If you still haven’t found the time or the resolve to read one of the greatest literary legacies of Western civilization, you’ll be glad to know that Homer’s
Iliad now has no less than four modern-day translations in as many English language registers from the original Greek.
You can take your pick from the following choices:
1. Richmond Lattimore’s lucid and scholarly verse translation,
The Iliad of Homer, originally published in 1951 but reissued recently with a new introduction (University of Chicago Press, 608 pages). This version has become the standard text in North America.
2. Anthony Verity’s far more restrained and scholarly but nonpoetic translation,
The Iliad (Oxford University Press, 512 pages), which is due for release this November of 2011.
3. Stephen Mitchell’s translation in more colloquial English,
The Iliad (Free Press, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 466 pages), which the author says is more reliable as it is based on a different edition of the text from Lattimore’s.
4. Alice Oswald’s bare-bones paraphrased verse translation,
Memorial (Faber and Faber, 84 pages), which nevertheless manages to capture the shocking brutality of the siege of Troy as Homer had depicted it.
The Economist in the UK has made a comparative review of these four translations in its October 15, 2011 issue, recommending Lattimore’s translation for capturing the epic scale and narrative of Homer’s poem, and Alice Oswald’s for its audacious feat of bringing the ancient poem’s violence shockingly to life in just one-eighth of the length of the original Greek.
Read “Winged Words” in The Economist’s Culture Section now! THIS PARTICULAR WEBPAGE NOW HAS A PAYWALL 
