The Iliad

A most immersive reread, or Pope vs Cowper

It’s been years since I read The Iliad last. To make things more interesting and more immersive, I decided to read two translations at the same time, choosing Alexander Pope’s and William Cowper’s. Both are from the eighteenth century. I chuckled at Cowper’s introduction, where he expresses the utmost respect for Mr Pope, and then proceeds to say ”that he has sometimes altogether suppressed the sense of the author, and has not seldom intermingled his own ideas with it…”. Pope’s text is beautiful, it has a flow and a rhythm that I like. Some of his details and sometimes whole passages are very different in content compared to Cowper. Make of it what you will! Cowper reads easier, show more his text is more transparent. There is a joy of poetry. I will remember his “heart-freshening joy”. I can’t proclaim a winner, but my love for The Iliad has only grown. In any case, not reading Homer in Ancient Greek is a game of whispers, but whispers so powerful and persistent that you cannot help feeling overwhelmed.

Reviewing The Iliad sounds like a silly undertaking. I’ll just sit and think about things that struck me, and things that I had fun (yes, fun!) with.

🏺The descriptions of battles seem endless sometimes. Yet I saw no battle glory this time, there was nothing but blood, gore, and grief. There is a reason why everyone who is killed is named – Homer tells us who they were, what kind of persons they were, who their parents were, that they were loved. I was suddenly wondering if The Iliad was an anti-war poem. “...and in all hearts awakened joyful hope that there should end war’s long calamities.”

🏺Agamemnon is a coward, a bully, an idiot, a murderer. He is still one of the worst (the worst?) humans in Greek mythology. Down with Agamemnon!

🏺Down with meddling Athena as well, while we are on that topic.

🏺Paris: gaaah, don’t get me started. ”As smooth of face as fraudulent of mind!” This is Paris after his disastrous performance during the duel with Menelaus, as retold by yours truly:
Helen: You are a coward. I wish you were dead.
Paris: Well, I am a little embarrassed, but it was the gods’ fault anyway. Whatever. Let’s have sex already.

🏺Diomedes in action, as retold by yours truly:
Diomedes: I have the biggest cojones in the Iliad!!!
Humans: Ruuuuuun!
Gods: Eh!?
Aphrodite: Ouch, my hand, ouch. I’m out of here.
Diomedes: Apollo, I am gonna get you!
Apollo: Can’t you see I am a god? Leave me alone! Ares, you are supposed to be the god of war! Can you do something about this guy?
Ares: Sure.
Athena: Diomedes, go get Ares!
Diomedes: Raaaaah!
Ares: Diomedes, what sharp spear you have! Ouch, ouch. I’m out of here.

🏺Hector and Andromache have such wonderful domestic moments, I loved them both so much.

🏺There came a day when I wanted to tell people: “Stop discussing these utterly uninteresting and unimportant things! Don’t you know that Patroclus has just died? His horses are crying…” I didn’t, because for some reason people think that I am sensible, and I’d like to keep it that way. I was tempted, though.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXII. It’s called “Death of Hector”, and I was being a coward about it. Is Hector going to die again? Are you sure we can’t do it differently this time?

🏺I forgot there was a chariot race. There should be more chariot races in books.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXIV, because then The Iliad would be over. I have spent two months with it. What am I going to do now? show less

It's amazing how such beautiful language and imagery, such bloody and exciting action and adventure...can also draaaaag through the middle. I blame my fits of boredom on aborted action (Paris vs. Melelaus duel cut off when Aphrodite whisks Paris to his bedroom, Hera and Athena prep for war only to stop while riding off to battle in they're chariots because they've suddenly remembered they're afraid of Zeus) and repetitive incidents of people being introduced and then immediately dying. Seriously, almost no one we know or care about dies until the very end. Oh, and being a chariot driver sounds a lot like being a Star Trek redshirt--how many times does someone throw a spear only for it to miss the target and kill the driver?

All joking show more aside, the language and metaphors really were beautiful, even if Caroline Alexander does lean into the repetition more than Emily Wilson did with her translation of The Odyssey. (I ended up just opting to read translations by women because they're some of the newest and, with such a flooded field, why the heck not?)

And The Iliad itself is a fascinating historical document--even if the historicity of the Trojan war itself isn't a sure thing, the cultural details that almost certainly came from ancient Greek society were well worth the read: that grabbing someone's knees was a sign of begging for mercy, that the upper levels of society rested from battle to nosh on what sounds like wine-soaked oatmeal, that funerals could be incredibly elaborate, that ships were pulled all the way up onto the beach, and of course the whole relationship with the gods. It was interesting to see when gods were credited with great deeds and with failures; it almost seemed like blaming the gods was a way to abdicate responsibility for major mistakes...though, admittedly, the gods make a lot of mistakes, seeming pettier even than the humans, and that's saying a lot considering this war started because a husband decided he needed whole armies to go after his runaway wife.

