Cheap Iliad (Book) (Homer, Stanley Lombardo) Price

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Customer Reviews of Iliad

Lively and Vivid
Stanley Lombardo has produced a lively and readable translation of Homer's work that's not afraid to use modern idiom and military jargon. I've read several translations (but not the original Greek unfortunately) and I'd recommend this to anybody interested in it whether it's his first experience of Homer or not. Setting the extended similes in italics and in their own stanzas adds to the vividness of the translation. I've liked Lombardo's Iliad enough to buy several of his other translations including the Odyssey. The hardback is full cloth and has a sewn binding; I only wish it came with a dust jacket.

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Homer for the modern student
This isn't the same Iliad you read in high school! Lombardo's translation literally comes alive for the reader. By updating the archaic language Lombardo allows the reader easier access to Homer's ideals and a better understanding of the events leading up to and after Achilles period of Rage.

The books biggest strength is the language used to describe battle. The horrors of war become much more real with these graphic descriptions of blood and gore.

This may not be the best translation for the serious scholar, as much of the poetry from the oringial is lost, but for students this translation is a life saver.

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Iliad - sans the whimsy and pompisity.
I have a copy of this book in paperback. I'm going to give it away to a friend of mine who can't read Greek. Me - I want to buy a hardbound copy as soon as I can, so that it will last forever. This is the translation of the Iliad that I would want to pass on to the children I'll someday have.

The Iliad is an essential book to understanding some of the many facets of strugle and passion in human society. It is too bad that the book is often thought of as something strictly read by stuffy intelectuals and boring academics. That literature has become something removed from the everyman is lamentable. But to often it is seen as boring old books for boring bookish people. Reading the Homer is a red flag for this stereotype.

This distortion of Homer is due to two key problems: Whimsy and pompisity.

I say whimsy because, very often, a person goes into Classics, and eventualy becomes a translator of Attic Greek or Latin because of a certain nostalgia for the warm hazzy feeling of a golden age long past, because of a desire to plunge into the musty depths of the well of history. Thier writting often reflects this historical romanticism, by adopting archaic or stiffled manners of English speech. If you are the type of person who thrills to long dry sentences filled with verbs that end in -th, then you may well enjoy other more formal translations, but you should be aware that Homer doesn't necessarily represent that. Homer was modern, at least to his original audience. The works of Homer were not nostaligic and filled with purple prose.

To tell the truth, the Greek lanugage is anathema to that sort of writting. This, though creates the second problem, pompisity. The insitution of Classical Studies has been so deeply entrenched in Academia, that often translation of Greek classics is seen as a medium to convey a person's technical mastery of Greek, instead of presenting something readable.

In Greek, there are several hundered different verb froms, as well as declinsons, meaning that the nouns are modified to reflect different uses in much the same way we conjugate verbs, so a full sentance of English could be required to explain the meaning of a single Greek word. Thus, Greek sounds brisque and fresh, even in ancient texts, but translators who attempt to show their mastery of Greek tend to ramble on, translating so many intricate nuances of the words that we lose track of the narrative in the midst of all these tiny details.

Lattimore, for instance, has produced a supurbly technical tranlsation of the Iliad, and I would genuinely recomend it to any student of Greek, since it can provide a very litteral equivelent of the Greek in the English language, and then as a student of Greek, one can then enjoy the spirit and vitality that Lattimore utterly lacks by reading the Greek original. (Actualy, if one is willing to spend the time to do all this, it will be far more rewarding than merely reading even the best translation)

On the other hand, unless you are an ardent classicist, reading Homeric Greek is an arduous process, and if I am looking to just enjoy a book for it's monumental themes and vivid human landscape, then this book provides that without years of college study. This book sounds much more like the Iliad that one reads in Greek, in that the Greek text seems very straight forward and visceral.

The perfect example of this is that Lombardo consistently describes Agamemnon as a 'Warlord.' To me, this makes sense and does so without rambling on to create an artificial antiquity or a pompus academic sound.

If you are looking to just read the Iliad for fun, or because you've no doubt heard of it and want to see what all the fuss is about, this is the perfect book.