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The Iliad: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Hardcover – October 11, 2011

by Homer (Author), Stephen Mitchell (Translator)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 137 ratings
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TOLSTOY CALLED THE ILIAD A miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment. Homer’s story is thrilling, and his Greek is perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever sung or written. But until now, even the best English translations haven’t been able to re-create the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace, and pulsing rhythm of the original.

In Stephen Mitchell’s Iliad, the epic story resounds again across 2,700 years, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam flows in every word. And we are there with them, amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful.

Mitchell’s Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West, whose edition of the original Greek identifies many passages that were added after the Iliad was first written down, to the detriment of the music and the story. Omitting these hundreds of interpolated lines restores a dramatically sharper, leaner text. In addition, Mitchell’s illuminating introduction opens the epic still further to our understanding and appreciation.

Now, thanks to Stephen Mitchell’s scholarship and the power of his language, the Iliad’s ancient story comes to moving, vivid new life.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    544 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Atria Books
  4. Publication date
    October 11, 2011
  5. Dimensions
    6.75 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9781439163375
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1439163375
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

“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 wonderful new version of the Iliad is a worthy addition to his list of distinguished renditions of the classics.” —Peter Matthiessen

“A sturdy, muscular, and nuanced translation that will surely bring many new readers to this great work.”—John Banville, author of The Sea

“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 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 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

About the Author

Stephen Mitchell is widely known for his ability to make old classics thrillingly new. His many books include the bestselling Tao Te Ching, the Iliad, Gilgamesh, The Gospel According to Jesus, The Book of Job, Bhagavad Gita, and The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. His website is StephenMitchellBooks.com.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1439163375
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atria Books; Reprint edition (October 11, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781439163375
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439163375
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 137 ratings

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Homer

Homer

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Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives.

He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey - are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.

In The Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. The Odyssey is the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. His adventures are many and memorable before he gets back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope.

We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. In fact 'Homer' may not be a real name but a kind of nickname meaning perhaps 'the hostage' or 'the blind one'. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
137 global ratings
Once Upon A Time, In A Stogy Language Arts Textbook...
5 Stars
Once Upon A Time, In A Stogy Language Arts Textbook...
I think we all remember reading a boring hard to understand translation of The Iliad in our reading classes back in school. This translation is not that. Its engaging and still poetic with out losing us with the annoyingly difficult language that only 3 percent of people understand lol. I for one remember having to reread each line over and over again and no one wants to read a book for fun like that. If this was the translation I read back in middle school, I might have been a fan of Homer much earlier.Overall, from a layman perspective, this was such a good read and I definitely plan on getting the Odyssey as well from the same translator.
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Top reviews from the United States

Orson Welles
5.0 out of 5 stars Mitchell retains Homer's oral formulae while modernizing the poem
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2014
Verified Purchase
Until I read Mitchell's excellent translation, I had never gotten as deep a sense of the cost of war: the exhaustion, the slaughtered bodies piling up, the fights over corpses, the grieving, the endless desire to avenge, defeat absorbing victories that barbaric, "butchery" to use Mitchell's word. Mitchell brings out the tension in the Iliad between the horrors of war and the desire for glory and honor that generate those horrors. The cover gives you a great sense of Mitchell's take on the poem: a soldier kneeling alone either because he is paying respect or because he is exhausted. By the way, Mitchell does include Book X. He just puts it in the back as an appendix with an illuminating and informative discussion of why scholars do not think it was part of Homer's poem. So you can read Book 10 if you wish.
English twentieth-century translations of Homer, translators tend to go in one of two directions: they heighten the archaic aspects of the Iliad, the formulae that look repetitive to a modern eye and ear. (Like whenever armor worn in combat is mentioned, it is always "bloodstained armor"); or translators abandon the oral roots of the poem and license themselves to get as poetic as they like, even adding lots of material ( The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)  goes the furthest in this regard of any I know. Mitchell has really achieved something with this translation: the formulae are noticeable, but not because they are redact. He has thoroughly integrated them into his very contemporary translation, that they call your attention them the same way other formal aspects of the poem call attention to themselves. Mitchell's introduction is the most thoughtful and well-written of any I've read (Fales, Lattimore or Lomabardo  The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation ; The Iliad of Homer , Iliad ). The paperback is also handsomely produced. The page size is much larger than most others and the ink is quite dark. I first read an adaptation of the poem as a child. I'm now 60. I'm really happy I Mitchell published this translation while I'm still able to read it.
24 people found this helpful
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Bruce Trinque
5.0 out of 5 stars Fast-paced, accessible translation of a great work of literature
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2012
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Mitchell has based his translation of Homer's Iliad principally upon the textual studies of M.L. West. Where West has identified passages that were later interpolations into Homer's original work, Mitchell has deleted those passages (plus a very few others) from the Greek text he translates. The deleted lines (including all of Book 10) at up to somewhat over 1300 lines of a standard total of nearly 16,000. The result is not, I emphasize, an abridgement of Homer, but rather an effort to present Homer's original vision, uncompromised by later poets.

