Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer's Odyssey into English, is producing an entirely new translation of the poem less than a decade after her acclaimed 2017 version was published. The move follows a summer of controversy in which Wilson strongly criticised Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film adaptation of the Odyssey, despite the director having cited her earlier translation, including its famous opening line, as an influence on his script.

Wilson says the new work is a complete retranslation rather than a revision, adopting an approach closer to her Iliad translation with more lines than the Greek original to allow varied pacing, and she is roughly halfway through. She plans to likely retain the opening line "Tell me about a complicated man", to use more precise terminology around enslavement than her previous reliance on the word "slave", and to quadruple her scholarly endnotes. Nolan's film, starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, took $264m (£196m) in its opening weekend and drove a 1,400% rise in UK print sales of the poem, while Wilson's public criticism of the film's writing drew a rebuke from novelist Joyce Carol Oates. No publication date has been set for the new translation.