Translator Criticizes Blockbuster Adaptation

The director cited the translator's edition of the epic as an influence on his own interpretation of the poem while on the press tour for his latest blockbuster. The translator is not returning the favor. In a negative review published this week, she criticized the adaptation for lacking psychological, emotional and ethical depth, adding that the film has nothing convincing to say about the material it borrows.

The translator, who teaches classical studies at a state university, spent six years on the edition that the director says he kept on set. Her review runs to four thousand words and reserves its harshest passages for the screenplay rather than the performances, which she describes as competent work in service of nothing in particular.

"I had hoped that the director's affinity with these themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But the film features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality, and its vision is too confused to deliver what it half-promises," the translator's scathing review reads.

She adds that the adaptation lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history or war, or about the relationship between one warrior's glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades and neighbors. The narrative structure is gimmicky and the writing is abysmal.

The director praised the translation during his press tour, telling a film magazine that he used its opening line as a guide for bringing his protagonist to life on the big screen. But the translator concluded of the film that she would be ashamed to have written any part of the script.

Audiences don't appear to be sharing the translator's dissatisfaction. The movie received top marks in exit polling during its opening weekend and has turned into one of the year's biggest blockbusters at the box office, earning a reported ninety million dollars in its second weekend domestically.

The film is now playing in theaters nationwide.