Homer in four translations
In The New York Times, Emily Wilson, who has now translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey, writes about four translations of a speech by Hector from Iliad 6.
Digging Troy
I can think of one other heist film in which a criminal mastermind invokes Troy in his scheming.
Simone Weil on force
Force can take the form of a knee on a neck or a vehicle aimed at human beings in uniform. It can be directed against a person or a community. It can be the work of a lone wolf, as we now say, or a larger group, or the state. One need not be a believer to be thinking these thoughts on Good Friday.
Victor Davis Hanson on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump
Comparing Trump to Ajax or Achilles: bonkers. If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”
#TrumpBookReport
“And btw- I was AGAINST the war in Troy.“
If Homer’s poems were television channels
Like it says.
Carlo Rotella on Muhammad Ali, Homer, and translation
The starting point for Rotella’s thinking is a boxer’s boast in Iliad 23: “I am the greatest.”
Eponym of the day: hector
“Hector is a brave and dutiful character, but unfortunately his name is now sullied in the language.”
Achilles in Afghanistan
“The subtitle of Achilles in Vietnam — Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character — makes a point that some readers want to resist: that good character provides no sure defense against the experiences of war, that good character can be destroyed by circumstance.”
The Interrupters
“The fatalism of so many of the film’s young people, captured in the words ‘I am next,’ written on a wall of the dead, seems straight from the Iliad: ‘I know I will not make old bones,’ as Achilles says. Yet the Violence Interrupters themselves have learned to live beyond criminality and violence, and we see them, armed only with words, convincing others to do the same.”
Edward Luttwak on Homer Inc
Edward Luttwak on the Iliad in Arabic, Chinese, and English.
Christopher Logue (1926–2011)
“Logue’s Homer seems to me the last great work of literary modernism, collapsing past(s) and present with grim wit and startling originality.”
An Iliad
A one-man adaptation, in Chicago.
Translations, mules, briars
Guy Davenport on Richmond Lattimore
Mediterranean fatalism
"What are you gonna do?" A rhetorical question from The Sopranos
"Uber-responsible" types
Hector and Aeneas and Rick from Casablanca
Homer's world
Homeric geography in what looks like a snowglobe
Hillary Clinton and kleos
I'm teaching the Iliad and the Odyssey in a four-week summer session for undergraduates: two hours of teaching in the morning, five days a...
Aristeia
The campus rampage and the Iliad
Jonathan Shay wins MacArthur grant
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has been awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Dr. Shay works with Vietnam veterans who suffer from post...
Petraeus
A seer?
Homer then and now
The undoing of character, in the Iliad and Iraq
Lombardo's Homer wins
audiobook prize
Homer's Rumsfeld
Agamemnon and Rumsfeld
Breakfast with Pandora
Iliad passage in two translations
Stanley Lombardo reads Homer
Link to a review of the Iliad and Odyssey on CDs
Homer rules
Homer in top 10 library books