Reviews
" Mitchell's Iliad is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before.... His strong five-beat rhythm is arguably the best yet in English. " - The New Yorker, "Stephen Mitchell has done a marvelous thing here: he has given fresh energy and poetic force to a work that perennially repays our attention. Without the Iliad the West would be a vastly poorer place; Homer's achievement speaks to every successive generation with its unflinching understanding of the essential tragic nature of life. Mitchell's translation is a grand accomplishment." -- Jon Meacham, author of American Lion, "Mitchell's translation is a brilliant accomplishment. It captures the fierce energy, rhythms, and powerful narrative of Homer's Greek in vivid and compelling English." -Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels, "Mitchell's wonderful new version of the Iliad is a worthy addition to his list of distinguished renditions of the classics." -Peter Matthiessen, "The verse is well-forged and clean-limbed, and achieves a powerful simplicity. Mitchell has re-energised the Iliad for a new generation." - The Sunday Telegraph (London), "Mitchell's five-beat line is a startlingly strong alternative to other translators' attempts to capture the inimitably mellifluous flow of Homer's Greek. Mitchell fits a meter to the poem, but also the poem to the meter, paring away words that could not work in English, aiming always to preserve the uncanny aesthetic distance and moral neutrality of the original at its full, thrilling, and horrifying depth. Read three pages, any three pages, and you'll realize that, no, you are not yet done with Homer." -Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography, "A sturdy, muscular, and nuanced translation that will surely bring many new readers to this great work."-John Banville, author of The Sea, "A strange, almost forgotten feeling overtook me as I first dipped into this new translation. I felt compelled to recite aloud! The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music. It's overtly virile stuff, propelled from the time when music, language, information, and politics were not yet distinguished." -Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget, "Stephen Mitchell's magnificent new translation of the Iliad reminds us that there is always a new and different way to read and interpret the great classics, and that they need to be reinvigorated from generation to generation, just as we need to be reminded that they are, however venerated, above all stories : exciting, full of life and great characters, in short great entertainment, not just great monuments of culture or the Western canon. Mr. Mitchell has accomplished this difficult feat wonderfully well, and produced a book which is a joy to read and an Iliad for this generation." -Michael Korda, D. Litt., author of Hero, Ike, and Ulysses S. Grant
