Customer Reviews

The Iliad: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

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The other reviewers have done an excellent job of describing the plot of "The Iliad," so I'll just pass on some tips that have helped me enjoy this amazingly enriching work.

The challenge of reading "The Iliad" is reading it as it was meant to be read. That means you have to let go of our modern notion of accessing literature. This text is not a "book" or a "novel," and was never meant to be. (The notion of printed books and private reading of novels came along more than twenty centuries after Homer finished his poem!)

So you'll have to pretend, as you hold your copy of "The Iliad" in your hand, that you're actually back in Ancient Greece sitting in a small crowd of people on a hillside listening to an orator recite the poem. The reading would have been spread out over several days (or perhaps several nights) and the orator would have been a professional, sort of like a one-man theatre troupe. His performance (perhaps recalled from memory, perhaps read from a parchment script--no one knows for sure) would have had the timing, fire, and precision that the great Shakespearean actors would perfect two millenia later.

In short, pretend you're hearing the text, rather than eye-balling it. As you read each line in this top-notch modern English translation, enjoy it and gnaw on it and savor it as though it were from a short verse poem. If you've got the guts, read each line aloud, and listen to the echo. Don't let the work's complexity intimidate you: "The Iliad" gets better as you go along, as the work itself slowly tutors you how to read it. Understand that Homer meant it to be a challenging, marathon event, so don't be discouraged.

As you advance (take your time!) in your reading, the beauty of the vocabulary, the drama of the situation, and the baseness or nobility of the various characters will slowly emerge. The grandeur of the courage and humanness of the characters builds progressively, and in the end your reading of this masterpiece will leave you exhausted yet enlightened. You will never forget it.

AUDENTES FORTUNA JUVAT!

The Iliad contains all the knowledge you will ever need in human affairs. It imparts wisdom in understanding people and psychology which no other book can. The Iliad is the first book ever written in a European language, and it is also the best. It preserves the essence of Western culture in a capsule from the warrior days of prehistory. The heroic ethos displayed in the Iliad underlies all later warrior codes and societies; medieval knights, viking adventurers, and American cowboys, for example, all can trace their ethos back to this protohistoric 'macho' culture. In the days of Homer, and indeed of all ancient Indo-european societies, one's relationships with others and one's skill in speaking could mark the difference between life and death. In our more comfortable lives today, we cannot reproduce this precarious breeding-ground of cleverly persuasive speech, so we benefit greatly from learning these skills from the best of that period's speakers: Homer, as he puts 'winged words' in the mouths of his heroic men and women. The Iliad is 50% dialogue and vicious debate: it is almost a play more than a book. In this book, it is not the pen that is mightier than the sword, but rather the tongue. It comes to me as no surprise that the Greeks and Romans looked at this book, as they did no other, as their 'soly scriptures', albeit in a non-religious kind of way, to be studied, quoted and memorized for the sake of gaining wisdom and understanding in human affairs.
I have read the Iliad in its original Greek, and I can tell you that the rhythmical enchantment of the original can not in any way be reproduced in English, or in any other language. There is no way to capture the same hilarious moments or grand episodes of bravery with the same music in our language as Homer did with his Greek. An English translation can only be an interpretation. Robert Fagles seems to give the Iliad a slightly darker mood than I felt it has in the Greek, but that could just be my own 'interpretation'. I think there is a great deal of humour in the poem: characters making stupid mistakes, gods behaving like buffoons, and little witty comments from the teller (Homer). These are not lost in Fagles' wonderful work, but are perhaps slightly harder to notice than in the original. Again, this is just my own feeling. I also find the over-the-top excitement in the poem very amusing, such as the build up of the tale to the point where the gods openly join in the war, and among others the god of fire swoops down to do battle with a god of a river, and Achilles in his fury even fights against the water. The Iliad is like the orchestral piece by Edvard Grieg "The Mountain King", which steadily but surely accelerates anxiously to a truly explosive climax. Robert Fagles has captured very much of this, perhaps as much as can be reasonably expected in an English non-chanted translation. Richmond Lattimore's translation is essentially a word for word extremely faithful rendering in Enlglish (even to the point of having the same number of lines of poetry per 'book')and it is wonderful for those who would like to get closer to Homer's actual words, but on the other hand, Robert Fagles' translation is so eminently readable, speakable and memorable in our own language that one can feel the heartbeats of the warriors pulsing in their chests while reading it. "Rage- goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles": so it starts, and Homer's heroes rise, breathing, from the dust.