Given all the action and the high, bloody death count, it's hard to understand how the Trojan war dragged out for ten years. The action came thick and fast, with thrilling cinematic moments that, for some reason, Troy ignored instead of, um, great balls of fire. There's the Achean wall, a powerful counterpart to the walls of Troy; sneaky spy missions by night; eyes popping out of their sockets; brains spattered inside helmets; angry river gods; leaping from beached ship to beached ship while stabbing people below with long spears; seriously, why isn't Netflix or HBO adapting this into a miniseries?

It was also notable to me how many "best of the Acheans" there were. So much is made of Achilles from the very outset ("sing of the wrath of Achilles") but we've also got the Ajax pair, Menelaus and Agamemnon, Diomedes, Petroclus, Odysseus, and a fantastic archer; and on the Trojan side it isn't just Hector, there's a Zeus-beloved demigod, Aeneas, and others whose names I now forget because, hey, there are a lot of names.

I'm talking a lot about the action in part because I'm sure much has already been made of the commentary about war, about how many lives it senselessly cuts short. Even the language used to describe death--knees cut out, biting and clenching the earth--is often gritty and real, the occasional metaphor of a great tree falling in the forest reminding readers of the pyres that will, hopefully, consume the dead and release their spirits. After the first truce to tend to the dead, I kept thinking of that every so often: whether all the many dead left on the battlefield would be left to rot, or whether they would manage to get their final rites.

I do regret that this "review" focuses so much on the action rather than the language, but alas, my copy of The Iliad is a library book and there was no way to mark the passages. Despite my efforts to avoid acquiring more books, I kind of wish I'd bought this one so I could mark it up.

Some other random thoughts that I need to jot down so I can finish this review before it's time to go to work:
> Why the heck does anyone worship these self-centered, careless gods? Perhaps the cruelties of ancient life are reflected in the changing whims of indifferent, selfish beings.
> One of my favorite moments was when Hector goes to visit his wife and baby; his baby cries when he doesn't recognize his father all dressed up in armor, and Hector and wife share a laugh and a moment of levity. It's easy to imagine it as nervous, sad laughter, and it's one of the few times when there seemed to be genuine love between a man and a woman rather than just playing politics (no matter what Achilles protests about Breisis (sp?)).
> How disturbing, to modern eyes, that rape of all Trojan woman is repeatedly thrown around as a goal.
> I found it amusing how people really ribbed Paris for causing this whole catastrophe, including getting on his case about how his major attribute is beauty, gifted by Aphrodite ("I can't help it that I'm beautiful!"). For all that, he still has some moments in battle to redeem himself.
> At the same time, I loved that Aphrodite had her moment in battle. Maybe it didn't work out the way she wanted and she didn't end up getting an Eowyn moment, but I felt that her effort and failure were very poignant.
> Um, what the heck was with a) Zeus giving away the entire plot with Patroclus wearing Achilles' armor; and b) everyone, including the Trojans, knowing it was Patroclus? What was the point if everyone knew it wasn't Achilles?
> At one point, Zeus invites Hera to bed by naming all the women he has slept with and all the demigods that had come from those unions. If Hera's goal hadn't been to distract him in the first place, I hope she'd have raged at him for that. Seriously Zeus, is that your idea of a smooth move?
> Patroclus only falls in battle because Apollo undoes Achilles' armor, which is totally cheating.
> I've heard so much made of the Achilles/Patroclus relationship that I was kind of surprised there wasn't more evidence of a romantic relationship between the two. I hate to be *that person*, but in a society where women basically counted for nothing and male friendship was the only friendship, there doesn't seem to be much to support more. Of course, I'm totally at the mercy of translator interpretation...
> Speaking of translations, while it was definitely a shock to move from Wilson's iambic pentameter in her Odyssey to Alexander's long lines of blank verse, I can't imagine how any translator could fit all the words into such rigid rules.

Okay, I'm out of time. On to the Aeneid!

(No quotes because, again, library book.) show less

I loved Homer's Odyssey, and so plunged into his earlier Iliad with great confidence. Relying on the same translator (Penguin Classics' E. V. Rieu) who had provided me with such beautifully alive prose in the story of Odysseus, I anticipated a similarly ambrosial experience. However, whilst I thoroughly enjoyed The Iliad and found much to recommend, it didn't excite in quite the same way.

