About
With her virtuoso translation, classicist and bestselling author Caroline Alexander brings to life Homer's timeless epic of the Trojan War. Composed around 730 B.C., Homer's Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year war between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion. From the explosive confrontation between Achilles, the greatest warrior at Troy, and Agamemnon, the inept leader of the Greeks, through to its tragic conclusion, The Iliad explores the abiding, blighting facts of war. Soldier and civilian, victor and vanquished, hero and coward, men, women, young, old-The Iliad evokes in poignant, searing detail the fate of every life ravaged by the Trojan War. And, as told by Homer, this ancient tale of a particular Bronze Age conflict becomes a sublime and sweeping evocation of the destruction of war throughout the ages. Carved close to the original Greek, acclaimed classicist Caroline Alexander's new translation is swift and lean, with the driving cadence of its source-a translation epic in scale and yet devastating in its precision and power.
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Reviews
"Alexander's translation preserves the line numbers with the ancient Greek. Her style is simultaneously artificial and action-oriented. It reads like a performance… At times it feels like peering into the everyday rhythms and rituals of ancient Greece. The poetry itself sizzles on the page."
New York Journal of Books
"[T]he guard has changed, and a new gold standard has appeared, a 2015 translation by Caroline Alexander.… [Alexander] is a grandmaster of restoration, delivering the Iliad unembellished, faithful to the Greek, and uniquely accessible. Her translation itself promises to be ageless and immortal."
New Criterion
"Alexander's translation comes across as translucent, readable and recitable, maintaining an epic poise and, by keeping a weather eye on the Greek word order, offering the occasional pleasing strangeness, while the varied line lengths ebb and flow with the tides of battle."
The Spectator