Translations of Homer

[sdi]

And while I'm blathering about Homer, if you're interested in reading him, my favorite translation for pleasure reading is W. H. D. Rouse's: The Story of Achilles and The Story of Odysseus. (The latter was even suitable for reading to my then-seven-year-old daughter so long as I explained things as I went along.) Those are hard to find in hardcopy, but don't let that stop you: even if all you can get locally is Samuel Butler's translation, it's stodgy but it's fine (for example, I have a really nice leather-bound, gilt-edged edition from Barnes and Noble, which I got while traveling for maybe $20 and is pretty hard to complain about).

Alexander Pope's Iliad is exquisite but I can't read heroic verse for more than a couple pages before my eyes bleed.

If I need a very precise translation (if I'm trying to understand the Greek line-by-line, say), I've been very impressed with Andrew Lang's Iliad and Odyssey every time I've looked things up in them (but I haven't read them cover to cover).

My daughter liked the Odyssey so much that she begged me to read her the Iliad, but even with an easy translation (and my skipping over large sections), it was too much for her. She enjoyed Rosemary Sutcliffe's retelling for children, Black Ships Before Troy, though.