President Uzzi Reflects on Back to School Season
Dear Students, Colleagues, Trustees, and Friends of the College,
Here we go again! It’s back-to-school season, and we are thrilled to have our Terriers back on campus! I realized this week as I was enjoying everyone’s first day of class (FDOC!) pictures that since my first day of kindergarten at age five, I have always had a first day of school. I’ve spent more than 90% of my life in education, and I plan to keep the streak going!
Everyone who knows me even a little knows that I dedicated half my life to the study of ancient languages and the ancient world. This is why I was so excited when Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey came out this summer. All of a sudden, millions of people were talking about a poem I knew inside and out, one that I had taught and read in English and Greek dozens of times. My brain was transported back to my life as a classicist.
One of the best ways I ever engaged with the Odyssey was through leading reading groups for combat Veterans in partnership with the Maine Humanities Council and the Portland Vet Center. Having read the Odyssey with combat Veterans, I can attest to the poem’s uncanny ability to speak to Veterans, even help them find comfort. Like many Veterans, Odysseus yearns for homecoming but finds that reality fraught, perhaps even a bridge too far. When the Veterans in my reading groups learned that upon his return home, Odysseus did not recognize his beloved Ithaka, they could relate. It was not until I read the Odyssey—a text I had been teaching for over a decade—with Veterans that I came to understand the full substance and depth of the poem.
Like any adaptation meant for an audience far beyond its context, Nolan’s Odyssey wisely attends to the language and culture of its audience as much as it attends to the language and culture of the original. Nolan reads the experience of the modern Veteran back into the epic, using the term “Veteran” four times in the film, often using “Trojan War Veteran,” as we would say “Vietnam Veteran,” something Homer would not have said. Nolan’s Odyssey departs from Homer’s original in many ways, but the boldest modern intrusion is probably the figure of the Veteran. In the film, the Sirens’ Song forces Odysseus to confront the fact that he might not want a homecoming. Nolan also infuses his Odysseus with a sense of regret inconceivable in Homer’s original. In the film, Odysseus laments that “we violated all that is sacred between people.” Is Nolan’s Odysseus historically accurate? Absolutely not. Does Nolan engage his modern audience on its own terms and help us make meaning of an ancient text? Absolutely.
This is an important lesson. When we translate, the point of translation is to make a text accessible to those outside its cultural context. Nolan’s Odyssey was meaningful to us thousands of years after Homer because Nolan was thinking as much or more about his modern audience as he was about the original text. Nolan was not alone; human beings are always translating. On an individual level, when we communicate, we are trying to translate the thoughts, ideas, and perspectives in our own minds into the minds of others. Even when we all technically speak the same language, we still don’t always speak the same language. When I imagine all the conversations students and faculty will have this year and the variety of cultural and ideological perspectives that will come together in those conversations, I am inspired by the power of a good translation. If we take a lesson from Christopher Nolan, we will focus more on making meaning for our audience than for ourselves, and if we do this, our translations might be more successful.
As we return to school this fall, I realize that I had the gift of returning to school this summer because Christopher Nolan attempted the daunting task of translating the ancient world into a modern one. I wish for all of us a 2026-2027 academic year full of inspiration and successful translations.
Sending my best,
