/lit/ - Literature

>>19726304
Having listened to the Lattimore translation on audiobook (highly recommend) I much prefer Lattimore. I experienced The Iliad not as "literature" but as an epic poem: basically, an entire season of anime in spoken word form from three thousand years ago. It's really good. When you compare short selections yeah it looks "lifeless" but when you compare large selections Lattimore doesn't wear you out with over-wrought descriptions and "sakuga" style fancy rhyming.

>and the bronze weariless shore all the way through
If I was storyboarding the anime adaptation, this would be a really cool part, with the spear static on the screen as the flesh and bone is shorn and splatters around until the spear comes to rest.

Pope's version may be the better English poetry, but it's not Homer at that point. Fagles splits up the sentence too much so now it reads like a description of key frames without any animation between them, or panels in a comic book, or that thing when you use a strobe light in a dark room. It loses the flow if that makes sense, even if it accurately conveys (maybe, I don't know greek) what Homer wrote.

And on that note, none of what I posted has any objective merit other than the parenthetical. Anyone who really wants to enjoy Homer should learn Ancient Greek. It's really that simple. Anything less is a half-measure.