Yet the contrast may be too extreme. Virgil the writer was certainly no stranger to recitation. Homer the performer, as the Introduction speculates, may have known a rudimentary form of writing. And writing may have lent his work some qualities we associate with texts in general—idiosyncrasies at times, and pungency and wit—and with the Iliad in particular, its architectonics, its magnificent scale, and the figure of Achilles. But even if Homer never used an alphabet himself, he now seems less the creature of an oral tradition whom Milman Parry discovered, and more and more its master, as envisioned by Parry’s son, Adam. Homer the brilliant improviser deployed its stock, inherited features with all the individual talent he could muster. Never more so, in fact, than in his use of the fixed and formulaic, frequently repeated phrase. Not only is Homer often less formulaic, but the formulas themselves are often more resonant, more apt and telling in their contexts than the hard Parryites had argued for at first. So the original form of Homer’s work, while a far cry from a work of literature as we know it now, is not exactly a song either, pure and simple. It may be more the record of a song, building over the poet’s lifetime perhaps, or what Marianne Moore would call “a simulacrum of spontaneity.”

Obviously at a far remove from Homer, in this translation I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no man’s land, if I can help it) between the features of his performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-for-line translation, my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer’s language as to cramp and distort my own—though I want to convey as much of what he says as possible—nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drive—though I want my work to be literate, with any luck. For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.

Of course it is a risky business, stating what one has tried to do or, worse, the principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist the writer later). But a word or two of explanation seems in order, and the first refers to the more fixed and formulaic parts of Homer. I have treated them in a flexible, discretionary way, not incompatible with Homer’s way, I think—especially when his formulas are functional as well as fixed—while also answering to the ways we read today. It is a matter of “riding easy in the harness,” as Robert Frost once said of democracy, and my practice ranges from the pliant to the strict. With one of the most frequently repeated phrases, for example—the line that introduces individual speeches—I have been the freest, trying to anticipate the speaker’s nuance of the moment yet retaining, at least, the ritual of introductory words for every speech. When Homer introduces a speech of “winged words,” however, I rarely if ever omit that well-known phrase, though I like the flight of the words to vary, with a quick burst at times and a longer drift at others, according to what a character has to say. And so with Hector’s flashing helmet, in the epithet that clings to Hector’s name: I like to ally its gleaming with his actions, now nodding his head in conversation, now rushing headlong into the front lines. But a flashing helmet it is, again and again, and not only to make his own career appear more meteoric and abruptly snuffed out but also to support a chain of tragic ironies throughout the poem. For the flashing helmet—Hector’s own at first—is soon replaced by the one he strips from Patroclus when he kills him: the helmet of Achilles. So as prophecy would have it, when Achilles destroys Hector in revenge he must destroy himself as well, his flashing mirror-image embodied in his victim, and the helmet he will wear, fire-new and forged by Hephaestus, flashes like the helmet of Ares when Achilles closes for the kill (Book 20.45, 22.158). ¹ The more the epithet recurs, in short, the more its power can recoil. And the inevitability of its recoil for Hector is further stressed by a repeated passage in the Greek repeated verbatim in the English version. The words that describe the death of Patroclus are exactly those that describe the death of Hector six books later (16.1001-5, 22.425-29): the first death, both in the mind of Achilles the avenger and in the style of his maker, will have served as warrant for the second. All in all, then, I have tried for repetition with a difference when variation seems useful, repetition with a grim insistence when the scales of Zeus, the Homeric moral balance, is at issue.

Turning briefly to Homer’s metrics: though my way is more remote, it is also meant to occupy a flexible middle ground, here between his hexameter line—his “ear, ear for the sea-surge,” as Pound describes it—and a tighter, native English line. If, as the Introduction claims, the strongest weapon in Homer’s poetic arsenal is variety within a metrical norm, the translation opts for a freer give-and-take between the two, and one that offers a good deal more variety than uniformity. Working from a loose five- or six-beat line but inclining more to six, I expand at times to seven beats—to imply the big reach of a simile or some vehement outburst in discourse or the pitched fury of combat on the field—or contract at times to three, to give a point in speech or action sharper stress. Such interplay between variety and norm results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation, between trying to encapsulate the meaning of the Greek on the one hand and trying to find a cadence for one’s English on the other, yet joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. I hope it results, at any rate, not only in giving my own language a slight stretching it may need and sometimes gets these days, but also in lending Homer the sort of range in rhythm, pace and tone that may make an Iliad engaging to a modern reader. It may be a way as well, again at a far remove, of trying to suggest the tension in Homer’s metrics, his blend of mass and movement both—so much ongkos yet so much grace and speed.

In aiming for these and other objectives in a version of the Iliad, I have had many kinds of help. The greatest has come from my collaborator, Bernard Knox, whom I would rather call a comrade. Not only has he written the Introduction and Notes to the translation but he has commented on my drafts for several years. And when I leaf through those pages now, his commentary seems to ring my typescript so completely that I might be looking at a worse-for-wear, dog-eared manuscript encircled by a scholiast’s remarks. Or is it something of a battle-map as well? The vulnerable lines at the center are shored up by a combat-tested ally, whose squads reinforce the weakest sectors and who deciphers Homer’s order of the day and tells a raw recruit what war—the movements of armies and the sentiments of soldiers—is all about. And more, what tragedy—in this, the first tragedy—realty means. In Book 9 of the Iliad old Phoenix calls for a man of words and a man of action too. My good fortune has been to work with such a man.

