Hutzell: Annapolis can always go Homer, no matter how Hollywood’s ‘The Odyssey’ turns out

I asked Brendan Boyle to speak in ancient rhyme the other day.

And, being a good sport as well as the associate dean for graduate programs at St. John’s College in Annapolis, he rapped out a little Homer.

“Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα,” he intoned, “πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ. πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν.”

OK. It’s Greek to me.

However big the song of Odysseus’ journey home from war 3,000 years ago will look on — really big — screens in Christopher Nolan’s IMAX adaptation this weekend, it has a home in Annapolis.

“Are young men still growing up? Are men and women still wondering what an authentic marriage looks like?” Boyle asked. “Are men and women still wondering how to hold on to a marriage after years of separation?”

Each time someone adapts “The Odyssey” or reads a new translation, the experience is about taking in what has drawn audiences from the time of Bronze Age poets to Matt Damon’s debut as one of the original heroes.

You could find relevance in what Homer’s travelogue of the magical Mediterranean says about being the stranger in a strange land, or the risks of being a bad guest in someone’s house.

We are all many things, Homer says, just navigating life’s obstacles and dangers with wits and luck.

Every year, freshmen arriving at the St. John’s campus or next door on the Naval Academy Yard read Homer.

If midshipmen are more likely to divine lessons from “The Iliad” on the humanity of war and the limits of heroism, then Johnnies are apt to study the poems as touchstones of Western thought.

For an 18-year-old arriving in Annapolis to study in St. John’s Great Books Program next month, the appeal might be Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. Indecisive child of a shifty, absent king and a clever, beset queen, he’s not that likable.

But teenagers other than your own are often hard to like because they’re not fully formed. That’s what makes Telemachus real.

“You could imagine that ‘The Odyssey’, in some sense, was written for, designed for students to read the first week that they come on a college campus,” Boyle said. “Because what are they doing there if not, in some sense, coming into the fullness of their adulthood?”

To find “The Odyssey” at the Greenfield Library on campus, students walk down a set of winding steps, turn right and follow the stacks to the third row.

The college has a first edition from 1870 — two, to be exact. It is the home of the Homerathon, a public reading, and a bust of what Homer might have looked like occupies a corner of the library catalog home page.

My kids know parts of this adventure.

I told them they could blame me for their problems until they turn 21. That’s a year older than Telemachus when his dad returns in disguise. He comes up short, unable to meet the challenge of greedy suitors vying to replace the long-missing Odysseus as king.

Except that I made it 31, giving them grace for the difficulties of modern life. I wonder if they’ll call me out after seeing the movie.

Kids. What are they to do with a magpie for a father, who picks up shiny ideas wherever he finds them and adapts?

Boyle will see the movie when he finds time. As a classicist, he’ll bring a critical eye.

How do you adapt an epic poem when the meter and language serve the narrative as much as the plot? How do you flesh out Homer’s half-conjured women and enslaved servants?

Boyle’s favorite attempt is “Contempt,” Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie about the obstacles of adapting “The Odyssey” to film. Mine is the 2000 Coen brothers’ “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” with George Clooney as a conman Odysseus and John Goodman as a Klansman-cyclops, Polyphemus.

Classicists are excited to see what Nolan can do. Some of that is having a platform to share what they know. When else will you read a Homer scholar’s opinions in The New York Times?

“We get to make a few remarks,” Boyle said, “mostly of wet blanket sort.”

Oh, the wet blankets are heaped high.

The accents are American. The armor is wrong.

Robert Pattinson is too modern as Antinous when he mocks Tom Holland’s Telemachus, telling him he’s whining for his “daddy’s” return.

Lupita Nyong’o is too Black to be Helen of Troy, Elliot Page too trans to be the wily soldier Sinon — although no one’s bothered by the lifting of his character from Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the Roman fable that starts with the fall of Troy.

Self-anointed culture guardians should get a grip.

They didn’t serve popcorn when Homer — who didn’t originate the poems — wandered the storied palaces of the Aegean to sing, if he ever really did.

If you don’t speak ancient Greek, then let me translate Boyle’s recitation above for you. It’s the opening lines of “The Odyssey.”

Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways, who wandered far and wide, after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.

We can’t even agree on this.

Is Odysseus the man of many ways, or the man who twists and turns? Is he a complicated man, or the Coen brothers’ man of constant sorrow?

Each is a subtly different translation, and there’s room for all of them.

That’s why “The Odyssey” will survive Nolan’s 21st-century treatment. You can’t hurt Homer.

So pass the pomegranate seeds, figs and wine. I’m ready to root for Athena, Circe and Calypso.

As Boyle might say in Greek if I’d asked: Ἔννεπε μοι, μοῦσα, πῶς τόνδε τὸν μῦθον τελευτῶ.

Tell me, oh muse, how this story turns out.