Product Description

This timeless poem-more than 2,700 year old-still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amid devastation and destruction as it moves inexorably to its wrenching, tragic conclusion. Readers of this epic poem will be gripped by the finely tuned translation and enlightening introduction.

Translated by Robert Fagles
Introduction and Notes by Bernard

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1950 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140275360
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
This groundbreaking English version by Robert Fagles is the most important recent translation of Homer's great epic poem. The verse translation has been hailed by scholars as the new standard, providing an Iliad that delights modern sensibility and aesthetic without sacrificing the grandeur and particular genius of Homer's own style and language. The Iliad is one of the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters: Achilles, Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and history in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy.

About the Author
Robert Fagles, the winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University and received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University.

Bernard Knox is Director Emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.

Customer Reviews

A readable Iliad in modern idiom
Robert Fagles's translation of Homer's Iliad is spiritually if not literally true to the original. Both versions repeat set speeches and descriptions in precisely the same words, and the translation exhibits a fairly regular rhythmic beat. But Homer's Greek was chanted, and the set passages were like refrains in which listeners could, if they chose, join in as a chorus. In English, the repetitions sometimes become tedious, especially when the same speech is given three times in two pages, as in the relay of Zeus's orders in Book II. Especially noteworthy is Bernard Knox's long and fascinating Introduction, a masterpiece of literary criticism and scholarship which conveys Homer's grim attitude toward war, the interplay of divine and human will, and the ancient concepts of honor, courage, and virility in the face of the stark finality of death. Knox also includes a succinct explanation of the quantitative, rather than accentual, basis of Greek (and Latin) verse. For easy readability, Fagles's translation is without rival. For elegance and poetry, however, I recommend Richmond Lattimore's older but still gripping and fluent translation.

A Translation To Read Out Loud
I own two copies of The Iliad. I own the Lattimore translation for study, and the Fagles translation for love of the story.

Translating ancient Greek is tough work. The author must constantly fight the battle to match the *meaning* of the original and the *feel* of the original in a language built for a very different culture and time.

Lattimore was invaluable when I was translating passages myself for college. He comes closest to writing ancient Greek in clear English. But when I want to lose myself in the story and action and feel myself swept away by the rage of Achilles, I reach for Fagles. He, more than any other translator I have read, carries the pace and force of the original Homeric Greek in an English that breathes life into the work without calling attention to itself.

Wow! Has he really done the impossible?
History shows us that "standard" translations are really translations for the time. As good as Pope's translation of the Iliad is - and it's good enough to stand on its own as an English poem - it definitely smacks of its time, particularly in how it moves and in its concern for rhetorical balance. Fagles has at least given me the Iliad of my own time. I read it the first time with part of me saying, "This is *so* good, can it last?" I have no idea. What impresses me so much is that it is undoubtedly wonderful poetry - poetry that makes you marvel at word choice and rhetorical construction - and yet it moves with the speed of an adventure novel. In other words, it exemplifies (as no other translation has for me) what scholars have been telling us about Homer for centuries. I don't understand classical Greek. I can't read Homer in the original, but I believe Fagles has given me something very, very close indeed.