With her virtuoso translation, classicist and bestselling author Caroline Alexander brings to life Homer’s timeless epic of the Trojan War
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. From the explosive confrontation between Achilles, the greatest warrior at Troy, and Agamemnon, the inept leader of the Greeks, through to its tragic conclusion, The Iliad explores the abiding, blighting facts of war.
Soldier and civilian, victor and vanquished, hero and coward, men, women, young, old—The Iliad evokes in poignant, searing detail the fate of every life ravaged by the Trojan War. And, as told by Homer, this ancient tale of a particular Bronze Age conflict becomes a sublime and sweeping evocation of the destruction of war throughout the ages.
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.
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“We don’t know much about Homer, but we do know that he didn’t write for readers—he wrote for listeners. Narrator Dominic Keating makes some small concessions to the modern ear, lightening his voice to indicate a female speaker and changing his tone or accent slightly when two or more men are speaking. But mostly he leaves Homer in control, giving us a bardic version as a single singer would have delivered it. Caroline Alexander’s faithful and forceful translation is served well by this approach. She approximates the hexameter cadences of the original (within the limits of English) so that Keating can drive us through the action scenes without losing the tenderness of Andromache’s few moments of love and loss of Hector.”
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