The Iliad of HomerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this book up at Autumn Leaves Used Books in Ithaca, NY. The previous owner inscribed his name and the date he bought this little volume. I did some research and found that he was from Cortland, NY, which is near to Ithaca and Homer, NY. How could I pass up a book with those kind of connections! :-)

I’d never read Ennis Rees’s translations of Homer, but I do have his Odyssey in my to read pile. He was a professor and a poet, even named the South Carolina Poet Laureate in 1984-85. His free verse translation of the Iliad is wonderful. It flows, it’s fast, it’s exciting, it keeps many of the repeated epithets of the gods and heroes, which I savor but some find too repetitive.

In Matthew Arnold’s lecture “On translating Homer,” he lays out four items necessary for a good translation. It must be eminently rapid, plain and direct in syntax and words, plain and direct in substance of thought (i.e. in manner and ideas) and noble. Rees hits all of these and makes an excellent translation. I still like Caroline Alexander’s and Lord Derby’s a bit more, but I am so happy to have read and a have a copy of this book on my shelf. The only thing I missed was that there were no line numbers to correspond to the original text. They are very useful to be able to go back to the Greek or to compare sections with other translations.

As for the Iliad itself, I continue to learn new things, or I come across the same topic multiple times that it finally makes an impression on me. I loved how Homer goes back and forth in history as he tells his story, mentioning the endgame then returning to the present (e.g. the deaths of Patroclus, Hector and Achilles; as well as the destruction of the wall protecting the Achaean ships by Apollo and Poseidon long after the war). I liked the spooky/scary nature of a River or a Horse speaking in a human voice. It isn’t comic or silly, but startling, as it would have been to Achilles. And the battle with the River Xanthus/Scamandar is mind-blowing. Achilles fighting a river, the river fighting back and then Hephaestus fighting the river with fire (Book XXI).