Prendergast, John
Description
The one and only Iliad of Homer, the primordial Western masterpiece of epic adventure about a pivotal battle during the Trojan War is a legacy of genu
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ine legend. The reader enters an earlier world, where heroes and heroines perform glorious deeds that have lived forever after in our collective memory, and where gods are indivisible from natural things. With its emphasis on dialogue, its well-structured plot, sophisticated themes and cast of complex characters driven to act on events by competing psychological forces, the Iliad, the oldest work of literature from Western civilization, remains entirely satisfying to the tastes and tenets of the modern day.
The human story in the Iliad is elevated beyond the ordinary by an interwoven divine story about the authentic, functioning pantheon of the time, a story driven by the character of the various gods, which portrays their individual scope and function through their behavior and how they interact with one another. Homer uses this divine story to set the world of his heroes within a moral universe, to have divine powers available as storytelling tools, to portray the impulsive workings of human motivation and to account for how the powerful yet fragile influence of morale ebbs and flows unexpectedly between fearless aggression and sudden panic as it sweeps through the armies of men.
This translation goes beyond all previous versions in quality and fidelity. What Homer actually said is presented in the way he actually said it. The meaning, form and order of words are preserved within limits allowed by English syntax. Such fidelity delivers a story true to the original with wording more fluent, lucid and genuine and in no way more difficult: The aim is to be a pleasure to read, while affording a faithful telling of the tale and a truthful view of Homer’s pantheon.
See its website at https://iliad-translations.com to learn more about how this new, breakthrough translation is set apart from others,
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