- Hardcover: 160 pages
- Publisher: Faber And Faber Ltd. (Nov 22 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0571274161
- ISBN-13: 978-0571274161
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.4 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 259 g
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#33,339 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Single Authors > British & Irish
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
Matthew Arnold praised the "Iliad" for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. ""The Iliad" is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world...compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking". (Alice Oswald).
About the Author
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Dart, her second collection, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2006, and in 2009 she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Sleepwalk On The Severn, a poem for several voices set at night on the Severn Estuary.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
War, breathless war, Nov 15 2011
By Hande Z - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Memorial (Hardcover)
Would you like to read Homer's Iliad in under two hours? This 84-page book, including 8 pages of the names of fallen warriors, one after the other in the order as they had fallen. Their names appearing as in a memorial of the dead in single columns. Oswald tells us in the first line of her introduction that "This is a translation of the Iliad's atmosphere, not its story". It is a fast paced account of the heroic and tragic moments in tenth year of the war. She skips the proem of the Iliad, which is traditionally in book One, where Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek expedition and Achilles, arguably the most famous name in the Iliad are introduced. Excluded are thus the main events, including one of my favourites - the chariot race in honour of Patroklos' death (traditonally, Book 23). Can the atmosphere of the war be adequately captured with the omissions of those events? The modern reader, familiar with the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the more recent wars against faceless, nameless enemies known only as "Terrorists", will surely appreciate what this book seeks to achieve. Achilles the great hero was only mentioned in passing since only the dead were honoured in this memorial and given names in block letters. And Hector, the main Trojan closes Oswald's book with his death, told in Oswald's verse without fanfare or excitement, just profoundly; the words ring the entire Iliad - as it does all human strife:"And HECTOR died like everyone else
He was in charge of the Trojans
But a spear found out the little patch of white
Between his collarbone and his throat
Just exactly where a man's soul sits
waiting for the mouth to open
He always knew it would happen".
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