Scholar at Work: Professor Hilda Ma ’01 on the Enduring Power of ‘The Odyssey’

“At Work” is a series that highlights Saint Mary’s faculty and staff at work in the world. Artists, writers, scholars, scientists—we sit down and dive deep into their latest projects.

Homer’s Odyssey is many things—one of humanity’s oldest surviving works of literature, a window into Bronze Age Greece, a cornerstone of Western culture and thought—but it’s also, fundamentally, an adaptation. The adventures of Odysseus existed long before they were on the page. For centuries, sailors swapped them at sea and bards performed them in feast halls. Only in the 8th or 7th century BCE did “Homer,” whoever they were, synthesize those tales into epic poem form.

In a way, then, Christopher Nolan’s recent blockbuster film The Odyssey is an adaptation of an adaptation. There’s an added layer, too: In writing the screenplay, Nolan drew on classicist Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the poem, honing in on Wilson’s description of Odysseus as a “complicated man.”  Nolan’s IMAX-sized Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is a haunted one, wracked by guilt over the Trojan War. The film, now the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, resonates with many and frustrates others, including Wilson herself. 

For Hilda Ma ’01, the varying, vehement reactions to Nolan’s Odyssey speak mainly to the source material’s richness. A Professor of English and a Shakespeare scholar, Ma also currently directs Collegiate Seminar—Saint Mary’s longstanding and beloved series of courses in which undergraduates read, discuss, and debate foundational books and texts. For decades, Homer’s Odyssey has been one of those works—including when Ma was an SMC student herself, toting her copy to a Seminar room in Dante Hall. Back then, she notes, the assigned translation was Robert Fagles’s, published in 1996. These days, Gaels read Wilson. Still, whether it’s mediated by Fagles or Wilson or Nolan, the story of Odysseus continues to endure. 

I recently sat down with Ma to discuss The Odyssey, Nolan’s film, and why Homer’s poem remains a natural fit for Collegiate Seminar. 

Why do you think The Odyssey remains so resonant?

To start, it’s just a really great adventure story. It has gods and monsters, fight scenes, family conflict, and revenge. Beyond that, it also asks questions that still feel familiar today: What does it mean to leave home and find a way back? What do we owe strangers and the people who welcome us? What does it mean to go home when you’ve changed, and home has changed, too? 

Even though the text is ancient, those questions are not so distant after all. 

I’m conscious, too, that it’s been part of the SMC experience for—well, not quite millennia, but a long time! When we posted about it recently on social media, the response was immense. 

Oh, absolutely. The Odyssey is having a moment right now, but SMC students have been reading it for decades. It’s currently part of a Collegiate Seminar course called Looking Outward, where students are asked to move beyond their own perspectives into the wider world. The Odyssey is especially well-suited for that course, because it’s about people encountering the unfamiliar. It’s also a story about what obligations people have to one another—be it to family, foreigners, the deceased, or a higher power. 

These topics are incredibly relevant to our students. If you think about it, it parallels their own lives. They’re in college, going on their own Saint Mary’s odyssey. They, too, will encounter their own trials and challenges. They’ll also change through their experiences and come out on the other side different. 

In the seminar course, we take a global approach to these enduring concepts. For example, alongside The Odyssey, we also read Journey to the West, the 16th-century classic by Wu Cheng’en. It’s another epic journey narrative with monsters and gods—including the Monkey King—but with a different set of messages informed by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Putting those texts in conversation with each other, you get some really rich discussions. It gets students thinking and talking about the values and assumptions inherent in culture and custom. 

There’s something powerful in that process, I think.

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Talk a little bit about Collegiate Seminar, for those who may not be familiar. 

Essentially, Seminar is a series of classes every SMC student takes. Students come together, sit around a circular table, and start discussing a book or text they’ve all read. In these courses, you’re facing people coming from different majors, different walks of life, and different backgrounds. Your professor could be from any department on campus. Naturally, everyone arrives with different interpretations and takeaways. 

That’s why it’s such a beloved SMC experience, I think; it’s through this process of exchange that students learn to think and speak effectively. They’re asked to articulate their ideas and back them up with evidence. They also learn to listen sincerely and, if they disagree, do so thoughtfully without dismissing one another. 

The Odyssey lends itself really well to Seminar discussion. Those big, resonant themes and questions I mentioned earlier—those are entry points for students to share their own perspectives. With any text, collaborative inquiry can get hairy and uncomfortable sometimes. But by the time they’re done here, students learn how to navigate it.

"The wonderful thing is that it never feels like we’re simply repeating something I’ve done before. You can put 'The Odyssey' on the table year after year, but once you put a new group of people around that table, it’s a new conversation."

— Hilda Ma ’01, Director of Collegiate Seminar

Speaking of disagreements: So much of the discourse around Christopher Nolan’s film has centered on interpretation and so-called “accuracy.” I’m curious about your perspective.

I don’t think we necessarily need to judge Nolan’s film by how faithful it is to Homer. That’s something I think about a lot as a Shakespeare scholar who teaches adaptation. An adaptation isn’t simply trying to reproduce an original work. It’s interpreting it, and in this case, it’s also translating it into a completely different medium.

The Odyssey itself comes from an oral tradition, whereas film generates meaning very differently. So I’m less interested in asking, “Did Nolan get Homer right?” than in asking what choices he made and what those choices allow us to see. What has he kept? What has he cut, added, or changed? Whose story gets amplified, and whose gets diminished or even erased? What happens, for example, when the gods become less prominent? Those differences aren’t necessarily failures of fidelity. They’re interpretive choices, and the interesting questions are about why those choices matter, what they reveal, and how they shape a story we may have heard before.

Homer’s story is still there, layered beneath the film, so part of the pleasure of an adaptation is the conversation that develops between the two works. You begin to see the ancient text differently because of what the adaptation emphasizes, and you also understand the film differently because you know what’s underneath it.

And I think the fact that we’re having all of these conversations, arguing about what Nolan changed, what he kept, and what The Odyssey should look like on screen, suggests that the adaptation has succeeded in at least one important sense. It has brought people back into a conversation with an ancient story. 

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How does it feel, as someone who walked through Collegiate Seminar yourself, to now be directing the program?

It’s really meaningful to me. I remember sitting around a Seminar table as a Saint Mary’s student, and now I get to watch new generations of students have that experience. The wonderful thing is that it never feels like we’re simply repeating something I’ve done before. You can put The Odyssey on the table year after year, but once you put a new group of people around that table, it’s a new conversation. Someone sees something you’ve never noticed. Someone asks a question you’ve never heard. The text comes alive again.

Seminar education also has an ethical dimension. We’re not telling students what their answers to those questions should be. We’re giving them the space and the tools to think seriously about them with other people. I think that’s why, after all these years, I still believe so strongly in Seminar. We’re giving students a place to slow down, think seriously about difficult questions, listen to and talk with people who may see the world differently, and figure out what they themselves believe and why.

Watching students do that makes me hopeful. As an alumna and now a professor and director of the program, I’m really proud that Saint Mary’s continues to place that experience at the heart of an undergraduate education.

Hayden Royster is the Associate Editor in the Office of Marketing and Communications at Saint Mary’s. Write him.