The Iliad is a story of passion. In its sweep lies war and death, honor and pettiness, mortality, domesticity, gods and men.

In his excellent introduction to this edition, Bernard Knox tells us that the Iliad probably was written down between 725 and 675 B.C. It tells a story that was archaic even for its time that is set around 1200 B.C. The story of the Iliad covers a matter of days in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War. It is allusive to the entire mythology of that ancient struggle. The tale is deliberately mythical, with characters and emotions that, Homer tells us many times, are larger than those of men today. For too many, the Iliad comes encrusted as a "classic". People read it, or portions of it, in high school or college and inevitably miss much of the grandeur and wisdom of the work.

When I came back to the Iliad recently (after not having read the work in many years) in Fagles' translation, I was swept away. I accompanied my reading of the Iliad with an excellent series of lecture tapes on the poem and its background. I thought the translation, written in a modern colloquial free verse helped me to understand and read the poem. The translation, for me, gives the reader a sense of the repetitions, formulas and phraseology of the original. It has a sweep to it, and the style and translation does not get in the way of understanding the work. This is important in a modern translation of an ancient work. The translation was easy to follow and got me involved in the tale. I am sure the poem works differently in the ancient Greek than in this translation. But this is largely irrelevant to the virtue of Fagles's work which makes the Iliad come alive and roar in a manner which encourages the nonclassicist modern reader to approach it.

There are a mulitude of themes in the Iliad. At the beginning of the work, Homer invokes his muse and announces that the work will deal with the "rage of Achilles." The work is about human anger and rage on a grand scale and about the waste, but strange grandeur of war. In his introduction, Bernard Knox quotes approvingly from Simone Weil, writing in France during World War II, who described the Iliad as the West's leading work on the use and nature of Force. The Iliad speaks deeply about the human condition, about the tragedy and heroism that human mortality makes possible, and about how people may learn to change and to understand others.

I found Bernard Knox' introduction and notes helpful in understanding the controversies surrounding the writing of the Iliad and in giving the reader some of the basic tools to think about the work. Whether the reader is approaching the Iliad for the first time or after many times, there is much to be gained from reading this basic text of the West. Fagles translation will help bring the reader to the Iliad.

Robert Fagles translation of the Illiad is supurb! It's very easy to read and yet still retains its essence which has captivated readers for 2800 years!! I would highly recommend The Illiad to everyone, the story is a timeless one and one can relate to it as much now in the year 2006 as the people did back in 1200-800BC, before it was even written down, and just passed down generation to generation orally. This translation is definitly the best english translation there is to enjoy this timeless classic.

Do yourself a favour and read one of the most brillant stories ever written.

I recently read Homer's epic poem "The Iliad" for the first time. There are three reasons why I did:

#1: I saw the movie "Troy" (which was entertaining; not great, but entertaining) and the story of the Trojan War piqued my interest. Ancient Greek scholars, please fight your gagging reflexes!

#2: A copy of "The Iliad" ALWAYS looks good on one's bookshelf.

#3: I can appear smarter than I really am just by saying "I've read 'The Iliad!'" Any moron can read "The Odyssey" (I know that from experience; I skimmed through it my freshman year of high school), but "The Iliad" always seemed darker and more challenging to me.

Anyhoo, my pretensions aside, "The Iliad" truly is an engrossing story set during the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of the city of Troy. To quickly sum up the story for the initiated and yet not ruin the story for the uninitiated, "The Iliad" concerns the rage of the great, yet self-absorbed Greek warrior Achilles and how his refusal to fight for the equally self-absorbed King Agamemnon leads to the ruin of many, all the while the gods pick sides and fight viciously among themselves.

The battlescenes are exciting and unbelieveably gory: limbs get hacked off, entrails spill out onto the ground, eyeballs pop out in different directions and brains splatter everywhere.