For one thing, the poetry of the prose (the main thing I enjoyed in The Odyssey) was not as powerful in this story. This is not a slight on E. V. Rieu's translation (which in my edition has been extensively revised by his son D. C. H. Rieu and Peter Jones) but, as The Iliad is set primarily on the battlefield outside the walls of Ilium as opposed to show more Odysseus' later far-ranging adventures, there is less scope and opportunity for Homer to wax lyrical. There are still a number of great phrases (for example, the conflict is often lamented as war with all its tears", whilst imminent death is described as "black destiny") but they often lack the room to blossom.

This is largely because a large chunk of the book is a repetitive sequence of battles in which not much is gained or lost. Battle after battle on Troy's plains, with the soldiers killed in more or less the same ways and whenever a major name becomes endangered (Ajax, say, or Hector) one of the gods (Pallas Athene, usually, or Apollo) whisks them away in a suspiciously deus ex machina "thick mist". I never thought I'd tire of reading about Greek and Trojan heroes battling it out with spear and shield in hand, but the action is ceaseless and does get more than a tad boring, especially as the most charismatic warrior on either side - Achilles - is absent for the most part from the field. There's also a lot of Chatty Cathys in the rosters of the Greek and Trojan armies: in the heat of just about every battle two opposing heroes will break off to boast (at excruciating length) about their proud family lineages. Too often, I wished some non-descript lowborn soldier would steal in and kill one of these many blowhards whilst they are regaling their opposite number with how their great-grandmother was a sea nymph who was knocked up by Zeus or something. There's so many names referenced that even the likes of George R. R. Martin would blush.

It's also worth noting at this point that, in contrast to The Odyssey, which tells the full story of Odysseus' plight after the fall of Troy, The Iliad is not the whole story of the Trojan War myth as we know it today. The Iliad covers a brief period of that long war with the focus on Achilles, from his falling out with his leader Agamemnon over a slave girl and his subsequent refusal to fight, through the death of his friend Patroclus and his vengeful return to combat, to the death and mutilation of Hector and Priam's secret visit to a sorrowful and fatalistic Achilles. In The Iliad, we do not reach the stage where Achilles is killed when Paris shoots him in the heel, nor the stage where the Trojan Horse arrives with all that entails for the fate of Troy (in fact, if I recall correctly, the Horse only gets a passing mention in The Odyssey too). The reason the war started (Paris stealing away with Menelaus' wife Helen) is mentioned, but those three characters are bit-part players here; the focus is on Achilles and Hector. It is a compelling clash between these two charismatic heroes (even if Hector running away from Achilles four times around the city does have a touch of Monty Python about it) but prospective readers should be aware that it is not the complete story as one might know it today.

It may seem my review is unduly negative, but The Iliad has much to recommend. One advantage it does have over the otherwise superior Odyssey is its achingly rich humanity. There's a lot of cold-blooded murder in The Odyssey, and whilst The Iliad has a much higher body count, the deaths are felt far more intensely, despite their relentlessness. Each individual warrior is given by Homer his own little portrait or biography (almost like a little vignette introduced into the wider story) so when he falls, often in the same paragraph, he falls with great weight. E. V. Rieu has the right of it when, in his Introduction, he assures the reader that "they will be brought closer to tears by the death of a single horse in the Iliad than by the killing of the whole gang of Suitors" in The Odyssey (pg. xlviii). There's an enduring human element to The Iliad which borders on a surprisingly modern anti-war sentiment. Even the bloodthirsty Achilles questions the reasons for waging war on Troy and notes very early on that the Trojans have never done him any personal harm; he's there for glory and duty (pg. 8). On page 155, Achilles steps outside his usual self-involved, macho posturing to deliver an impressively eloquent address which throws into even sharper relief the senseless mass bloodletting taking place on the battlefields of Troy:

"... There were often times at home when my heart's one desire was to make some well-matched girl my lawful wife and enjoy the fortune my old father Peleus had made. For nothing, as I now see it, equals the value of life - not the wealth they say prosperous Ilium possessed in earlier days, when there was peace, before the coming of the Greeks, nor all the treasure piled up behind the stone threshold of Phoebus Apollo in rocky Delphi. Cattle and fat sheep can be lifted. Tripods and chestnut horses can be procured. But you cannot lift or procure a man's life, when once the breath has left his lips."

