6/8: 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

⏱️ 8 minutes

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6/8: 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

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0:29.0	com pricing shown. I'm John Bachelors with Professor Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania.
0:39.0	Her new work is The Iliad.
0:40.8	By Homer, nearly 2,800, 2,700 years ago.
0:45.0	However, imagine this book being read by 2,700 years of scholars and students and how each century comes to it with its own assumptions,
0:59.0	modernity each time. And we now come to the battle scenes which the professor has rendered into English
1:06.1	with great vividness at the same time it's gory it's extremely gory.
1:11.7	Homer wanted you to know how each of these men died and why.
1:17.0	Professor, in translating the gore, you have, I mentioned earlier from your notes, you talked about the word spear.
1:25.0	The sounds of the battle you also consulted men and women who have been in combat
1:32.0	what did you learn from them about how to render the Greek into English?
1:38.0	I found it fascinating to hear from veterans, partly because they had so much of a more visceral I think understanding
1:45.3	than many people of how important it is to sort of wrestle with this question and what to do
1:49.8	about the dead. I mean most of us don't encounter dead bodies in our daily lives, but people who've been in combat
1:56.1	may well have had this very shocking experience of his either an enemy corpse or a corpse of a comrade, and we have to decide in the midst of
2:04.7	combat what to do about that. I mean I also just wrestled in general about the
2:09.8	ways that the Iliad represents all this violence so clearly and often so beautifully.
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