First Great War Book

THE ILIAD OF HOMER, A LINE FOR LINE TRANSLATION IN DACTYLIC HEXAMETERS--William Benjamin Smith and Walter Miller--Macmillan ($3.75).

Seven or eight centuries before Christ, song and story being at that time synonymous, the two principal epics of the ancient world were put together and attributed to a poet called Homer. Both poems related adventures incidental to a ten years' war that had been fought by the chivalry from the Peloponnesus against the chivalry of Asia Minor at a walled town, Troy, near the entrance to the Dardanelles. The Odyssey told of the wanderings of the Greek soldier, Odysseus, on his way home to the island of Ithaca (now Corfu); the Iliad told of the wrath of Achilles and what came of it at the siege of Troy. The Iliad is the first great war book, and probably the greatest pre-Christian poem.

The ardor, humor and radiance of life, the bloody darkness of death in war are constantly and insistently mingled in the Iliad. It is more than a war story of the Greeks, fighting on their beaches before Troy. Artful in detail, it is also awesome in implication. As the French scholar Rachel Bespaloff recently observed, the Iliad presents a civilized soldier, Hector, who has everything precious to defend, in contrast and finally in combat with the childlike yet superhuman fury which was Achilles.

The Wrath of Achilles. The Iliad has never been translated into English as successfully as the Odyssey, of which George Chapman in the 16th and William Morris in the 19th Century made accomplished versions. The Iliad has less narrative charm and less of the lyric graces that are easy for English poetry. Translators' English has seldom touched its humor and power.

The newest translation of the Iliad stands among the best ever made. It is the only one ever carried through in an English equivalent of the Greek epic meter.

Thereby it suggests the rhythmic quality of Homer better than Chapman, better than Pope, and a great deal better than the King James prose of the Lang, Leaf & Myers translation. First lines:

Sing, O Goddess, the wrath of Achilles, scion of Peleus, Ruinous wrath, that afflicted with numberless woes the Achaeans. . . .

This meter, rarely used in English, the translators have maintained through 15,693 lines, and have made it clear, resonant and readable. Poets only by avocation, they have not matched the ease and music of the Greek; but great poets have failed at this. They have used old-fashioned forms of language, considering such forms necessary to suggest Homer's ancientness, and in order to get extra syllables in the long lines. Their few attempts at modernity are incongruous:

Scowlfully looking, the valiant prince, Diomedes, addressed him: "Buddy, sit thee in silence; obey my word as I bid thee. . . ."

Sometimes their verse moves with simplicity toward an English approximation of the swiftly flowing Homeric style:

So now all day long till the sun had gone to its setting They had lamented for Hector with tears in front of the gateways, Had not the old man spoken from out of his car to the people. . . .

In lines like these the new translation attains something like the directness which the Iliad had for those who first listened to it.

The Translators. William Benjamin Smith, professor emeritus at Tulane, left the manuscript of this translation unrevised when he died ten years ago at 84. His friend, Walter Miller, now 80 and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, revised and finished it. An odor of honorable mustiness, of philology and old German texts, clung round the generation of U.S. classicists to which these men, with their degrees from Goettingen and Leipzig, belonged. Good translation, or even a reasonable fluency at writing English, were not among its ambitions. But Smith and Miller achieved a good translation. Their Iliad is published without scholarly notes or impediments and with Flaxman's beautiful 18th-Century drawings as illustrations (see cut).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.