Unfortunately, experience as a literature professor has taught me that, even for gifted new readers, Lattimore’s Iliad is slow going.
He gets admirably close to Homer’s voice.
Lattimore’s fluid, flexible six-beat line is especially apt for the quiet moments and lyric touches of the poem. And except for an occasional archaism, his language is straightforward and unadorned. He uses Greek spellings for the characters’ names, so Achilles is “Achilleus” and Ajax “Aias.” He hews closely to Homer’s text, keeping interpretation at a minimum. Lattimore is scrupulously faithful to the original. Two generations ago, Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad of Homer - which the University of Chicago Press recently reissued with a new introduction by Richard Martin - captured the majestic repose of Homer’s verse with great fidelity. Sublime passion and urgency rendered bright and hard, with none of the blur of time. The unhurried movement of Homer’s verse plays against the graphic assault and energy of the action, intensifying their effect. And Homer’s hexameters, with their stately pause at each half-line, proceed with an Olympian pace fitting the detachment of their godly source. Opponents meet on the field, in the midst of chaos, but there is time to exchange pedigrees or insults without stint. The hour hangs at dawn, dusk, noon, or night, without transition. The action unfolds in a boundless, inexhaustible present. It is a poem of brutal, relentless violence, but it is a violence without haste. SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, English translators have been striving to do justice to The Iliad.
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