The Iliad

The Introduction alone is good enough to justify the price of the book.I think almost every literate person in the world knows the story of the Iliad (I'll ignore the movie if you don't mind). I didn't buy the book for the stor4y, I think I bought it for the story-telling and the poetry. I can't pretend that I've finished reading it; I pick it up and read a few pages at a time or take it with me if I expect I'll have time on my hands somewhere.There's all kinds of debate about Homer, was he one man or many. If he was one man, the achievement is utterly mind boggling.Somehow, I feel I learn something about myself or humanity each time I read a few pages of the story.

I bought this to participate in a Homer outdoor read-aloud festival. We were hiking and reading the epic at different places around lakes, mountains and ...walls. I had to keep getting corrected by people who had the paper version because of the typos and misprints in the kindle version. So NOT worth the kindle price that equaled a paper version.

Before I begin, a disclaimer. This review is not written to help you decide whether to read the Iliad. It is to help you decide which translation of the Iliad to choose. In short: In 2015, this is the best translation to get. Get it in paper, not Kindle.Peter Green states in the introduction that he is following in the footsteps of Lattimore, to preserve as much of the poem in Greek--wording, sentence structure, meter, and so on--in English, but to also make it declaimable. It is a translation to be read aloud. Thus, it is also a challenge to Fagles's translation, among whose virtues is how well it works as an audiobook.To review, there are several major verse modern translations of the Iliad. Lattimore's is closest to the original Greek, and for undergraduate work can substitute for the original well enough. There is the Fagles translation, in modern free verse, is wonderful to read aloud. The Fagles Odyssey was on Selected Shorts once, and for a long time after I insisted that there was no other worthwhile contemporary translation of Homer. I swore by it. Lombardo's translation is pretty common in colleges because of the price and the slangy presentation. Then there is Fitzgerald, which some swear by, but Fitzgerald's translation is loose with the Greek and mannered and fey in its English. It even translates Odysseus as "Ulysses," a sure sign that fidelity to the Greek is not worth the translator's trouble. I am missing some others, I'm sure.So let us begin at the beginning. In the Greek, the Iliad has "μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος" Quite literally, "Rage! sing goddess of the son of Peleus Achilles." μῆνιν means, more or less, the anger that engenders revenge, rage, wrath, anger are all ok to some degree. (It's complicated, an entire scholarly treatise is written on the meaning of the word.) Green gives, "Wrath, goddess, sing of Achilles Peleus's son's [/ wrath]." Fagles gives "Rage--Goddess sing the rage of Peleus's son Achilles." Lattimore gives "Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus." Green and Fagles are right to put the first word first. This is poetry, after all, the order of the words matter, the first especially. The first word is the theme of the poem, the way it is directed first against Agamemnon, then toward the Trojans, and then tempered for a common moment of humanity, is the internal trajectory of the whole epic. Wrath might be best of all, since it conveys that it is anger in a sense that is unfamiliar to modern readers.Once, in my second year of taking Greek, I was told that there was no use of literal translations. Take it far enough, and you wind up with a textbook on how to read the book in the original Greek. Make it into readable English, and you wind up with a host of compromises where thousands of close translations might do. Go far enough you wind up with Girardoux's "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place," worthwhile on its own, but not really a "translation." That professor preferred Fitzgerald, but easy for her to do, she could read anything in Greek without any help. For us mortals with mostly forgotten Greek, or no Greek at all, closeness to the original in a translation should be treasured.In the end, translating Homer is a game of compromises, How much of the strangeness of 2500 year old lines and 3200 year old motivations do you keep? Dactylic hexameter calls for lines much longer than any form of English verse, so shorter lines or not? And so on. For me, Fagles is as far to compromise with how English verse should go as I am willing to accept. For what it's worth, Lattimore's English verse is better than his critics complain of.Starting from no knowledge of Greek, I'd choose Green. Over Lattimore because it's friendlier for the beginner and not worse as far as I can tell for a serious third reading. Over Fagles because the true-to-the-Greek line lengths convey the way the poem drives itself forward better in Green's line by line than in Fagles's free verse.Also. The introduction includes a plot summary of the whole Trojan War, of which the Iliad only covers a small portion. I have never seen such a succinct and complete synopsis before. There is also a synopsis of the poem keyed to the poem in the back matter to help find your place, an enlightening glossary of names and concepts to help you through your first read, and footnotes to inform the reader of context that has since been lost.Word to the wise re: Kindles. These are long verse lines. To get complete lines on a Kindle screen, you need a Kindle that allows text to display in landscape mode.Even then, complete lines only work in a very small font size. Get this in hardback for now. The hardback is stitched and bound to keep, so it is worth your money.

