that in Christopher Nolan’s film, “The Odyssey.” You won’t get it anywhere, he advises, but Homer.

No retelling, no matter how great, can match the intricate gossamer beauty of this poem. Mr. Nolan’s achievements can’t match it, nor can he threaten or diminish it. Whether you love the movie, as I did, or hate it, doesn’t matter very much.

Read Daniel Mendelsohn’s lovely translation, advises Mr. Klavan, or Robert Fagles’s, or Richmond Lattimore’s.

Listen to the great Ian McKellen read it aloud. But do read it. Nothing else compares.
Mr. Klavan is associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and host of the “Young Heretics” podcast.