Volume 38, Number 4 · February 14, 1991
Welcome Homer!
By Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Homer: The Iliad
translated by Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox
Viking, 683 pp., $35.00
The Iliad for Speaking Steingrabenstrasse 20, 8036 Briebrunntam Ammersee, Germany)
translated by Michael Reck
Porpentine Press, 436 pp., $40.00 (available from the publisher, Porpentine Press,
The Odyssey of Homer
a new verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
University of California Press, 526 pp., $35.00
Homer has never lacked readers, not even during the long period in which the essential unity of his poems was denied, and all the problems presented by the poems were solved in terms of conflicting theories of multiple authorship, so that finally scholars questioned even his ability to depart from a limited collection of traditional set phrases. Each new generation is bound to produce new translations and new interpretations; these are not necessarily better than the old, but must be tested against them by careful comparison. Richmond Lattimore's Iliad (1951) and Odyssey (1965)[1] were considered by many as the best available translations into modern English verse, and Robert Fitzgerald's translations[2] have also had admirers. Now here are new versions of the Iliad by Robert Fagles, who has translated the Greek lyric poet Bacchylides, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and the Theban plays of Sophocles, and by Michael Reck, who is known as a poet and as a friend of Ezra Pound, and of the Odyssey by Allen Mandelbaum, who has translated the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy, as well as Ungaretti and Quasimodo.
Review, 7547 words
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