{"id":938,"date":"2010-11-13T21:34:49","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T05:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=938"},"modified":"2010-11-13T21:34:49","modified_gmt":"2010-11-14T05:34:49","slug":"review-the-iliad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=938","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Iliad"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a translation of The Iliad<\/em> by Edward Earl of Darby in 1862, unsurprisingly free for the kindle<\/a>, my current e-book reader of choice. I’d read parts of The Iliad<\/em> in high school and had been meaning to get back to it.\u00a0 Things come up, however, and twenty some-odd years later I finally got around to it.<\/p>\n

I thoroughly enjoyed the reading it, front to back.\u00a0 I suspect that I would have enjoyed it less in high school, but now it was an endless parade of delights.<\/p>\n

First of all, it’s a rip-roaring Hollywood blockbuster of a story.\u00a0 It’s one bloody encounter after another, described vividly and in detail.\u00a0 I tried to read Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur<\/a> a few years ago and found it deadly dull.\u00a0 A big part of the reason for that was how sterile and ethereal all the interactions and altercations were.\u00a0 Sure Arthur “slew on the left and slew on the right” but that leaves it all pretty vague what was going on.\u00a0 With Homer You Are There: he describes the various movements of the heroes and how they face each other to the point of telling where the victorious spear enters the loser’s body and just how the body came apart.\u00a0 While I do not feel any great need to know that Hector decapitated someone as opposed to disemboweling them, the overall tone is much more detailed and close to the action.\u00a0 As a result the characters and situations are more lively.\u00a0 Mallory seemed like literature to me in the worst pretentious way; Homer feels like a story that gets retold and amplified by people.<\/p>\n

The translation is also a source of fun.\u00a0 I can imagine a very direct translation that tries to get the meaning across as clearly as possible to modern readers so that they can easily follow events from a couple thousand years ago. That’s not what the Earl provides at all.\u00a0 Apparently he’s trying to capture the flavor of the ancient Greek, and not knowing any Greek I can’t tell how he did.\u00a0 What I can say is that his translation has a quirky rhythm and flow all its own.\u00a0 For example, evidently negation was an intensifier in ancient Greek, because no divine intervention takes place without at least three offsetting negations: “you should not hesitate to avoid throwing your spear.”\u00a0 It’s all comprehensible, but just alien enough to remind you that Homer’s world is a different place.\u00a0 It’s also all pretty consistent, which gives the text the flavor of a stylist rather than a translator.<\/p>\n

I also enjoy the little shout-outs and digressions throughout that remind the reader that this was a history of the war and the warriors and communities that contributed to it.\u00a0 It is pretty common to introduce a character and describe his history and personality in the space between a spear being thrown at him and dashing out his brains.\u00a0 Longer digressions describing the founding of cities or the lineage of the heroes also pop up.\u00a0 While all this diverts from the main plot, I find it charming that some Greek soldier otherwise lost to the mists of time gets a brief moment of immortality here.<\/p>\n

So, overall, The Iliad <\/em>is a lot of fun to read, and it certainly helps your literacy in the classics.<\/p>\n

Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a translation of The Iliad by Edward Earl of Darby in 1862, unsurprisingly free for the kindle, my current e-book reader of choice. I’d read parts of The Iliad in high school and had been meaning to get back to it.\u00a0 Things come up, however, and twenty some-odd years later I finally got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":941,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}