Books

Some books you may enjoy reading.

Homer, Iliad.

Aristotle gave Alexander the Great, his disciple, a copy of the Iliad which he always kept with him and read frequently. For those who can read Greek that would be an interesting option. For the rest of us, there's those diverse perspectives of a shifting fact, the translations; an international library of works in prose and verse.

‘I do not know of a more controversial issue than the Homeric adjectives. "The divine Patroclus," "the nourishing earth," "the wine-dark sea" "the uncloven-hoofed horses," "the moist ways," "the dark blood," "the dear knees" stir our hearts at unexpected moments. At one point, there is mention of "rich noblemen who drink of the black waters of the Aesopos "; at another, a tragic king who, "unhappy in lovely Thebes, governed the Cadmeans by the gods' fatal decree.’ ‘Alexander Pope, whose lavish translation we shall scrutinize later, believed that all these immutable epithets were liturgical in character. Remy de Gourmont, in his long essay on style, writes that though they must have been enchanting at one time, they are no longer so. I, however, suspect that these standard epithets were what prepositions still are today: modest and obligatory sounds used to join certain words and on which no originality can be exercised. We know, for example, that the correct way to get somewhere is on foot and not with foot.’ ¹

The present state of Homer's works resembles a complex equation that delineates precise relations among unknown quantities. Perhaps Butler's translation is not a bad one. The verse translation whose cover you can see at the left, by Robert Fagles has the probably dubious honour of being the most important recent one. I post it because it seems to be quite popular at the moment.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.