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Summary
Summary
&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RThe Iliad&&L/I&&R, by &&LB&&RHomer&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R &&LI&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R: &&LDIV&&R New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics &&L/I&&Rpulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&LP&&RThe epic song of Ilion (an old name for Troy), &&LI&&RThe&&L/I&&R &&LI&&RIliad&&L/I&&R recreates a few dramatic weeks near the end of the fabled Trojan War, ending with the funeral of Hector, defender of the doomed city. Through its majestic verses stride the fabled heroes Priam, Hector, Paris, and Aeneas for Troy; Achilles, Ajax, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Odysseus for the Greeks; and the beautiful Helen, over whom the longstanding war has been waged. Never far from the center of the story are the quarreling gods: Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.&&L/P&&R&&LP&&R&&LI&&RThe Iliad&&L/I&&R is the oldest Greek poem and perhaps the best-known epic in Western literature, and has inspired countless works of art throughout its long history. An assemblage of stories and legends shaped into a compelling single narrative, &&LI&&RThe Iliad&&L/I&&R was probably recited orally by bards for generations before being written down in the eighth century B.C. A beloved fixture of early Greek culture, the poem found eager new audiences when it was translated into many languages during the Renaissance. Its themes of honor, power, status, heroism, and the whims of the gods have ensured its enduring popularity and immeasurable cultural influence.&&L/P&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LSTRONG&&RBruce M. King&&L/B&&R&&L/B&&R studied at the University of Chicago, and has taught classics and humanities at Columbia University, Reed College, and the University of Chicago. Recently a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, King focuses on archaic and classical Greek literature and philosophy. He is currently a Blegen Research Fellow at Vassar College.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R
Author Notes
Translator and professor Robert Fagles was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 11, 1933. He received a BA in English from Amherst College and a PhD in English from Yale University. While obtaining his degrees, he studied Latin and Greek on the side. He taught at Yale for one year and then joined the faculty at Princeton University as an English professor and remained there until he retired in 2002. While at Princeton, he created the university's department of comparative literature and received an honorary doctorate in June 2007.
He was also a renowned translator of Latin and Greek. His first published translation was of the Greek poet Bacchylides (1961), which was followed by versions of The Oresteia by Aeschylus and the plays, Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. Fagles was best known for his versions of The Iliad (1990), The Odyssey (1996) and The Aeneid (2006). Instead of being an exacting literal translator, he sought to reinterpret the classics in a contemporary idiom which gave his translations a narrative energy and verve. He died of prostate cancer on March 26, 2008.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Choice Review
Merrill's new verse translation of the Iliad is the equal of Richmond Lattimore's poetic version (1951) and even Martin Hammond's prose edition (1987) in its fidelity to the sense of Homer's words. Read (preferably aloud) for the quality of its verbal music as a poem in English, it is on a par with Lattimore and with the more beautiful renderings of Robert Fitzgerald (1963) and Robert Fagles (1990). And for sheer readability, it matches Stanley Lombardo's lively translation (CH, Dec'97, 35-1954) while conveying a sense of antiquity through deft, sparing use of archaisms (e.g., "scion"). But what particularly distinguishes Merrill's version is its resourceful approximation in English of the rhythms of the Greek dactylic hexameter. Only Merrill's Odyssey (CH, May'03, 40-5063) and, to some extent, Edward McCrorie's Odyssey (CH, Nov'04, 42-1388) are as effective in this regard. Another plus is the consistent replication of Homer's formulaic repetitions. To vary these, as do most other verse translators, falsifies the true aesthetic power of Homer's epic. In sum, Merrill has succeeded better than anyone since Lattimore in retaining the meaning of Homer's words while ingeniously suggesting the effect of their metrical and formulaic rhythms. A sensitive introduction, bibliographic guidance, and a glossary of names complete the volume. Summing Up: Essential. All readers, all levels. J. P. Holoka Eastern Michigan University
Guardian Review
With Chapman and Pope, and in the modern age Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles, there is no shortage of English translations of The Iliad. Stephen Mitchell - who has also translated Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and the Book of Job - provides the latest. "My intention," he writes, "has been to recreate the ancient epic as a contemporary poem." To make familiar, or to make foreign? That is one of the many dilemmas of the Homeric translator. For my taste, Mitchell's version, while pacy and direct, is overfamiliar and I dislike his technique of sometimes removing the poem's "Homeric epithets" (the often-repeated descriptive phrases, such as the "wine-dark" sea, which were probably used as metrically prefabricated units by the early oral bards who improvised these stories.) These phrases often simply fill out the metre and are irrelevant to the context, he argues. I think they do more than he gives them credit for. And in any event, I missed their delicious archaic tang. To me, they are one of the great pleasures of the poem. - Charlotte Higgins With Chapman and Pope, and in the modern age Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles, there is no shortage of English translations of The Iliad. - Charlotte Higgins.
