CHASING BRONZE AGE VAINGLORY EVER SINCE. 8/8: The Iliad Hardcover – September 26, 2023 by Homer (Author), Emily Wilson (Translator)

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 12 May 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

CHASING BRONZE AGE VAINGLORY EVER SINCE.

8/8: 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

1738 ILLIAD

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0:34.0	I'm John Batsworth,
0:40.0	Professor Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania. her new work is The Iliad, by Homer
0:46.0	2700 years ago, and today rendered in dynamic pentameter English. It's a joy to speak of these matters even though
0:56.3	everybody knows the ending. The ending has some surprises to me because Achilles having lost Patroclus insist upon a funeral pyre and there's
1:07.6	violence in the funeral pyre the 12 young men boys that Achilles is taken captive, he destroys the funeral power along with dogs,
1:17.1	everything he throws in to the funeral power for Patroclus.
1:21.0	But then it would appear that Achilles is accepting death on its own.
1:27.2	I can't tell, Professor, forgive me, I started reading this psychologically and I know I shouldn't
1:32.4	do that, but it's too tempting.
1:35.2	What is Achilles coming to terms with when he goes from the funeral pyre to the funeral games?
1:41.6	I think he's coming to terms with the possibility that you can't
1:46.3	be an ultimate winner. I mean there are always going to be winners and losers and
1:49.8	that in fact in some way all mortals are losers even somebody who's the son of a goddess as he is himself
1:56.3	he's still lost terrible things he's lost both honor to Agamemnon which I think by this point in the poem starts to seem relatively trivial,
	...

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