The Iliad: A New Translation by Peter Green

For Green (Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics, Univ. of Texas, Austin), this new rendition of Homer's epic poem is the product of a lifetime of scholarship and translation. An authority on Alexander the Great, Green is also a novelist and well-regarded translator, including of versions of Ovid, Catullus, and the Argonautica of Apollonis Rhodios. His new verse translation joins many, including those of Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo, and more recently Barry B. Powell. Aiming at the general reader who knows little or no Greek, Green seeks a "declaimable" version to be "read" by the ear rather than the eye, a text that is at the same time true to the vigor and oral character of the original. In this he is generally successful, deploying an iambic line modified with an anapestic opening that creates something of the Greek hexameter. Like Robert Fitzgerald, he transliterates the Greek version of names, giving an anachronizing effect, avoiding Lombardo's practice of using a contemporary idiom.