My first time reading this classic. Thrilling, engaging, enthralling story, couldn’t put it down, except to work and sleep and eat and use the lavatory. The story telling is fantastic but admittedly I’m not very well read. I will say I may be biased toward classical literature as opposed to the meaningless drivel which passes for literature these days, I mean who could compare the Iliad with Harry Potter or Twilight or whatever other ridiculousness is available.This and other classic works like The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy or the Aeneid are some of the origins of western thought and culture and should be read and appreciated.All of that being said, people who like to collect books would probably chew their tongues off if they saw the quality of this print. The binding is adequate, the cover is mediocre and the pages are not cut properly, with the pages themselves being of varying width with rough edges. The pages top and bottom are uniform though.I say who cares, the content is what matters to me, I put more stock in the enjoyment of the story than the disheveled appearance of the page edges.It’s a cheap print, so what.If I come across a collectible print of the Iliad which is under $100 I’d probably buy it just to look good on a shelf but that’s only after all my bills are paid and the wife & kids have had there full of ice cream and lollipops.

A must-read for anyone remotely interested in ancient cultures, the Greek pantheon, and - frankly - any kind of literature. Homer's epic will engage you, break your heart, and raise a lot of good questions about warfare. This translation is decent (I had to read the poetic translations for academic work) for a general reading, and very enjoyable. The Odyssey is more of an adventure, per se, but there's nothing like the Iliad to so effectively convey human emotions.

I liked more or less everything about it.I wanted to know who the Gods were, and why they took sides and interferedin the affairs of mortals, lets say that I now Know a bit more than I did.Zeus, who moves the storm clouds, would surely approve of this fine retelling.

Awesome book ..I won't go about telling you the story ..As you have picked up the book to your shopping list, then you may certainly have sliced off it's story ...But I just want to talk about a few things about this book ..First of all ... The reviews here are not only about the item shown above . These reviews here are a bunch of the reviews given by the buyers on the books of Iliad published and translated by various translators , publication houses or groups of people ..So here, my review is on that version of Iliad, been translate by E.V. Riue, an eminent scholar on Classic European Literature ... This book is a part of the Penguin Classics( very awesome and world class publication house ).The most charming fact about this book is that the text is translated in prose verse, really amazing isn't it !! It is very easy and intelligible to read the epic in prose verse than poetic one..The Book includes an introduction and notes by Peter Jones and is revised and updated with D.C.H. Rieu. The story consists of 462 pages, with an addidtion of a few more pages of introduction and notes . The printed price of the book is 350rs. But the price sometimes varies way more than expected, don't know why!!! But I bought it for 319rs.The print , the pages as well as cover and paperback binding is outstanding and why would not it be !!! It is Penguin Classics 👍At the long run , I will definitely recommend this book to all the enthusiastic reader of English literature as well as to other regular readers....You must go through this book once in your life ....Thank you ...

The wrong voice for an audio book can be a killer. Years ago I had the Penguin recording on tape, which eventually got chewed up and I've been looking to replace it even since. In the meantime I bought a dreadful American recording that made me cringe and only lasted for 5 mins listening!! Now I'm the proud owner of the Jacobi recording and loving every minute of it. Fully recommended even at a higher price.

Bought in good faith. It says it is translated by Fagles but it is not. It is the Pope translation. Don't waste your money, unless of course that is what you are after.