THE ILIAD OF HOMER

translated with anintroduction by Richmond Lattimore '26.University of Chicago Press, 1951, pp. 527. $4.50.

In these days when almost no one reads Greek the need of good translations is a serious one. How, in particular, can the Iliad, that earliest masterpiece of our literary heritage, be brought satisfactorily into the orbit of a modern reader's appreciation? If the story were all that mattered—and I agree that the story, even by itself, is worth telling again and again—a simple prose version such as the new one by E. V. Rieu in the Penguin Classics would be most satisfactory. But when the translator's aim is that declared by Professor Lattimore—"to give a rendering of the Iliad which will convey the meaning of the Greek in a speed and rhythm analogous to the speed and rhythm I find in the original,'—his translation will have to be in some sense poetic.

As Mr. Lattimore is not only a recognized Greek scholar but a poet of skill, resourcefulness, and a bold readiness to explore the expressive possibilities of idiom and cadence, the result (as a reader of his admirable Pindar translations could have foreseen) is a remarkable one. He imitates Homer to the extent of employing an unrhymed six-foot line as, so to speak, his base of operations, but wisely avoids any suggestion either of the metronome or of the textbook, by allowing the cadences of thought rather than strict rules of prosidy to determine where and how the beats shall fall. Read, for example, with full openness of auditory imagination, the lines in which Helen replies to Hector's reproach: "Brother by marriage to me, who am a nasty bitch evilintriguing, how I wish that on that day when my mother first bore me the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea deep-thundering where the waves would have swept me away before all these things had happened."

The translation is preceded by an admirable introduction, covering such topics as author- ship, story sources, the pattern and style of the poem, and the men and gods who appear in it; and at the end there is a useful glossary of proper names.