Why Myths Keep Returning
PublishedEvery few years, someone tells the story of Troy again. Christopher Nolan's new film adapts Homer's Odyssey, joining a long line of writers, translators, and filmmakers who have returned to...
Every few years, someone tells the story of Troy again. Christopher Nolan's new film adapts Homer's Odyssey, joining a long line of writers, translators, and filmmakers who have returned to the same handful of ancient stories across centuries. Odysseus's journey home keeps drawing new interpreters into its structure, generation after generation.
What makes a myth durable isn't actually that it stays the same. It survives because each generation renders it differently. In 2017, classicist Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, choosing a modern, rhythmic language built in strict iambic pentameter. Her version gave weight to details earlier translations had softened, changing how Penelope, Circe, and Calypso read on the page. Nolan has said her translation informed his research, alongside earlier editions by Robert Fagles and E.V. Rieu.
The Odyssey (2026)
A myth, seen this way, behaves not like a fixed text, but more like a form waiting to be re-authored. Each translator, each filmmaker, chooses what to emphasize and what to leave implicit, and that choice becomes the version audiences inherit.
This is closer to design than most people assume. A silhouette, a weaving technique, a way of draping cloth passes through generations the same way, carried forward by makers who reinterpret rather than repeat. Craft survives because someone keeps choosing to render it again, in their own hand, for their own moment.
Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic/Melinda Sue Gordon - © Universal Studios
Fashion runs on the same instinct. Every house with an archive spends its seasons in conversation with its own past, returning to a house silhouette, a signature cut, a fabric technique the founder once developed, and rendering it again for a different decade. Nobody accuses a maison of repeating itself when it reopens an archive. The reopening is the craft.
Nolan's Odyssey is one more rendering in a very old line. It is unlikely to be the last.
