The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton, 2023. 848 pages.
Sixty pages of the Iliad was all I could handle. Reading Homer is thought to be edifying. I did not find it edifying. I found it boring. The mortals (at least in the first sixty pages) all are idiots, all behaving badly — vain, blind, belligerent, conniving, and mean. The gods are even worse. The mortals are hyperactive and volatile. The gods are lazy. I often have said that dysfunction and foible do not make good stories. If there is a quest in the Iliad, it’s crushing and looting Troy, just for the heck of it. What an edifying goal!
Stories require villains, but there’d better be at least one character per story whom we actually can like. No such character appears in the first sixty pages of the Iliad.
Of course I understand why reading the Iliad is thought to be edifying. To be able to read the ancient Greek would be very edifying. But translations not so much.
I tried to remind myself that the Iliad was 300 or 400 years old in Plato’s time. It’s not surprising that it is so primitive.
I do think, though, that this new translation of the Iliad is a good book to have on the shelf as a reference. There is a long list of characters at the back of the book that would serve as an excellent reference on Greek mythology. There are extensive notes nicely keyed to the verse. The notes explain many of the symbols and allusions, things that only Greek scholars would know. To me, the notes are more edifying and illuminating than the text itself.
There is a fascinating clash between Greek philosophy, with its wisdom, and Greek mythology, with its foolishness. From what little I know about Greek history, it was inspired more by foolishness than by wisdom. Reading about the Peloponnesian War, which was complete folly, will break your heart. Foolish gods, perhaps, drive foolish projects.
Having flung the Iliad, I’ve started on a guaranteed good read — Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I may have read it many years ago, but if I did I don’t remember anything about it. Many of Dickens’ novels were serialized — The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby. These are my favorite Dickenses, though I love David Copperfield and have read it several times.
It’s a shame that nobody serializes novels anymore, because serialization requires that the writer make each installment compelling in itself, so that the reader is eager for more and desperate to know what happens next. A serialized novel probably will be a hot read, and we all love hot reads. The only modern serialized novels that I can’t think of are Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels, which were serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle (and briefly in the San Francisco Examiner after Maupin had a spat with the Chronicle’s editors).