A Heroic And Human Tragedy
The Iliad is a story of passion. In its sweep lies war and death, honor and pettiness, mortality, domesticity, gods and men.
In his excellent introduction to this edition and translation by Robert Fagles, Bernard Knox writes that the Iliad probably was written down between 725 and 675 B.C. It tells a story that was archaic even for its time that is set around 1200 B.C. The story of the Iliad covers a matter of days in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War. It is allusive to the entire mythology of that ancient struggle. The tale is deliberately mythical, with characters and emotions that, Homer tells us many times, are larger than those of men today. For too many, the Iliad comes encrusted as a "classic". People read it, or portions of it, in high school or college and inevitably miss much of the grandeur and wisdom of the work.
When I came back to the Iliad recently (after not having read the work in many years) in this translation by Fagles, I was swept away. I accompanied my reading of the Iliad with an excellent series of lecture tapes on the poem and its background. I thought the translation, written in a modern colloquial free verse helped me to understand and read the poem. The translation, for me, gives the reader a sense of the repetitions, formulas and phraseology of the original. It has a sweep to it, and the style and translation does not get in the way of understanding the work. This is important in a modern translation of an ancient work. The translation was easy to follow and got me involved in the tale. I am sure the poem works differently in the ancient Greek than in this translation. But this is largely irrelevant to the virtue of Fagles's work which makes the Iliad come alive and roar in a manner which encourages the nonclassicist modern reader to approach it.
There are a multitude of themes in the Iliad. At the beginning of the work, Homer invokes his muse and announces that the work will deal with the "rage of Achilles." The work is about human anger and rage on a grand scale and about the waste, but strange grandeur of war. In his introduction, Bernard Knox quotes approvingly from Simone Weil, writing in France during World War II, who described the Iliad as the West's leading work on the use and nature of Force. The Iliad speaks deeply about the human condition, about the tragedy and heroism that human mortality makes possible, and about how people may learn to change and to understand others.
I found Bernard Knox' introduction and notes helpful in understanding the controversies surrounding the writing of the Iliad and in giving the reader some of the basic tools to think about the work. Whether the reader is approaching the Iliad for the first time or after many times, there is much to be gained from reading this basic text of the West. Fagles' translation will help bring the reader to the Iliad.
Robin Friedman