It is this rich humanity, igniting a tremendous sense of pathos in the reader, which makes The Iliad such a rewarding read, even if it doesn't quite compare to The Odyssey. The Iliad is the Hector to The Odyssey's Achilles; an inferior fighter when matched one-on-one, but one who would wipe the floor with just about anyone else on the field." show less

A most immersive reread, or Pope vs Cowper

It’s been years since I read The Iliad last. To make things more interesting and more immersive, I decided to read two translations at the same time, choosing Alexander Pope’s and William Cowper’s. Both are from the eighteenth century. I chuckled at Cowper’s introduction, where he expresses the utmost respect for Mr Pope, and then proceeds to say ”that he has sometimes altogether suppressed the sense of the author, and has not seldom intermingled his own ideas with it…”. Pope’s text is beautiful, it has a flow and a rhythm that I like. Some of his details and sometimes whole passages are very different in content compared to Cowper. Make of it what you will! Cowper reads easier, show more his text is more transparent. There is a joy of poetry. I will remember his “heart-freshening joy”. I can’t proclaim a winner, but my love for The Iliad has only grown. In any case, not reading Homer in Ancient Greek is a game of whispers, but whispers so powerful and persistent that you cannot help feeling overwhelmed.

Reviewing The Iliad sounds like a silly undertaking. I’ll just sit and think about things that struck me, and things that I had fun (yes, fun!) with.

🏺The descriptions of battles seem endless sometimes. Yet I saw no battle glory this time, there was nothing but blood, gore, and grief. There is a reason why everyone who is killed is named – Homer tells us who they were, what kind of persons they were, who their parents were, that they were loved. I was suddenly wondering if The Iliad was an anti-war poem. “...and in all hearts awakened joyful hope that there should end war’s long calamities.”

🏺Agamemnon is a coward, a bully, an idiot, a murderer. He is still one of the worst (the worst?) humans in Greek mythology. Down with Agamemnon!

🏺Down with meddling Athena as well, while we are on that topic.

🏺Paris: gaaah, don’t get me started. ”As smooth of face as fraudulent of mind!” This is Paris after his disastrous performance during the duel with Menelaus, as retold by yours truly:
Helen: You are a coward. I wish you were dead.
Paris: Well, I am a little embarrassed, but it was the gods’ fault anyway. Whatever. Let’s have sex already.

🏺Diomedes in action, as retold by yours truly:
Diomedes: I have the biggest cojones in the Iliad!!!
Humans: Ruuuuuun!
Gods: Eh!?
Aphrodite: Ouch, my hand, ouch. I’m out of here.
Diomedes: Apollo, I am gonna get you!
Apollo: Can’t you see I am a god? Leave me alone! Ares, you are supposed to be the god of war! Can you do something about this guy?
Ares: Sure.
Athena: Diomedes, go get Ares!
Diomedes: Raaaaah!
Ares: Diomedes, what sharp spear you have! Ouch, ouch. I’m out of here.

🏺Hector and Andromache have such wonderful domestic moments, I loved them both so much.

🏺There came a day when I wanted to tell people: “Stop discussing these utterly uninteresting and unimportant things! Don’t you know that Patroclus has just died? His horses are crying…” I didn’t, because for some reason people think that I am sensible, and I’d like to keep it that way. I was tempted, though.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXII. It’s called “Death of Hector”, and I was being a coward about it. Is Hector going to die again? Are you sure we can’t do it differently this time?

🏺I forgot there was a chariot race. There should be more chariot races in books.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXIV, because then The Iliad would be over. I have spent two months with it. What am I going to do now? show less

Translation by Emily R. Wilson

Halfway through an endless war over a dispute everyone hardly remembers, two powerful men (on the same side) are squabbling. Agamemnon has taken Achilles’ favorite slavewoman, and so Achilles gets pissy about it and refuses to fight in the war. As the best fighter on the Greek side, things don’t go well without him. To inspire the troops, Achilles’ best friend and lover Patroclus dresses up in his armor to fight, but is slain by Hector, golden child of the Trojans. Achilles takes his rage out on Hector, and then on Hector’s corpse.

Wilson is a great translator, and I definitely appreciated this more than the other times I have tried to read it. However, it is not my thing. I found the lists of guys show more dying boring, and the misogyny was grating. I know this is supposed to be a meaningful poem about how bad war is, but most of the main characters are the ones who could be stopping the horrible war, so it’s hard to have sympathy for them. Women and poor people are the victims, as they always are in war, but we don’t get their perspective. The 24th and last book of the poem is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful pieces about grief ever written, but it’s too hard to get there. show less

I listened to Audra McDonald's reading of this on Audible, and also read along for a lot of the book on Kindle. Both experiences were just great. I last read this book in the mid-70s for a class on The Epic, I think in Lattimore's translation, and I found this totally readable, dramatic, and moving. Emily Wilson's translation and McDonald's reading seem real to the experience of Greeks listening to the story being told 2700 years ago. I had forgotten how bloody and descriptively bloody the story was, and this time around I also really enjoyed the Homeric similes which often referred to the natural world, and were oftentimes small little stories in themselves. I actually was not looking forward to the end of this book, and as with show more Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, I hope to read it again one day. show less

First a disclaimer: I don’t have ancient Greek (or any other kind), so please correct or chastise me if I misunderstand any passages for that reason. Equally, my analysis involves some assumptions about what was common, idiomatic English in Pope’s day: if I’ve got it wrong, please set me right!