Several modern scholars and critics, cited in the bibliography, have helped as well, and so have several modern translators of the Iliad, in whole or part. Each has introduced me to a new aspect of the poem, another potential for the present. “For if it is true,” as Maynard Mack proposes, “that what we translate from a given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true that we see in it what we have the power to translate.” So my debts to others are considerable, and here I say my thanks to William Arrowsmith, Robert Graves, Martin Hammond, Richmond Lattimore, Christopher Logue, Paul Mazon, Ennis Reese and E. V. Rieu. A few I have known in person, most I have never met. Yet I suspect we all have known each other in a way, having trekked across the same territory, perhaps having all encountered the nightmare that haunted Pope—“that he was engaged in a long journey,” as Joseph Spence reports, “puzzled which way to take, and full of fears” that it would never end.. And if you reach the end, the fears may start in earnest. In any event, the translator I have known the best is the one to whom I owe the most, Robert Fitzgerald, both for the power of his example and because, at a sensitive moment, he heartened me to “fit on your greaves and swordbelt and face the moil or the melee.”

Many other friends have come to my side, some by reading, some by listening to me read the work-in-progress, and responding in close detail with criticism or encouragement or a healthy combination of the two. Most encouraging of all, none has asked me, “Why another Iliad?” For each understood, it seems, that if Homer was a performer, then his translator might aim to be one as well, and that no two performances of the same work—surely not of a musical composition, so probably not of a work of language either—will ever be the same. The timbre and tempo of each will be distinct, let alone its deeper resonance, build and thrust. My thanks, then, to Marilyn Arthur, Paul Auster, Sandra Bermann, Charles Beye, Claudia Brodsky, Beth Brombert, Victor Brombert, Clarence Brown, Rebecca Bushnell, Robert Connor, Robert F. Go heen, Rachel Hadas, Robert Hollander, Samuel Hynes, Edmund Keeley, Nita Krevans, Janet Lembke, David Lenson, William Levitan, Herbert Marks, J. D. McClatchy, Earl Miner, William Mullen, Georgia Nugent, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanna Prins, Michael Putnam, David Quint, Richard Reid, James Richardson, Charles Segal, Steven Shankman, Michael Simpson, Raymond Smith, Paolo Vivante and Theodore Weiss.

And several classicists have lent a steady hand: William A. Childs, George Dunkel, Elaine Fantham, Andrew Ford, John Keaney, Richard Martin, Glenn Most and Froma Zeitlin. The published commentaries of other scholars, cited among the further readings, and even some unpublished have helped us on our way, thanks to the kindness and alacrity of their authors. Our book was in its later stages when M. M. Willcock sent the galleys of his second volume, Books 13 through 24. And the remaining parts of the commentary-in-progress under G. S. Kirk’s editorship—his own work on Books 5 through 8, J. B. Hainsworth’s on 9 through 12, Richard Janko’s on 13 through 16, Mark W. Edwards’ on 17 through 20 and Nicholas Richardson’s on 21 through 24—luckily arrived while each was still in proof or typescript. The first impulse for the translation, however, came from the late W. B. Stanford, who, one afternoon in County Wicklow many years ago, sketched out my route for returning to the source.

The roofs of some great houses have extended welcome shelter to the translator and his work. Theodore and Mary Cross have turned Nantucket into Ithaca West with their Homeric hospitality. The Rockefeller Foundation provided a resident fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio during May 1985. Princeton University gave me leaves of absence in the spring semesters of 1982, 1985 and 1989, and, more important, the chance to study Homer with many students who have been an education to me. The Program in Hellenic Studies at the university twice appointed me to a Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship, first to begin the translation on Greek terrain, then to complete it there years later. The secretariat of Comparative Literature, from its leader, Carol Szymanski, to Gary Fuchs, to the Quietwriter and lately, the LaserJet, have been invaluable in helping to prepare the final manuscript. And close to the zero hour Deborah Fryer shared the task of placing the Greek line numbers throughout the text.

To produce the book at hand, my editor, Kathryn Court, assisted by Caroline White, has treated the writing and the writer, too, with energy, affection and address. Beena Kamlani’s efforts to copy-edit a fairly large and unruly manuscript have been heroic. Ann Gold, with all her artistry joined by Amy Hill’s, has designed a volume to companion the two that came before it. Anita Karl and James Kemp have drawn up the fine maps to guide the reader through the wilds of Homer’s world. Mary Sunden has labored long and hard with Joe Marcey and Peter Smith to find this version of the Iliad some readers. And the good people at Viking Penguin—Michael Jacobs, Christine Pevitt, Leigh Butler, Paul Slovak, Marcia Burch, Faye Darnall, Maureen Donnelly, Daniel Lundy, Cynthia Achar, Roni Axelrod—all have been loyal allies in New York. In London Peter Carson and Paul Keegan have been generous hosts to the latest Homer in the house. Before he left the publisher my former editor, Alan Williams, who saw me through the troubles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, gave my plans a happy push toward Troy. Prior to the present volume, Ben Sonnenberg graciously opened the pages of Grand Street and ran three books of the translation. Reginald Gibbons gave another book a timely berth in TriQuarterly. And through it all, without the unfailing stay and strategies of my friend and agent Georges Borchardt, assisted by Cindy Klein, this Iliad might never have been published.

“The Classics, it is the Classics!” Blake exclaimed, with pointed reference to Homer, “that Desolate Europe with Wars!” The violence of the Iliad can be overpowering, as it was for Simone Weil and many others, yet, as the Introduction observes, Homer makes that violence coexist with humanity and compassion, as close together as the city at war and the city at peace emblazoned on Achilles’ shield. If the translation offers any sense of this, it is because the translator has often consulted the familiar spirits of Adam and Anne Parry, and always relied on the Muses summoned in the dedication, chief among them Lynne.

This printing contains minor revisions of the text.