Stuff
Product Details
Simon & Schuster Audio, October 2011
Unabridged Audio Download
ISBN-10: 1442347325
ISBN-13: 9781442347328
Description
One of The New Yorker’s Favorite Books of 2 011 Tolstoy called the Iliad a miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment. Homer’s story is thrilling, and his Greek is perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever sung or written. But until now, even the best English translations haven’t been able to re-create the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace, and pulsing rhythm of the original. Now, thanks to the power of Stephen Mitchell’s language, the Iliad’s ancient story comes to moving, vivid new life, and we are carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful. Mitchell’s Iliad is also the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West, whose edition of the original Greek identifies many passages that were added after the Iliad was first written down, to the detriment of the music and the story. Omitting these hundreds of interpolated lines restores a dramatically sharper, leaner text. In addition, Mitchell’s illuminating introduction opens the epic still further to our understanding and appreciation.
Read more:
Browse Inside IliadHear an Excerpt from the Audiobook
“The verse is well-forged and clean-limbed, and achieves a powerful simplicity. Mitchell has re-energised the Iliad for a new generation.”
-- The Sunday Telegraph (London)
“A daring new version of the epic poem.”
-- The Wall Street Journal
“Mitchell’s Iliad is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before.... His strong five-beat rhythm is arguably the best yet in English.”
-- The New Yorker
“A sturdy, muscular, and nuanced translation that will surely bring many new readers to this great work.”
-- John Banville, author of The Sea
“Mitchell’s translation is a brilliant accomplishment. It captures the fierce energy, rhythms, and powerful narrative of Homer’s Greek in vivid and compelling English.”
-- Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels
“Mitchell’s five-beat line is a startlingly strong alternative to other translators’ attempts to capture the inimitably mellifluous flow of Homer’s Greek. Mitchell fits a meter to the poem, but also the poem to the meter, paring away words that could not work in English, aiming always to preserve the uncanny aesthetic distance and moral neutrality of the original at its full, thrilling, and horrifying depth. Read three pages, any three pages, and you’ll realize that, no, you are not yet done with Homer.”
-- Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
”A strange, almost forgotten feeling overtook me as I first dipped into this new translation. I felt compelled to recite aloud! The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music. It’s overtly virile stuff, propelled from the time when music, language, information, and politics were not yet distinguished.”
-- Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget
The Scotsman, October 16, 2011
...books, including the Noddy series, made more “politically correct” for modern day audiences. And a new edition of Homer’s The Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell, caused controversy for cutting out swathes of the epic poem, including ...
First Post, October 14, 2011
...at Cullodden, the air thick with arrows at Agincourt, the Spartans at Thermopylae... by the time we reach Homer, almost 3,000 years ago, war has become a fairy-tale and death of no account. His Odyssey has become the blueprint for some of ...
Denver Post, October 9, 2011
...girl crosses the ice with her parents to visit a lighthouse and promptly vanishes. — Library Journal The Iliad, by Homer (Free Press) The latest translation of a classic work from the highly regarded Stephen Mitchell NonfictionMy Song, by ...
Business Day, October 4, 2011
...US classics scholar steeped in Latin and Greek has taken one of the oldest works in western literature, Homer’s Iliad , and produced a sizzling, homoerotic first novel that reads like a thriller. My knowledge of Greek mythology is scant. ...
Guardian.co.uk, October 1, 2011
...The lives of 200 soldiers are brilliantly remembered in this majestic poetic reworking of Homer's Iliad Alice Oswald made her name with a book-length poem: Dart . A tribute to the Devon river made up of her own and other people's voices, it ...
Guardian.co.uk, December 18, 2009
... Tom Holland says that it takes a special kind of foolhardiness to go head to head with Homer If Classic FM published fiction, then Ransom is the kind of novel that would surely result. David Malouf's reworking of the climactic episode of ...
Guardian.co.uk, December 11, 2009
...the list? Even the most ardent lovers of ancient literature tend to steer clear of one section of Homer's Iliad. This is the poem's second book, which is euphemistically known as 'The Catalogue of Ships' – but is in fact dominated by a ...
Sydney Morning Herald, October 4, 2009
...Malouf, in an ABC radio interview, spoke about his latest novel Ransom, which revisits the ancient Greek poet Homer's Iliad and the war that led to the fall of Troy, an ancient city in what is now north-western Turkey. He commented that the ...
Know Your Mobile, September 29, 2009
...of free books on offer, many are classics that you probably read at school. We opted for The Iliad by Homer. The book took a matter of seconds to download and we headed back to the homescreen and selected our recently downloaded novel from ...