I think the overarching drama played out between the vigorous, up-and-coming Greeks and the more cultured, slightly decadent Trojans is one that we profoundly recognise. In western societies, we are of course at the Trojan stage, but most western societies can look back at an earlier, less sophisticated, more vigorous founding generation or generations. And even where the parallels are not nearly exact, I think there’s a sense of show more recognition. In fact, I think most readers have a sneaking regard for the simple, thuggish side of the Achaeans. This is maybe reinforced by the fact that we know that these Greeks eventually produced the Classical Greece society and invented democracy. In a sense, we are the Achaeans and the Trojans at the same time. I’ll leave the question to one side as to whether Homer and the Greeks stamped this archetype on our minds or whether it is a universal of human nature (or to stay in this corner of the Med, a Platonic ideal). This drama is also played out at the family level, and people still love stories of rough, determined self-made people who carved out a successful living and founded a dynasty. We don’t expect these founders to be morally impeccable or culturally sophisticated: they allow subsequent generations to be that.

Why is “The Iliad” modern?

a) It’s modern because it’s been pretty much an uninterrupted influence. Homer was a big influence in his way on Classical Greece (reading Plato, it’s remarkable how conversant all the “characters” are with Homer’s poetry). And at least from the Renaissance on, Classical Greece has been a model for all European and American nations, especially those with aspirations of empire. In other words, Homer doesn’t feel alien to us because he made our minds what they are. An interesting thought experiment here would be to imagine that The Iliad had been lost before Classical Greek times and then suddenly a manuscript of the text was discovered last year. Without all the influence exerted by the book over the intervening period, how alien would we find the story then?

b) The Iliad feels psychologically modern because of the plot arc. A lot of the archaic weirdness is front-loaded and eventually we end up at Priam’s tent and we understand, it seems, every nuance of what is said and every corner of the characters’ hearts;

c) Homer (i.e. Homer-the-author-of-The-Iliad), like Shakespeare, was a unique genius who speaks to our inner selves.

My perspective here has been that of an European. Beyond a certain universal core, people from different cultures and traditions will of course feel different levels of proximity to the book. Incidentally, the only long narrative I’ve read from a similar time as the "Iliad” that feels as psychologically familiar to me is the stories (or at least much of them) spanning the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings in the OT (NB: The NT feels psychologically familiar too – for many different reasons of course, one being that the places where Jesus lived were to some degree culturally Greco-Roman then & the NT was written in Greek etc.) I have no textual analysis to back this up, but the author of “The Odyssey” feels very different to me to the author of the "Iliad”. To me “The Odyssey” smacks a little of multiple sources spliced together, but I strongly feel that the material of the "Iliad” was drawn together by and filtered through a single consciousness (whether orally first or not is a different question).

And I don’t feel close to that person, even allowing for the cultural differences of 3,000 years. Why is that?

Let’s delve into this some more; I think of any other ancient epic you like (“The Odyssey” comes to mind). Jumping forward in time to Virgil, I have to say that the “Aeneid” is perhaps even stranger and more confusing (and maddening) to my imagination than the “Iliad”. Or if we take any European work with roots in pre-historic tales or the Early Middle Ages, I feel that it is much more alien to me than the “Iliad”. There is much in Beowulf, the Arthurian legends and the earliest Robin Hood ballads that makes no psychological sense to me. In part this is because the versions that were written down were not shaped by a single (supremely talented) imagination. (And because sometimes different tales were cobbled together without much editing, that accounts for some psychological inconsistency.) But I don’t think it’s the full reason: I think the people who told and consumed these stories were very different to me. Put bluntly, psychologically I feel I have more in common with Achilles than I do with King Arthur or Lancelot. By the time we get to Chaucer and Dante, I think we know pretty much exactly where we are (psychologically speaking).

Some further thoughts on rhyme and Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” (analysing translations is a lengthy business, so apologies in advance for what will be a long comment):

First of all, a rhymed version hasn’t (as far as I know) been attempted in a very long time, and the reasons are obvious:

a) ancient and classical poetry isn’t rhymed, so a rhyming version is anachronistic;
b) observing a metre (e.g. blank verse), conveying a range of poetic effects and delivering the content of the original is plenty to be getting on with;
c) for some reason rhyme is capable of carrying the most serious subject-matter when used in lyric poetry, but can seem inappropriately bouncy for ancient epic poetry.

