CHASING BRONZE AGE VAINGLORY EVER SINCE. 4/8: 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
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
4/8: 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
500 BCE ILLIAD
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. Wish you were here. Follow the price of Paradise Now wherever |
| 0:26.7 | you listen to podcasts. I'm John Batsworth Professor Emily Wilson whose new work is the Iliad. |
| 0:40.0 | I Homer. It's an audible book as well by Audrey McDonald's and I recommend the book to read |
| 0:46.7 | along with Audrey McDonald's reading because the actress and singer, opera singer |
| 0:53.0 | singer Argy McDonnell has a range of voices to give you to understand their |
| 0:57.8 | depths of motive in these characters as they come to their moments. |
| 1:02.2 | And Aphrodite, every time she appeared, |
| 1:05.4 | something bad was going to happen. |
| 1:07.5 | What are we understanding about Aphrodite? |
| 1:10.1 | She's just one of those women who bad 50 miles a bad road. Is that how to think about her? |
| 1:17.2 | I mean all gods are bad if you're a human who gets in their way, right? I mean, |
| 1:21.1 | Aphrodite is very dangerous to Helen, but she's also helped |
| 1:24.4 | Helen and got her in a position of power. I mean, so in book five, we have two gods, very unusually, |
| 1:31.0 | gods are on the battlefield in book five and those gods are Aphrodite and Aries, |
| 1:36.1 | the gods who are presented as the most borderline ridiculous among the gods themselves. |
| 1:41.2 | And I think that's partly because those gods are the closest to |
| 1:45.2 | representing what has seen as basic human instincts. They either lust in the case |
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