Mitchell has aimed for a fast-reading poetic rendition that can be readily appreciated by a modern audience. He has used a "5 beat" line (5 stressed syllables per line) that usually results in a line of from 12 to 14 syllables, although occasionally less or more. This choice of relying upon a regular structure of stress while allowing the syllable-count to float provides a satisfactory poetic framework while preservng the translator's freedom to select words with particular power or grace. Mitchell quotes with favor Ezra Pound's advice to an earlier Iliad translator that nobody will give a damn about meter so long as the result has FLOW.

In pursuit of speed (and avoiding tedious repetion) Mitchell has, for the most part, eliminated the usually characteristic epithets so familiar from other translations of the Iliad. He does so on the basis that such epithets were primarily an artificial device to achieve the required meter. Not all Greek scholars would agree with this assessment, stressing that the epithets bring layers of meaning to the poem beyond metrical convention.

The quibble about the (non)use of Homeric epithets aside, Mitchell's translation indeed is fast-paced and highly readable, providing a modern reader with a relatively easy path to approaching one of the great literary masterpieces of all time. I have previously considered the translations by Stanley Lombardo and Michael Reck to be my standards for rapidly paced, easy-reading versions of the Iliad, but I certainly must add Mitchell's new work to that short list and, indeed, it may become the translation I would first recomment to newcomers to Homer.
8 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Not your High School edition (or experience) of The Iliad
Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2011
Verified Purchase
If you have bad memories of struggling though Homer in High School, you're in for a real treat. The language in this new translation is so beautiful and so readable you won't be able to put it down. As you might imagine, I wasn't searching for a new edition of the Iliad when I learned about this new edition. I learned of it on the radio. I heard a fascinating interview of Steven Mitchell by Michael Krasny on KQED radio that I highly recommend you listen to, too: [...]. This interview inspired me to order the book. I was somewhat sheepish about ordering it as I knew there was a reasonable chance it would go unread. But order it I did and I am not sorry. After reading the first dozen pages, I called my husband into the room to share in my excitement. I began to read the first few pages and he sat down and suggested I continue reading. We finally stopped at the end of the first book and agreed to read the full book aloud. When was the last time you wanted to hear any book read aloud? Buy this book. Be delighted. Enjoy (finally) one of the greatest stories of all time. And don't miss that interview!
26 people found this helpful
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Claire B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Translation.
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2021
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This is a very good translation. I have purchased also the translation by Pope, that is very different from it.
If you have few versions of Iliad translated by different people at different times, this alone add to the
wonderful charm of the Homer work. it is fascinating to see how different times influence translation.
Naturally the translator lives and works at certain times, there is no escape of that, they always have to consider the contemporary reader.

This translation is definitely worthy owning.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Iñaki Moraza
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in Spain on September 6, 2022
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Vibrant, engaging, best.
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XO5
2.0 out of 5 stars Is it supposed to be insightful or merely has historical relevance?
Reviewed in Australia on June 23, 2022
Verified Purchase
Nothing wrong with the author's translation, but the story was very boring and repetitive despite its reputation.
I couldn't see any insights personally
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Steven Siffledeen
5.0 out of 5 stars More than what I expected
Reviewed in Canada on September 24, 2013
Verified Purchase
I definitely was happy with this book. It's a beautiful hardcover book, and even came with it's own ribbon book mark. Definitely more than I expected.
2 people found this helpful
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