One of my favourite scenes in all of literature is in Goethe’s Faust (Part 2). To explain for those who haven’t read it: most of Part 2 involves extended fantasy sequences where Faust flits between various eras and settings and mingles with legendary characters of the past. After a long scene in front of Menelaus’s palace which uses exclusively classical metres (and no rhyme), Faust and Helen of Troy wind up at a medieval castle. There a character makes a speech in rhyme, and Helen is amazed. She says:

“But teach me why that man spoke aloud
With curious speech, familiar but strange.
Each sound seeming to give way to the next,
And when a word gave pleasure to the ear,
Another came, as if to caress the first.”

In a translation into German by A.S. Kline we get:

“Doch wünscht ich Unterricht, warum die Rede
Des Manns mir seltsam klang, seltsam und freundlich.
Ein Ton scheint sich dem anderen zu bequemen,
Und hat ein Wort zum Ohre sich gesellt,
Ein anderes kommt, dem ersten liebzukosen.”

Faust explains a little and then induces Helen to begin rhyming by leaving his thoughts incomplete for her to supply the missing rhyme. In other words, he tees up little rhymes for her. This all symbolises their coming closer (and also of course it symbolises a union between ancient Greek and medieval German). It’s such a delightful scene, and its whole impact is dependent on understanding that rhyme was hardly ever used in ancient or classical verse and is something that emerged with force in medieval Europe. In this context, Alexander Pope’s decision to translate the “Iliad” into heroic couplets can appear philologically dubious and generally wrongheaded. In the period between Pope and Goethe, as I understand it, a lot of classical research was undertaken and there was a general resurgence of interest in the classical world (the era preceding Romanticism isn’t called Classical for nothing). So it’s easy to see Pope and his rhymed version as forever stranded, although of course his Iliad also had its critics in his day and shortly afterwards – including Cowper.) A few years back, I expressed some scepticism about Pope’s heroic couplets for the reasons above and some others as well. But I promised that I would read some of the Pope with an open mind. So I’ve dipped into the Pope translation, especially the sections in Book I and Book VI that were excerpted from the new Caroline Alexander translation. That’s allowed me to compare Fagles and Pope. The other translations I’ve just used as comparisons: my focus has been on Pope.

I made the point earlier about inappropriate jollity or bounciness. Well, Pope as good as owns up to this at the end of the second line:

“Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!”

That exclamation mark is justified in one sense by the imperative, but surely it is also an acknowledgement of Pope’s audacity/brass neck. In fact, exclamation marks pepper the translation, including sometimes – rather incredibly – at a caesura. Presumably these exclamation marks have nothing to do with Homer’s text or ancient Greek punctuation (at least they’re absent from Caroline Alexander’s and Fagles’s translations). Of course, coming up with a rhyme every two lines is a kind of performance in itself, and I think it’s not too much of a stretch to see or hear an implied exclamation mark every time a verse comes home (i.e., every two lines). So I think these implied exclamation marks build up their pressure and eventually force Pope to use real ones when the rhymes are particularly extravagant. Already we see that the use of rhyme is forcing Pope to drift away from Homer’s text into a kind of parallel one. (Of course, all translation is a parallel text in some sense; I just mean that Pope is pushed further off course than modern translators) ...

Before reading (some of) the Pope translation, I assumed that heroic couplets (with their double strictures of rhyme and iambic pentameters) would inevitably result in rum word choices and unnatural word order. Over a long translation, I think this is simply inevitable. And indeed you don’t have to look far to find them:

“Her bosom laboured with a boding sigh,
And the big tear stood trembling in her eye.”

The big tear? Prosody experts can correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect that the only reason it’s “the” big tear and not “a” big tear is because “a” would count as a weak stress, and that would mess up the iambs. (Of course, it’s a kind of suspension of disbelief anyway to imagine that “the” would be pronounced with a stronger stress than “big” but it’s necessary for iambics to be viable; otherwise you couldn’t have a single-syllable adjective precede a single-syllable noun.)

“That quarter most the skilful Greeks annoy,
Where yon wild fig-trees join the wall of Troy”

One suspects that the position of the word “most” and the use of the word “annoy” are only there to serve metre and rhyme and have little to do with idiomatic – or even poetic – (early 18th Century) English.

“Thrice our bold foes the fierce attack have given,
Or led by hopes, or dictated from heaven.
Let others in the field their arms employ,
But stay my Hector here, and guard his Troy.”

Or if we move back to the very start of the poem, we have this rhyme:

“Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!”
And then around 20 lines later:
“If mercy fail, yet let my presents move,
And dread avenging Phoebus, son of Jove.”

