It has been surprising in recent years to witness the arrival of translator-scholars like Powell and Green, both professors emeriti with many academic books in print or in progress.
Rodney Merill alone among recent translators can lay claim to both mantles, and his self-generated introduction is correspondingly colorful and unique, dispensing with historical questions altogether in favor of the topic “Singing the Iliad.” However, Merrill’s translation also employs a strict hexametric line and uses archaisms like “scion” in place of “son,” which for many readers - especially teachers - makes it a non-starter. But the two roles have increasingly diverged in the last quarter-century. In the olden days of Lattimore and Fitzgerald, scholars might also be poets and poets scholars, and Fagles, in the next generation, still incarnated both (though he handed off his introductions to his friend and collaborator, Bernard Knox). With the University of California’s publication last month of Green’s Iliad, the number of muses singing that baneful/ruinous/murderous/destructive/doomed force, the wrath of Achilles, has become nearly overwhelming - especially for teachers like myself who must ponder anew each year an expanded selection of classroom texts.īroadly speaking, the roster can be divided into translator-scholars and translator-poets - a distinction clearly signaled by whether or not a separate author has been enlisted to write the introduction.
Now the list has grown once more to include Peter Green, revered classicist and author of many compelling studies of Greek history as well as a 1997 verse translation of Apollonius’ Argonautica. To say “even my neighbor down the street is doing one” might seem hyperbolic, but in my case it’s literally true, since the poet and Homeric translator Charles Stein lives a few houses from mine. The last decade has seen Iliads from Rodney Merrill (University of Michigan 2007), Stephen Mitchell (Atria 2011), Edward McCrorie (Johns Hopkins 2012), Barry Powell (Oxford 2013), and Anthony Verity (Oxford World Classics 2011) - to mention only the major editions several others are available online or from smaller publishers. Since the days of Lombardo, the floodgates of Iliad translations have opened with a vengeance, and the pace of new arrivals grows ever quicker. I myself adopted Lombardo’s version in my classrooms for many years, until its typography - space breaks, indentations, false line breaks, and the italicization of similes - began to disturb me, as did the occasional snickers of my students when insults like “bitch!” were encountered. Lombardo, with his quick, light line and his flirtations with colloquialism and anachronism, posed a brash challenge to the “Big Three,” a challenge that many were eager to embrace. Then in 1997 came the debut of Stanley Lombardo’s Hackett translation, with its famously iconoclastic cover, a photo of a landing craft arriving on the beaches of Normandy. (His version is still in print from Penguin, and Lattimore’s was reissued in 2011 by the University of Chicago, with a new introduction and notes by Richard Martin and an updated, though hugely unappealing, cover image.) The publication of Fagles’ work created an enduring troika of viable translation options for readers and teachers. “And thick and fast they came at last,/ and more, and more, and more.” Those lines from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” were once quoted to me by Bob Fagles, my teacher at the time, to describe the late-20th-century proliferation of translations of Greek texts, Homer’s poems in particular.įagles was at that time preparing to add to the onrush with his 1990 Iliad, a refreshingly limber alternative to the then-standard poetic versions of Robert Fitzgerald (1974) and Richmond Lattimore (1951).
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