Library Journal Review
Why another Iliad? Just as Homer's work existed most fully in its performance, so the Homeric texts call periodically for new translations. With this in mind, Fagles offers a new verse rendering of the Iliad. Maneuvering between the literal and the literary, he tries with varying degrees of success to suggest the vigor and manner of the original while producing readable poetry in English. Thus, he avoids the anachronizing of Robert Fitzgerald's translation, while being more literal than Richard Lattimore's. Fagles's efforts are accompanied by a long and penetrating introduction by Bernard Knox, coupled with detailed glossary and textual notes.-- T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Bruce M. King's Introduction to The Iliad The Iliad , then, even as it sings the immortality of its heroes, suggests an end to their imagined era and to the political order that is located there. Indeed, one of the great feats of the Iliad is to pose a critique--centered upon the withdrawals and speeches of Achilles--of the heroic order and the possibilities that it offers for mortal happiness. From this point of view, the essential work of the Iliad is one of negation--again, the epic is unjust with respect to the old, but potentially beneficent with respect to the future. The old heroic order--for all its blinding beauties and exaltations, for all its aspirant motion toward the realm of the aesthetic--is also revealed as unable to quell strife and its attendant violence, as conducive to no just stability and, finally, as a desolation to its own greatest heroes (as the complaints and career of Achilles will dramatize). To the extent that it thematizes the obsolescence of the old heroic order, the Iliad reveals an orientation toward the future; the poem cannot invent the forms that will govern the future, but it can present to the future a kind of tabula rasa , upon which the poet's audience might reinscribe new meanings out of the wreckage of the old, upon which the heroes might be reassembled and once again directed toward human ends. If the warrior order is permanently unmade over the course of the Iliad , it is upon the Shield of Achilles (XVIII.540-681) that the poet depicts a collective way of life closer to the historical experience and communal ethos of his late eighth- or seventh-century audience. The Shield is forged by Hephaestus, the god of craft, at the request of Thetis, Achilles' mother. This new and immortal shield replaces Achilles' prior shield, which he had given to his beloved Patroclus, who lost it--along with his life--in combat with Hector, the Trojan prince and defender. In a distillation of pure fury following the death of Patroclus, Achilles has resolved to return to battle to avenge the death of Patroclus, with the full knowledge that his return will necessitate his death at Troy. When the Dawn-goddess delivers the gift of the Shield down from Olympus to Achilles' camp, his companions, upon seeing the images worked upon the Shield, are struck with fear and avert their gaze (XIX.16-18). They cannot look upon the "splendor" of the Shield, for in the depiction of the way of life there--which is that of the poet's own audience--the heroes see their own obsolescence. Achilles, however, gazes long upon the brilliance of the Shield with a combination of adrenal anger and deep pleasure; his eyes gleam back in response, as if themselves afire. The vision that he sees upon the Shield--of a world without heroes, of a world without the relentless martial strife of the Iliad itself--is the source of a renewed, visceral anger for Achilles because it is a world whose possibilities are not meant for him. Yet the vision is also a source of pleasure to him because it is of a world that his own great paroxysm of killing rage in the final quarter of the poem will usher in. In his pleasure at the sight of the Shield, Achilles can, as it were, acknowledge his own role in the foundation of the world to come, even if his role is preeminently one of extraordinary negation: Achilles is the hero whose discontent fully lays bare the failures of the heroic order from the point of view of mortal happiness, while his surpassing strength permits him to make that discontent murderously actual, as he devastates much of the heroic order itself in the final books of the poem. His perfection is such that he is both the culmination and the destruction of the traditional form. Among the images upon the Shield, it is the depiction of the wedding procession and, in the passage immediately following, of a communal process of adjudication in a case of murder that are foundational for the city-state (XVIII.554-560 and 560-574); both images appear on the second ring of the Shield, in the city at peace. In the wedding procession, the "high-blazing" torches illumine a scene of music and revelry; the sight provokes wonder: The promise of the wedding--which we do not see concluded, but always in motion--is one of social unity, the joining together and mutual strengthening of families withinn the city. In the Iliad itself, such unity is always in pieces, defended in speech even as it is sundered in action. The Achaean cause at Troy is, of course, the recovery of Helen, whose wedding to Menelaus is overturned by her flight, whether compelled or voluntary, to Troy. The martial expedition to Troy presents itself as a defense of the conjugal union and, by extension, of the social work that the wedding accomplishes--primarily, the joining together of families and the establishment of a new social unit that might, in turn, offer guest-friendship to others and to outsiders, thus creating further links of social exchange and comity. And yet, as Achilles complains with great and piercing sarcasm in book IX, the larger social principle epitomized by the defense of Helen and her marriage has been granted no general applicability, but seems to apply only to Agamemnon and Menelaus. Excerpted from The Iliad by Homer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