So how is the word “Jove” pronounced then? (Or have the pronunciations of “move” and “strove” changed since Pope’s time?) ...

.. And yet, and yet … I have to say that Pope’s translation does many things very well. There’s a tidiness to his verses – partly imposed no doubt by the couplets but also I think by his general poetic mastery. For example:

“The nurse stood near, in whose embraces press'd,
His only hope hung smiling at her breast,
Whom each soft charm and early grace adorn,
Fair as the new-born star that gilds the morn.
To this loved infant Hector gave the name
Scamandrius, from Scamander's honour'd stream;
Astyanax the Trojans call'd the boy,
From his great father, the defence of Troy.”

To me, that’s all beautifully clear and efficient. It doesn’t read like a translation. I think Pope outdoes Fagles here.

This is Fagles:

“She joined him now, and following in her steps
a servant holding the boy against her breast,
in the first flush of life, only a baby,
Hector's son, the darling of his eyes
and radiant as a star . . .
Hector would always call the boy Scamandrius,
townsmen called him Astyanax, Lord of the City,
since Hector was the lone defense of Troy.”

To me, the inversions lend Andromache’s speech a perfectly apposite rhetorical nobility. And as two lines of euphonic verse, they are just lovely on their own terms. And often Pope is winningly ruthless when it comes to leaving out unnecessary details. For example:

“Yet while my Hector still survives, I see
My father, mother, brethren, all, in thee:
Alas! my parents, brothers, kindred, all
Once more will perish, if my Hector fall,
Thy wife, thy infant, in thy danger share:
Oh, prove a husband's and a father's care!”

Again, we see Pope’s tidiness of mind and impressive economy. He’s left out some details of the Greek (or at least I infer that he has from the fact that Fagles included them).

Here’s Fagles again:

“You, Hector—you are my father now, my noble mother,
a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm and strong!
Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,
before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow.”

I presume that Fagles is more faithful to the Greek text (readers of Greek can correct me if I’m wrong), and I suspect that the Greek word/inflection for “noble” or “honoured” fits nicely into the grammar and metre of Homer’s verse. But (to me at least) it feels awkward in English to give the mother an adjectival attribute in the middle of the list and not the father or the brother on either side. So I suspect that Pope, by jettisoning “noble”/”honoured”, has exercised good judgement as far as the demands of good English verse is concerned. Equally, I guess Andromache calls Hector strong and young in the original Greek – and it could be argued that it adds to the pathos to have her say these words – but we know Hector is young and strong, and I don’t mind not having that information here if it makes for a better verse. Certainly modern translators are held to higher standards of fidelity than 18th Century ones, so my praise of Pope here should not be understood as implicit criticism of Fagles. In general, I don’t want to get into the fidelity vs demands of target language debate, but I do want to praise Pope for keeping a concerned eye on his readers.

Other verses of Pope that I wish to offer up for simple admiration are:

“The chief replied: "That post shall be my care,
Not that alone, but all the works of war.
How would the sons of Troy, in arms renown'd,
And Troy's proud dames, whose garments sweep the ground
Attaint the lustre of my former name,
Should Hector basely quit the field of fame?
My early youth was bred to martial pains,
My soul impels me to the embattled plains!
Let me be foremost to defend the throne,
And guard my father's glories, and my own.”

I really feel that the last line in particular is pure poetic brilliance.

Or to prove that Pope’s rhymes are capable of capturing the humanity of the characters, there’s this one for example:

“Thus having spoke, the illustrious chief of Troy
Stretch'd his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy.
The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast,
Scared at the dazzling helm, and nodding crest.”

Having said all that, I could only recommend Pope to someone who was going to read a modern translation as well. I loved the Fagles version and am looking forward to reading the Pope once again after 10 years. But my closer reading of the Pope back in the day, has made me appreciate that his translation is more than just a slightly misguided artefact. I’m now inclined to think it’s a towering and still relevant achievement. In any case, it has made me want to read his whole “Iliad” translation … which all goes to prove that there is no set of preconceptions that won’t be overturned or deepened by a proper encounter with something, especially when the thing is the work of a great poet.

