Penguin Classics Homer The Iliad

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com/product/index/Iliad-P-B-Trans-Hammond-Penguin-Classic 9780140444445 Iliad P/B (Trans Hammond) Penguin Classic http://www. For modern readers who enjoy stuff like Harry Potter or other fantasy/mythology stuff, this may honestly be a tough story to get into.

Martin Hammond's acclaimed translation is accompanied by a full introduction and a comprehensive index. Considering that in the Homeric world the heroic worth passes from father to son, and so the latter can ensure a ‘revival’ of the former, it is remarkable that, after having talked with Odysseus, Achilles seems no longer to be sad or to wish to be alive; indeed, he goes away rejoicing because he knows from Odysseus that his son was glorious and famous (11. the issue of Agamemnon’s status which does not justify the way he dealt with Achilles’ feelings of injustice (pp. Fagles occasionally smoothes over the brazen, weird archaism of Homer's phrasings - so old they seem new - with cliches, a stab at contemporaneity the poem doesn't need, even if we do; Poseidon's voice 'like a shock wave'? Mycenaen war bands where active near Miletus so the war was probably actual but Homer wrote about 700bc so by then the Bronze age was a memory and the tale became embroidered with fantasy.As to how the time / aidos issue affects the reaction of Achilles and his desire of revenge, Jones nevertheless later talks of “revenge for his own [Achilles] slighted honour” (p. Martin Hammond is headmaster of the Tonbridge School and has translated Homer's Iliad for Penguin Classics. Martin Hammond's modern prose version is the best and most accurate there has ever been' - Peter Levi in the IndependentThe Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilisation - an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture. As these charges are the responsibility of the recipient, please check the customs service in your destination country to see if charges are applicable. Contrast this with the dutiful willingness of Menelaus and Agamemnon to get their hands dirty, and the poem's honourable lack of partisanship, its scrupulous even-handedness.

Eg: there is this particular scene where Andromache begs her husband Hector to come back alive from the war, beging that since she lost all of her family, Hector was a husband, father, brother, sister and mother to her, all of it. I had enjoyed Fitzgerald's verse translation of The Aenied as a result of which I bought this verse translation of the Iliad. The Illiad is the starting point of the Odyssey and the Aeneid both classics of epic poetry and the Illiad is also ripe with Greek Mythology. He focuses almost exclusively on the following items: the debate as the first reaction of the two heroes to the problem, as according to the heroic code they have to assert themselves and win by debating, too (p.

Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses.

You're not supposed to read `The Iliad' like a normal book, but that's all you can really do with a prose translation like this. Jones describes how the shots gradually become wider by showing Homer (a) as setting the scene first in the context of the battle between the Greeks and Trojans, then within the broad context of the whole history of the ten-year Trojan war; (b) as dealing with his personages like a “vast cast” (p. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.What an age can read in Homer, what its translators can manage to say in his presence, is one gauge of its morale, one index to its system of exultations and reticences. Read Martin Hammond's prose translation in Penguin Classics for a crib, an accurate representation of the original's brutality (and a better index); or Pope's (also Penguin Classics) for a sense of epic. A nice touch is that Hammond has given the different characters names that are far closer to the original Greek then the ones often used in other translations (e. To understand and appreciate an ancient work, it should be useful to deal also with the way that the Ancients themselves conceived of that work. Martin Hammond's acclaimed prose translation is accompanied by an introduction which discusses the central themes of The Iliad and provides a lucid synopsis of the work.