CHASING BRONZE AGE VAINGLORY EVER SINCE. 2/8: The Iliad Hardcover – September 26, 2023 by Homer (Author), Emily Wilson (Translator)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 12 May 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
2/8: The Iliad Hardcover – September 26, 2023 by Homer (Author), Emily Wilson (Translator)
https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-Homer/dp/1324001
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
1715 POPE TRANSLATION PATROCLUS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? |
| 0:04.0 | Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the |
| 0:09.1 | tropics. |
| 0:10.1 | But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise, |
| 0:18.0 | the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder. |
| 0:23.0 | Wish you were here. |
| 0:24.0 | Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm John Bachelor Professor Emily Wilson. |
| 0:38.0 | She's at the University of Pennsylvania where the students are very very fortunate |
| 0:41.8 | to have a new version of the Iliad rendered in English |
| 0:44.8 | in an amic pentameter asking the question as I wish I had done when I was 19 years old, |
| 0:51.9 | who was Homer, Professor? |
| 0:53.6 | What do we know? |
| 0:54.8 | Homer, who was Homer is a very difficult question, |
| 0:58.2 | which is still viciously argued about among Homerist scholars. |
| 1:02.2 | What we know is that for many centuries after the |
| 1:06.2 | collapse of so-called Mycenaean civilization there was no writing or literacy in the |
| 1:11.6 | Greek-speaking world. During that period for many centuries, |
| 1:15.4 | so for many centuries before the 8th century B.C. there was no writing and yet during |
| 1:21.2 | that period these extraordinary stories were being developed about the great cities of the past, including Thebes and Troy, and the great heroes of the past, including Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and so on. |
| 1:34.8 | Those stories and that rhythm that Tilly Kaysameter that we talked about for telling those stories |
| 1:40.3 | were told and re-told and re-told performing poets who were composing their poems as they went along. |
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