Robert Fagles
Homer Now
The Iliad of HomerTranslated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 599 pp., $15) Homer: The IliadTranslated by Anthony Verity (Oxford University Press, 470 pp., $29.95) Homer: The IliadTranslated by Stephen Mitchell (Free Press, 466 pp., $35) Memorial: An Excavation of the IliadBy Alice Oswald (Faber & Faber, 84 pp., £12.99) The Song of AchillesBy Madeline Miller (Ecco, 378 pp., $25.99) English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary HistoryBy Stuart Gillespie (Wiley-Blackwell, 208 pp., $110.95) I. "Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son Achilleus/an
On Familiarity
What is present other than all those things--physical, objects, ideas, and sensibilities as well as their traces and fragments--that have somehow persisted into our own time? It is a characteristic, yet peculiar condition of modern life: Even though our world is made up of just these things from the past, more often than not, they have become unintelligible to us, if not invisible.