Lakeland Ledger, September 1, 2009
...Last week, it became evident to us librarians that one class has taken up studying the classics, notably Homer's "The Iliad." The gods, so the story goes, stir up the Greeks and Trojans, exhaust both sides for a generation, and it ends with ...
Guardian Unlimited, August 14, 2009
...Herodotus if he ran Swan Hellenic cruises). A modern audience is also targeted with her unstinting enthusiasm for Homer ('I don't think I'm physically capable of reading Iliad book six without weeping'). Yet Higgins is clear that ancient ...
Jacksonville Daily News, August 3, 2009
...offering by local author Shana Norris. The writer, whose genre is young adult fiction, has taken the ?The Iliad,? written by the Greek poet Homer, and put her own eastern North Carolina translation on it. ?It?s a modern-day retelling of ...
Individual.com, August 2, 2009
...(McClatchy-Tribune Informa) "The Iliad," written by the Greek poet Homer, has been translated into a number of settings over the years, but now the epic story of Sparta's 10-year siege of Troy ...
The Australian, June 30, 2009
...are understood not as anomalies but as manifestations of the same fundamental human impulse that led Agamemnon in Homer's The Iliad to tell Menelaus, 'We are not going to leave a single one of them alive ... down to the babies in their ...
Times Higher Education Supplement, June 4, 2009
...February 2009 Reviewer : Barbara Graziosi is senior lecturer in classics, Durham University. She is the author of Inventing Homer (2002), and is currently writing a commentary on The Iliad, Book 6, with Johannes Haubold ...
Miami Herald, May 16, 2009
...incorporated The Lightning Thief into their curriculum. High school teachers are using the books as ''a gateway into Homer's Iliad and Odyssey,'' he says. 'I've had letters from librarians who said, 'My 200s [the Dewey Decimal classification ...
Spiegel Online, May 15, 2009
...visual propaganda isn't often found on ancient Greek monuments. In ancient Greece the blood flowed elsewhere. In Homer's Iliad alone, 318 bloody duels are described with anatomical precision: teeth fly around, eyes leak and brain matter ...
Cumberland Courier, April 15, 2009
...Ransom is his first new novel in 10 years and is described as an enthralling, visceral revisiting of Homer?s Greek classic The Iliad. Malouf will be at The Epping Club on Thursday, April 23, from 6.30pm. Bookings are essential and can be ...
The Australian, April 14, 2009
...middle, always doing the right thing.' She cannot recall the exact afternoon she took up a copy of Homer's Iliad and began to read to the fidgety class of nine-year-olds at West End Primary. It was a way to fill in the final hour of a wet ...
The Australian, April 14, 2009
...The benefits of good teaching last a lifetime DAVID Malouf's new novel Ransom, inspired by Homer's epic poem The Iliad, is a testament to the power of narrative. It is also a testament to the power of good teaching. On the ABC's Lateline on ...
The Australian, April 14, 2009
...DAVID Malouf's new novel Ransom, inspired by Homer's epic poem The Iliad, is a testament to the power of narrative. It is also a testament to the power of good teaching. On the ABC's Lateline on ...
More from
-
The Foreign CorrespondentAn underground newspaper reporter becomes the target of a European spy web in the looming shadow of WWII Paris in this heart-pounding thriller from...Read More -
Sin KillerIn Larry McMurtry's Sin Killer, the first novel of a major four-volume work, it is 1830, and the Berrybender family, rich aristocratic English, and...Read More
-
By Sorrow's RiverThis third novel of the Berrybender epic continues the party's perilous trail across the endless Great Plains of the West towards Santa Fe.Read More
-
Folly and GloryThe final novel of the Berrybender epic reaches its climax at the Alamo, in one of the most dramatic moments in the history of the American West.Read More
-
The Wandering HillThe masterful continuation of the Berrybender family's journey into the West of the 1830s, the second volume in Larry McMurtry's four-part epic.Read More
-
The Glass Books of The Dream EatersIt began with a simple note: a letter of rejection delivered to Miss Temple on her maid's silver tray. But for Miss Temple, her fiancé's cruel...Read More
-
The BeatlesEven before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault...Read More
-
The IntelligencerLeslie Silbert’s novel takes you from Elizabethan England to the present day in a turbo-charged race to uncover one of history’s greatest...Read More
-
Elmore Leonard, The Tonto Woman and "Hurrah For Capt. Early"Elmore Leonard's western fiction burns with passion, treachery, and heroism. In these two stories taken from his hard-bitten collection, The Tonto...Read More
Displaying 1 of
