It’s also worth looking more closely at his line, “gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds”. Here Lattimore chooses to avoid any sense that Achilles shares divine qualities and simply render it as “brilliant”. These are not wrong as such, but I find them less elevated. It’s difficult to know what to make of it therefore and so many translators prefer more easily-comprehensible words like “glorious”, “noble”, or even “Prince”. The word in Greek most literally means “godlike”, which is an odd descriptor as its often used for distinctly mortal characters. I would note his choice for Achilles’ epithet. He also adds “House of” before Hades, and “bodies” in line 4, neither of which is in the Greek. These are corpses being left for dogs and birds, not a fastidious dinner party. What on earth was he thinking? Not only is the word 'delicate' nowhere in the Greek, its also tonally jarring. We also see some oddly dissonant word choices such as the “delicate feasting of dogs”. Here we have the awkward, “put pains thousand-fold upon” and “that time when first there stood in division of conflict” both of which doesn’t quite work in English and I found them to be jarring, and a disruption to the flow of the English. Since that time when first there stood in division of conflictĪtreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. Of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

Of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting Hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son AchillesĪnd its devastation, which put pains thousand-fold upon the Achaians, This is evident in the first few lines where he writes, His line structure is stilted and strained, with some odd syntax and aesthetically jarring word choices. However I found his fidelity to be inconsistent and moreover I found him to be a poor writer. For a standard classroom study of Homer he is often the teacher’s favourite. But it's perhaps the closest approximation possible. Its not a true dactylic hexameter since that's all but impossible in English. His translation was ground-breaking in its day for not only being faithful to the language but for daring to match the metrical rhythm of Homer as well. The first and most frequently recommended translation is Lattimore (1951). I focused on recent versions because I find older translations to be distracting with their more archaic English style. I've been wondering which translation of the Iliad to buy and so spent some time looking into all of the main translations from the last 70 years, focusing on a direct comparison of the first 43 lines as an example of their work.

Iliad in english