5/8: The Iliad Hardcover – September 26, 2023 by Homer (Author), Emily Wilson (Translator)

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 9 December 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

5/8: The Iliad Hardcover – September 26, 2023 by Homer (Author), Emily Wilson (Translator)
https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-Homer/dp/1324001801

When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017―revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)―critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time.
The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world―the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even “complicated,” characters―both human and divine.
The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.5 maps

1633 Olympus from Pope's translation

Transcript

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0:42.0	Professor Emily Wilson, University of Pennsylvania, her new work is The Iliad.
0:47.0	I-Homer, translated here in the 21st century with all of the nuance of Greek translated into the nuance of modern English
0:55.9	with iambic pentameter as the choice by the professor to help it to help us read
1:01.4	it not only silently on the page, but also allowed to ourselves and also
1:08.1	to listen to the reading of Audrey McDonald, the actress and opera singer, whose range of voice helps a deal and
1:16.1	I believe Professor influences my attention to the female characters because hearing it read
1:22.4	by a woman with that range of voice you immediately hear the whispering going on and the doubts and the hesitations. But we get to the plot. The plot begins with Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, nine years
1:38.6	into the Siege of Troy, and he has offended Achilles. What did he do, Professor? How has Achilles taken up this rage that will eventually be his undoing? So all the leaders of the Greeks in the Greek encampment which
1:56.5	you're besieging who are besieging the Trojan City all of them have various
2:00.6	trophy women as their enslaved prizes who represent their honor.
2:05.8	Bonavaggamemnon's women turns out to be the daughter of a priest of Apollo.
2:11.2	The priest of Apollo wants his daughter back, which is, you know, God's have a kind of sway over human life, which humans don't always take account for.
2:21.0	A manon has failed to take account of the fact this woman
2:24.1	wasn't actually available for the taking.
	...

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