Why don’t I like the “Iliad” the same way I do with the “Odyssey”? No modern author would choose a vain, sulky brat (Achilles) as their hero (even if they tried, the character would be interpreted as an anti-hero). No modern author would make another of the main heroes as devious and underhand as Homer portrays Odysseus (a modern author would have to make Odysseus’s cunning more ingenious than sneaky if the character was to have any hold on our sympathies). Another way in which the "Iliad" is psychologically alien is the nature and role of the gods. Clearly Homer (and by implication his audience) had a very different conception of human autonomy. Having the gods intervene in the action to pursue petty vendettas really does feel alien to us. There are no doubt other ways too in which the book is alien. However, my overall feeling when I read the "Iliad" for the first time was of psychological involvement/engagement with the characters right through to the end (i.e. the opposite of alienation from them). This was very different from my experience of reading “The Odyssey” (which I’d read first). I found Odysseus tiresome, maddening and strange, and many of the individual episodes were also estranging experiences (in other words, weird stuff happened that I couldn’t really psychologically comprehend), but the overall story arc of the Odyssey is very engaging and it ends very satisfyingly. Achilles, on the other hand, is not a hero in the modern sense of the word. He is individualistic. He broods in his tent while his brothers-in-arms are hacked to pieces. The near-victory of the Trojans seems to leave him indifferent. Achilles is in it for personal glory. He sulks when his honour is publicly diminished, and only takes up arms in a vengeful rage. Any notion of communal glory or fighting for the advancement of his people seems to be absent. His instruction to Patroclus not to ‘make my glory that much less’ (by attacking the city) strikes me as the kind of thing Messi might say to a teammate before a match if he thought he could get away with it.

Having said that, none of the “Iliad” made sense to me until I understood the centrality of honour. I found the scrambling for armour in battle, with the adversary already dead and his comrades closing in, particularly baffling. But of course, if your main objective in battle is to prove your valour, then the best way to do that is to grab a trophy from a slain enemy. It’s worth the risk if honour is valued more highly than life.

If I'm a man and not crippled or very old, I'm a hoplite, and if I'm a hoplite my shield hangs over the hearth most of the time. Every few years my wife takes it down and polishes it up and then I go off to kill a few other hoplites from out of town and someday, very likely, get killed myself. Meanwhile, between wars, these wandering storytellers come around and entertain us for a modest price. One thing I know: it will have to be one hell of a story to top the stories I could tell you myself. You think your last commander was a piece of work? Let me tell you about Agamemnon. You had some tough guys in your army? Let me tell you about Achilles. When he was on your side, you always won. Always. Nobody could stop him. But what an amazing jerk he could be! Get this, there was the time...I think all this is psychologically real to us because it's every war story you can think of - and every story in the form of a war story - we've ever had. But it's not conforming to us, it's we who are conforming to it whenever we revert to war story mode. In every other way the world of the “Iliad” is impossibly foreign to us. Nobody thinks about anything in the “Iliad”: some god jumps straight into their head and tells them what's what. Always, all the way through. And yet it doesn't feel nearly as strange to us as it ought to - because when we're in war story mode, we don't do a whole lot of thinking ourselves, either. We only think we do. I can certainly see the old veteran describing (in painstaking detail!) the ships he saw and itemising the legions and their commanders. That could be the veteran of almost any major war. (Whether Homer himself saw action is a different question). And much of the middle of the “Iliad” is like the first 20 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” in many respects. The heat of battle remains the heat of battle. In addition, the sympathy we feel for the Trojans is probably not all down to Homer's skill but because we understand what defeat means. It has not fundamentally changed.Yet, when we think of all the myths and stories about the Trojan War that were available to Homer, wasn't it a stroke of complete storytelling genius to begin late in the siege with the squabble in the Greek camp and to essentially tie the whole drama of the war to Achilles's internal struggle? And the basic structure of internal squabbling, then battle with the enemy, then poignant aftermath at Priam's tent: I don't think any of that is self-evident as a structure: it needed a genius. Think of what a muddle could have been made with the same material. In other words, I don't think Homer just got there first in describing a war and did a decent job and had his influence for that reason. To give an example I mentioned above: Robin Hood has become a kind of archetypal hero (a good-hearted outlaw in an unjust society), but if you read “A Gest of Robyn Hode”, you can see what a strange mess (from a modern perspective) can be made out of such material. (In the case of that ballad, this is of course partly due to it being written by different sources). And the “Gest of Robyn Hode” is much, much more recent.

Coming back to the "Iliad", I might say: Nobody thinks about anything in the “Iliad”: some God jumps straight into their head and tells them what's what. Always, all the way through. I agree 100%: that's how the poem develops, line by line. And yet the Achilles that talks to Priam at the end is (internally, psychologically) a very different person/demigod to the sulking youth of the start. And importantly, it's not that he has learned a pat lesson: he has actually become more complex as a result of the war. We are not shown the train of thoughts (like the brilliant scene at Pemberley in “Pride and Prejudice” where we eavesdrop on Elizabeth Bennet's thoughts and listen to her arrive step by step at the truth about her feelings and Mr. Darcy), but nonetheless we must infer that they have occurred. Anyway, this has turned into a long riff on just two words, so apologies! show less