The Iliad - Twenty Centuries of Translation

The Iliad has never belonged to a single language or a single age. For more than two thousand years, Homer’s epic has travelled from oral performance to papyrus, from parchment to print, and from Ancient Greek and Latin into the many competing forms of the English Iliad.The Iliad: Twenty Centuries of Translation is not another translation of Homer’s poem. It is a critical investigation of the many lives the Iliad has acquired through transmission, interpretation and translation.Michael M. Nikoletseas follows the poem from its origins in oral tradition through the surviving papyri, medieval manuscripts and early printed editions. He examines the Homeric Greek text, the Greek vernacular tradition, the Latin Iliad and the development of the poem in English. Major translators-including George Chapman, Thomas Hobbes, Alexander Pope, Samuel Butler, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo-are considered both individually and comparatively.Particular attention is given to the celebrated opening of Book I. Through close comparison, Nikoletseas demonstrates how choices involving rhythm, imagery, word order and cultural interpretation can alter the reader’s understanding of Homeric anger, heroism, violence and divine intervention. Every translation preserves something of the original, transforms something and inevitably leaves something behind.Ancient Greek passages appear alongside historical papyrus and manuscript illustrations, allowing readers to encounter the Iliad not only as a literary work but also as a physical text transmitted across centuries and cultures.Written for classicists, students of literature, translators, historians of the book and serious readers of Homer, this distinctive study offers an illuminating journey through the continuing life of one of the foundational works of world literature.