Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has
everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its
enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods
come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the
poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her
account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the
brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little
more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably -
and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance. 'The Iliad
is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in
the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and
lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own
coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an
antiphonal account of man in his world... compatible with the
spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting
itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written
language, was still alive and kicking.' - Alice Oswald
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