The new translation by Caroline Alexander breaks the tradition of The Iliad being translated by men.


It manages to convey not only the stateliness and grandeur of Homer’s lines, but their speed and wit and vividness: As when from gloomy clouds a whirlwind springs,That bears Jove’s thunder on its dreadful wings,Wide o’er the blasted fields the tempest sweeps;Then, gather’d, settles on the hoary deeps;The afflicted deeps tumultuous mix and roar;The waves behind impel the waves before,Wide rolling, foaming high, and tumbling to the shore:Thus rank on rank, the thick battalions throng,Chief urged on chief, and man drove man along. What I like best about Mitchell’s version is its strong five-beat rhythm—arguably the best yet in English. His “drives downward” in line 2 nicely gets the “d” and “n” sounds in the Greek eisi pedo_n d_e, “goes earthward”; and I particularly like the way he reproduces all those liquid “l” sounds in his line “boiling waves a long the length of the roaring water.” He also strives to reproduce the “some … other” construction of the Greek in his “one upon another … some leading and others after them.” You’ll notice, too, that Lattimore favors a long, six-beat line that mimics the six-beat line that Homer uses—one of the ways he tries to conjure the grandeur and expansiveness of Homeric verse. The Laud Troy Book: The Forgotten Troy Romance (The Troy Myth in Medieval Britain B... Stone and Steel: A Novel Of The Roman Empire (Colossus Book 1). Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights.

: Catholic Sisters in the WWII Nazi Resistance. Fagles’s sensitivity to the alliteration of “l” is clear, especially in his first two lines (“squall of brawling gale-winds” is really good), and it’s nice that he tries to suggest Homer’s line-ending alliterations with his end-rhyming “roaring” and “closing”.
Also of note is the way that the two adjectives in the fourth line—paphladzonta, the “roiling” waves, and polyphloisboio, the “greatly-roaring” sea—replicate each other’s consonants: the “p”s, the “ph”s, the “l”s, the soft “s”s and “z” sounds.

Alexander received her doctorate in classics from Columbia University and was the founder of the Department of Classics at the University of Malawi in East Africa.

University of California Press, pp. Composed around 730 B.C., Homer’s Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion. But simply to convey what Homer’s words mean gives no sense of the real challenge that the translator faces, which is to think of ways to reproduce the wonderful sound effects Homer contrives here to evoke the sounds of the sea. It’s just one of many tiny effects that accumulate to make this at once the grandest and the most minutely detailed there is ever likely to be. I have no father or lady mother;it was godlike Achilles who slew my father,when he sacked the well-established town of the Cilicians,high-gated Thebes, and killed Eëtion;yet he did not strip his body, for in his heart he thought it shameful,but he cremated him with his decorated war-gear,and heaped a burial mound over. It can be a bit too loose—it sometimes feels like stacked prose—but has an admirable clarity: Down the Trojans came like a squall of brawling gale-windsblasting down with the Father’s thunder, loosed on earthand a superhuman uproar bursts as they pound the heavy seas,the giant breakers seething, battle lines of them roaring,shoulders rearing, exploding foam, waves in the vanguard,waves rolling in from the rear. Lattimore is alert to Homer’s effects, particularly his play with consonant sounds.

The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. [#image: /photos/590953de019dfc3494e9e587]HAY rha th’oo-POH BRON-TAYZ PAH-TROS Di-os AY-si peh-DON deh, that beneath (the thunderbolt) (of Father) Zeus goes earthward, [#image: /photos/590953e0c14b3c606c10432a]THEH-speh-see-OY d’oh-mah-DOY ha-li MIZ-geh-tai, EN deh teh POLL-ah, (with an inhuman) (din) (the salt sea) (churns), and many, [#image: /photos/590953e01c7a8e33fb38af0e]KU-mahtah PAH-PHLAH-DZON-tah poh-LEE-PHLOYZ-BOY-oh thah-LASS-ays, Waves roiling (of the loudly-roaring) sea. New translation of the Iliad by Caroline Alexander – extract Read a short section from the latest edition of Homer’s great epic of the Trojan wars – the first English translation by a woman © 2020 Condé Nast.

And around it elms were grownby nymphs of the mountains, daughters of Zeus of the stormy aegis. This week in the magazine, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews a new version of Homer’s Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Carved close to the original Greek, acclaimed classicist Caroline Alexander’s new translation is swift and lean, with the driving cadence of its source—a translation epic in scale and yet devastating in its precision and power. It gives a straight foreword account without additional interpretations which usually disturb the flow.


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