/lit/ - Literature

Iliad becomes my favorite book the more I reread specific passages, all it once it can be derivative but there are some incredible moments

Take your pick
Fagles:
On this Vulcan kindled a fierce fire, which broke out
first upon the plain and burned the many dead whom
Achilles had killed and whose bodies were lying about in
great numbers; by this means the plain was dried and the
flood stayed. As the north wind, blowing on an orchard
that has been sodden with autumn rain, soon dries it, and
the heart of the owner is glad—even so the whole plain
was dried and the dead bodies were consumed. Then he
turned tongues of fire on to the river. He burned the elms
the willows and the tamarisks, the lotus also, with the
rushes and marshy herbage that grew abundantly by the
banks of the river. The eels and fishes that go darting
about everywhere in the water, these, too, were sorely
harassed by the flames that cunning Vulcan had kindled,

Pope:
The power ignipotent her word obeys:
Wide o'er the plain he pours the boundless blaze;
At once consumes the dead, and dries the soil
And the shrunk waters in their channel boil.
As when autumnal Boreas sweeps the sky,
And instant blows the water'd gardens dry:
So look'd the field, so whiten'd was the ground,
While Vulcan breathed the fiery blast around.
Swift on the sedgy reeds the ruin preys;
Along the margin winds the running blaze:
The trees in flaming rows to ashes turn,
The flowering lotos and the tamarisk burn,
Broad elm, and cypress rising in a spire;
The watery willows hiss before the fire.
Now glow the waves, the fishes pant for breath,
The eels lie twisting in the pangs of death:
Now flounce aloft, now dive the scaly fry,
Or, gasping, turn their bellies to the sky.

Chapman:
Mulciber prepar’d a mighty fire,
325 First in the field us’d; burning up the bodies that the ire
Of great Achilles reft of souls; the quite-drown’d field it dried,
And shrunk the flood up. And as fields, that have been long time cloy’d
With catching weather, when their corn lies on the gavel heap,
Are with a constant north wind dried, with which for comfort leap
330 Their hearts that sow’d them; so this field was dried, the bodies burn’d,
And ev’n the flood into a fire as bright as day was turn’d.
Elms, willows, tam’risks, were inflam’d; the lote trees, sea-grass reeds,
And rushes, with the galingale roots, of which abundance breeds
About the sweet flood, all were fir’d; the gliding fishes flew
335 Upwards in flames; the grov’lling eels crept upright; all which slew