And for those who prefer modernist twists on ancient classics, Christopher Logue’s War Music-a reimagining of Homer’s epic, in an imagistic style-will appear in a new, more complete version next month, augmented by material Logue left unfinished in his declining years, after working on the poem, on and off, for five decades.
Do you fancy rhymed couplets? The once-great versions by George Chapman and Alexander Pope have been recently repackaged, as has the prose version by Victorian novelist Samuel Butler. Some translators prefer a five-beat line of verse (like Shakespeare’s), others something closer to the six-beat line of the original still others blend the two, or, as in Alexander’s case, stick to no clear metrical scheme at all (“a cadence… which varies from verse to verse,” as she describes it in her introduction). Given the increasingly rapid pace at which new Iliads keep emerging, we will likely see another before the Iowa caucuses-all this while older versions of the poem, some dating back centuries, continue to get reissued with new notes, introductions, and cover illustrations.įor readers, and for teachers like myself, the range of choice has become bewildering. Last month, with the arrival of Caroline Alexander’s version of Homer’s great epic-the first ever by a woman, if that matters-the Iliads drew just one shy of the nine Republican contenders who appeared in December’s debate.
If you answered (a), you’d be right, but by a very slim margin. Pop quiz: Which is greater? (a) The number of Republican presidential candidates or (b) the number of new English translations of Homer’s Iliad published in the last decade.
0 kommentar(er)
