Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying, and presumably reading, new translations of the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscences of Bronze Age combat? Some years ago, I asked the same question at the start of a lengthy article on the composition and editing of the Greek text in Alexandria’s great library, which I cheekily titled ‘Homer Inc’.
I never did answer the question, because at the time, I was in Beijing, where the fourth edition of the Iliad rendered in Chinese characters was selling well at the big Wangfujing bookshop. That brought me to the belated realisation that only a blockhead would pass up the opportunity to read the Iliad again with the excuse of a new translation. My own Greek gives me Prokopios transparently, but only a dull sense of Homer’s Ionian-inflected musicality – which is rather odd, actually, because Prokopios, like every other non-illiterate in the eastern Empire, had been brought up on Homer in his schooldays.
(Parenthetically, it also occurred to me that if the Iliad was selling well in China, it was not as entirely a Eurocentric affectation as influential academics were suggesting at the time, which was enough to induce the shrinkage or outright closure of classics departments. Princeton’s, mysteriously, is still open even after abandoning the Greek or Latin language requirement – it used to be both – in the name, of course, of inclusion.)
There are widely admired Iliad translations that I dislike, including Robert Fitzgerald’s for betraying the Greek text even as he paraded a semblance of authenticity with his “Akhilleus” instead of Achilles (and so on). But I have not disliked reading Emily Wilson’s. A key reason is her solution for the notorious problem of Homer’s dactylic hexameters, which are good for chanting to a lyre in Greek, but do not declaim at all well in English – and an Englished Iliad must of course be declaimed.
Wilson tells us that she (very sensibly) prayed for the help of Calliope, the muse in charge of epics, who (very sensibly) told her to find her meter in the English poetry she liked best. If the reader therefore hears Milton’s unrhymed iambic pentameters in Wilson’s Iliad, that’s just as well, because no English text is better declaimed than Paradise Lost, and Milton read his Homer most intensively, judging by his own heavily annotated Iliad.