If that isn't enough, the amount of trash-talking done by these ancient warriors makes today's NFL players seem tame by comparison. "The Iliad" is a tragic tale, but it is an unrelentingly MACHO tragic tale. Not surprising for a war story, I guess. I'm sure Oliver Stone has a copy of this poem stashed away somewhere.

It should be noted that there are several different English translations of Homer's epic floating around the marketplace. I chose Robert Fagles' 1990 translation because it was the quickest and most understandable read, especially to a modern English-speaking audience. From what I've heard, Richard Lattimore's translation is more poetic, but is harder to get through.

Bernard Knox's introduction is worthwhile reading, as it explains the history behind the poem, as well as giving a literary analysis of its heroes (namely, Achilles and Hector).

Now that I've read "The Iliad", I feel "ever so smart" as Martin Prince would say on "The Simpsons". Now, I just hope the mean kids don't beat me up on the way to school.

Fagles is a distinguished translator and I have enjoyed his work on Aeschylus and Sophocles, but compared with Richmond Lattimore's Iliad, Fagles language is rather banal and flat. I also prefer Lattimore's Iliad to that of Robert Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is probably the most elegant versifier of the three, but his version is a bit too much of a loose paraphrase for my tastes and his style doesn't always match up well with this fierce, fierce poem.

This is a beautiful, poetic translation of Homer's classic Iliad, sure to be enjoyed even if you aren't a great lover of ancient works. This edition sings with crisp, clear language, not muddled like Fitzgerald, Lattimore, etcetera. Professor Fagles has used a more modern verse to make this wonderful story more accessible and understandable, but does not lose the beautiful, awe-inspiring epic poetry of the original Greek text. Obviously not nearly as poetic as A. Pope's classic translation, this edition is thousands of times more accurate and true to the language. The enduringly popular story of Achilles' rage has once again been brought to us, this time in a thrilling version to be enjoyed time and time again. All hail to the king--the king of the Iliads!

P.S. I suggest getting the hardcover edition. It has a nice built-in bookmark. It's also a bit more sturdy.

I have read several versions of the Iliad (both poetic and prose) and this version translated by Robert Fagles is the best I've read. Fagles has such an ability to translate the classics (as he has done with the Odyssey and the Theban Plays of Sophocles) so that they are readable to the modern English reader while still maintaining the lyricism of poetry. I'm also a sucker for introductions, glossaries, and translation notes and this edition has excellent versions of all three. While I would have liked even more notes to explain some of the myth references within the Iliad, the ones that are there are very explanatory. Bernard Knox (who also wrote the Notes) delivers a very erudite introduction that puts the "rage of Achilles" into context and gives an enlightening view of the humanity of the Gods who appear within. Highly recommended to those who want to get in touch with their Ancient Greek side.

The Iliad. You know the story. The Rage of Achilles. Great story. One of the, if not the pillar of Western Literature. Fagles is a latest to do a major translation of this story. I like it better than Fitzgerald's, but this is the only case. I don't think Lattimore is very accessible for the first time reader. I also like the anglicized names, which Fitzgerald does not do. However, the translation is not perfect. It is a little too modern for my taste, and does not give the formality and mysticism that Homer so rightfully deserves. For example, the constant use of B**ch degrades it. He also changes the epitaphs around a lot. Overall good, the best out now, but there can be better.

This is a powerful translation. All my life I have shunned contemporary translations in favor of older, more well-accepted ones. This translation is so easy to read that millions of school-age children can praise Zeus--or Fagles--that they have been spared the much more difficult translations that are normally foisted on them.

The idiom of Homer can be difficult enough, but to pile opaque, antiquated verbiage on top of it is simply too much for most readers. What a shame that for so many years this story has been made unaccessible to so many. This translation solves that problem brilliantly. Readers will be impressed with the current and sometimes colloquial nature of the writing. For instance, in connection with the funeral games for Patroclus, the first volunteer to participate in the boxing match says, "I am the greatest." Coincidence? But don't think for a minute that the translation is not serious.

This translation has forced me to reexamine my view of the role of the translator. If someone can translate into clear and comely contemporarly language, why should they not do it?

Hurray for Robert Fagles!