Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7524 in Books
• Published on: 1961-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Customer Reviews

Invaluable Documents but...an uneasy read.
I recognize and agree that Lattimore's translations of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are the MOST TRUE to Homer and Ancient Greek we have ever seen.

Two minor examples: he uses long verse lines (like Homer), maintains Homer's sentence structure and he keeps and repeats all the Epitaphs exactly as they appear in Homer.

Lattimore's choice of words and sentence organization can sometimes seem jumbled and complicated and his manner/style somewhat archaic, it is because Lattimore is showing how Homer "sounds" in English as if you were translating it directly and perfectly from the Greek. That is Lattimore's aim, to render Homer as EXACTLY as possible. For this I am grateful...he has helped many to develop a more scholarly aptitude.

This aside,

I give it 3 stars because I find that his translation is not condusive to reading. Lattimore's 1950's American English is out of date and the story moves excessively slow. I often find Lattimore's Homer stodgy, hard, complicated, and often boring!


My favorites are still Stanley Lombardo's (Prosaic Verse) and E.V. Rieu's (Novel-like Prose) versions. Both full of fire-like Excitement, shimmering Beauty and monumental Drama.

I always recommend having 2 or 3 different versions of Homer on shelf, Lattimore is always on mine...not for reading enjoyment though but only for comparing.

Thanks

Western literature starts here
Having been a very lazy student in high school, I'm sure I was assigned to read the Iliad or Odyssey, but never did. A recent trip to Crete, and to the ruins of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization inspired me to read Homer. Considering the comments of reviewers who read the Iliad under duress as students, I'm glad that I read it on my own account.

Why read the Iliad? For one thing, it's where Western literature begins. The Minoans had writing, but their language is undeciphered. The Mycenaean Greeks adapted the Minoan writing system, and their language has been identified as an early form of Greek, but if they ever wrote any extended works, none have been discovered. That means that Homer and Hesiod, who are generally thought to have lived in the 8th Century B.C., are the earliest surviving literature in Europe. Homer is assumed to predate Hesiod. The themes of the Iliad - fate and free will, for instance - have been dealt with by writers through the ages, and continue now.

Homer's works represent the transition point where the legends and traditions transmitted orally since time inmemorial are first recorded in writing. The settings of the Iliad and the Odyssey are in Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece, and many of the traditional legends which serve as a basis for the stories undoubtedly date back far into prehistory. The style and contents of the Iliad have many elements which undoubtedly come directly from the oral traditions, most notably the Iliad is written in verse. These, as Lattimore explains in his introduction, are tools which the narrator uses (a) to memorize the tale, and (b) to help to help the listener follow along. A lot of elements are repeated, especially the epithets (my favorite is "Thersites of the endless speech") and descriptions of repeated events like religious ceremonies or the death of a warrior ("his armor clattered about him"). Reading it, it can seem a bit repetitive at times, but keep in mind that this is an epic composed long before it was transcribed to written language.

This is by no means easy reading, and it is quite long (485 pages). Things are usually developed very slowly. The plot of the story is actually fairly simple. Lattimore starts the book with a 50 page introduction, which is very helpful in explaining how the Iliad works. In the beginning of the introduction he gives a summary of the story which takes less than one page, but you would be missing the entire point by reading the "cliff notes". To give you an example, there is a description of Achileus' shield which takes up 4 pages, and which is an absolute highlight of the book. Patroclos's funeral is also detailed at length, giving a fascinating look at the culture in pre-Classical Greece (you can't be sure how much is from the Mycenaean Bronze Age, and how much is from the Iron Age Dark Ages, when Homer lived).

A lot of time is given to the interaction of the various gods and immortal beings with mere mortals. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. These gods are hardly impartial, loving, or "above things". They all have competing stakes in the outcomes of the war, and scheme and deceive humans and one another to affect the outcomes for their favorite mortals.

Not having read any other translation of the Iliad, I really can't comment on the relative merrits of Lattimore's translation compared to others. Lattimore's goal is to be as true to the original Greek sentence structure and the original meter of the verse. Since English and Ancient Greek have very different grammatical structures, this inevitably results in some convoluted sentences at times. Unlike some other translations, this one remains pretty faithful to the original Greek names, rather than the Roman ones (Zeus and Ares vs. Jupiter and Mars, etc.). This attempt to be faithful to the original is why I ultimately chose to read this translation. I really wanted to get into the spirit of the times, as much as possible.

BTW on the web you can listed to a recitation of the "Iliad" in ancient Greek by Prof. Stanley Lombardo, who also did a translation. I can't understand anything, but it sounds great, and you can really appreciate the musicality of the poem.

The BEST Iliad
"The Iliad" is my all time favorite single piece of literature (even though I am a Shakespeare scholar), so I did not buy this copy to read "The Iliad" for the first time, but because my nearly forty-year-old and much read/much loved 1970 copy was genuinely falling apart (despite repairs with both packing and duct tape at two separate points in the past). So I bought it to read again and hopefully to last another forty years. The Lattimore translation is to me by far the best translation of the "The Iliad," readable, dramatic, accurate, and very, very beautiful. I recently also re-read the good and serviceable Rouse translation, and it's excellent--in fact for first time readers, I would probably recommend it since it's easier for new readers, especially younger ones, because of the simpler prose translation. However, I compared passage after passage and found the Lattimore to have many times the poetic POWER! "The Iliad" is after all a POEM, and Lattimore shows us the power of that gorgeous poetry even now three-thousand years later.