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Gripping. . . . Lombardo s achievement is all the more striking when you consider the difficulties of his task. . . . [He] manages to be respectful of Homer s dire spirit while providing on nearly every page some wonderfully fresh refashioning of his Greek. The result is a vivid and disarmingly hardbitten reworking of a great classic. --Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review
So great is the impact of ancient Greek literature on Western culture that even people who have never read Homer s
Iliad or
The Odyssey know a lot about them. The Trojan Horse, Achilles heel, the Sirens call, Scylla and Charybdis--all have entered popular mythology, becoming metaphors for the less heroic situations we face in our own lives. Ever since these oral poems were committed to paper (probably in the 8th century B.C.E.), people have been translating them. The version of
Iliad translated by Stanley Lombardo is a brave departure from previous translations; Lombardo attempts to adapt the text to the needs of
readers rather than the listeners for whom the work was originally intended. To this end, he has streamlined the poem, removing many of the stock repetitions such as the infamous "rosy-fingered dawn," or rewriting them in ways dependent on their context. What emerges is a vivid, lively rendition of one of the world s great stories of men and war.
But classicists, beware: This Iliad has something of a 90s sensibility, from the cover art (a photograph of the D-Day Normandy landing) to Achilles Rambo-like diction. It might well outrage the purists, but for those who remember their musty high-school reading of Homer s great epic with a barely suppressed yawn, Lombardo s energetic translation is just the version to change their minds.
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