What do you think?
Rate this book
The War Nerd Iliad
The War Nerd takes on Homer in a new translation; a classic gory, funny, tragic story in today's language.
260 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 2017
72 people are currently reading
895 people want to read
About the author
John Dolan
12 books36 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
See also: Gary Brecher.
See also: Gary Brecher.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 84 reviews
October 18, 2017
This is by far the best modern English translation of Western civilization’s greatest epic. John Dolan, the author, is my husband. Whoa, wait, where are you going? Hear me out!
Long before we met I was a hardcore Classics geek. My first crush was Alexander the Great. When my young peers were out getting wasted on Friday nights I sat diligently copying Greek noun declensions from Clarence W. Gleason’s A Greek Primer. My great goal in life at age 17 was to memorize Lucretius’s De Rerum Naturae.
For a pretentious Classics geek like me, no English translation would do until I’d read ‘the original’. In my third year of Ancient Greek at university I did manage to translate, piece by painful piece, most of Book XXII ‘The Death of Hector’. As slight as this was, it was a transcendent experience. Each syllable revealed a little more of a hard, cold, unfamiliar world. Each event in that book left an indelible emotional imprint: Hector’s parents standing on the city walls begging him not to fight, Hector’s awe as he sees the unbeatable Achilles shining like a morning star on the horizon, Hector’s final plea for mercy completely ignored, his dead body finally defiled by cowards. An allegory of our mortality without a moral, told in flowing, direct language.
When I finally accepted reading the whole thing in Greek was more than I had the brains to do, I decided to look around for a decent translation. Being an English major I first went for Pope but Pope is an eighteenth-century man and his preoccupations with concision and wit made me feel as if he were turning Homer into a fancy Swiss clock. Then Dryden, who is grand but whose language I don’t really understand. Then there was Butler, the nineteenth-century guy, who was good—clear and all—but Victorian to a T. And then the 20th Century vers libre efforts--ugh. As for prose, well, here is the first couple of lines by Emile Victor Rieu (Penguin, 1950):
The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfillment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades
Honestly, is it any wonder people gave up reading this book? I was a Classics major and I loved Homer but every translation I saw was boring as a rusty old tractor.
This Iliad, by contrast is a fully functioning war machine whose engine purrs, whose guns fire white-hot shells, whose gods scream like demons and whose heroes bleed in 3-D. It is not a word-for-word rendering, but it is faithful to the life of Homer’s hard, old world. It has been polished up, stripped of centuries of accumulated verdigris, and made to shine.
Long before we met I was a hardcore Classics geek. My first crush was Alexander the Great. When my young peers were out getting wasted on Friday nights I sat diligently copying Greek noun declensions from Clarence W. Gleason’s A Greek Primer. My great goal in life at age 17 was to memorize Lucretius’s De Rerum Naturae.
For a pretentious Classics geek like me, no English translation would do until I’d read ‘the original’. In my third year of Ancient Greek at university I did manage to translate, piece by painful piece, most of Book XXII ‘The Death of Hector’. As slight as this was, it was a transcendent experience. Each syllable revealed a little more of a hard, cold, unfamiliar world. Each event in that book left an indelible emotional imprint: Hector’s parents standing on the city walls begging him not to fight, Hector’s awe as he sees the unbeatable Achilles shining like a morning star on the horizon, Hector’s final plea for mercy completely ignored, his dead body finally defiled by cowards. An allegory of our mortality without a moral, told in flowing, direct language.
When I finally accepted reading the whole thing in Greek was more than I had the brains to do, I decided to look around for a decent translation. Being an English major I first went for Pope but Pope is an eighteenth-century man and his preoccupations with concision and wit made me feel as if he were turning Homer into a fancy Swiss clock. Then Dryden, who is grand but whose language I don’t really understand. Then there was Butler, the nineteenth-century guy, who was good—clear and all—but Victorian to a T. And then the 20th Century vers libre efforts--ugh. As for prose, well, here is the first couple of lines by Emile Victor Rieu (Penguin, 1950):
The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfillment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades
Honestly, is it any wonder people gave up reading this book? I was a Classics major and I loved Homer but every translation I saw was boring as a rusty old tractor.
This Iliad, by contrast is a fully functioning war machine whose engine purrs, whose guns fire white-hot shells, whose gods scream like demons and whose heroes bleed in 3-D. It is not a word-for-word rendering, but it is faithful to the life of Homer’s hard, old world. It has been polished up, stripped of centuries of accumulated verdigris, and made to shine.
September 21, 2017
I've read it before this release when the Author kindly allowed me to "peek in" the manuscript. It's a great re-telling of the Iliad in prose, surprisingly faithful to the original, but still likely to put a lot of people into the classic WTF state. After all, the Iliad is the original European war fable, a no one but the mighty War Nerd could tell it this way, with all the flesh, blood, carnage and grim humor that Homer may have intended in the original. As they say, grit doesn't translate well, particularly from X° century BC Greek, but in the end the modern stripped down English prose John uses works beautifully well to give us a hint of the life and death of the doomed Homer heroes. It's a great book, and should be read by anyone interested in Homer, war or simply great literature.
October 29, 2017
Dolan puts Lattimore and Fitzgerald in the shithouse, to paraphrase Dr. Reo Symes. A superb re-telling of the Iliad, that succeeds in Dolan's goal of returning the epic to its wild campfire origins by emphasizing the humour, violence and action of the original to accomplish.
There's a great moment where war god Ares wants vengeance for the slaughter of his son, but when challenged he can't remember his son's name. And that's one of the areas where Dolan shines–most translators have the wrong kind of faithfulness to the text, peppering the text with Greek and Trojan names as if we were still in the bronze age and had nothing better to do that memorize them. Dolan gets to the point by reminding us where we've seen these names last, or skipping the names of individuals altogether and only relating their place in the story (ie in the boxing match at Patroklos's funeral games we're told that this is a sport for commoners and that's that).
The other thing Dolan gets right is that he conveys the fantastic elements of the story in ways that will be familiar to fans of science-fiction/fantasy. Try to see Iris 'coalescing' and relaying messages from the Overworld to Troy and not picture a Star Wars-type holograph projection. Other versions of the Iliad, I've found, lose their way here. And probably because their authors are as afraid of SF/F as much as Dolan loves it. They tend to get overly precious and poetic, or skip the divine/fantastic element altogether, like in the Brad Pitt version of Troy.
Dolan and the Iliad are a match made on Olympus. One of my favourite authors with what had for a long time been one of my favourite books. And Dolan of course knows exactly why it fell out of favour with me: because no one reads poetry anymore. Sometimes I wish it were otherwise, but that's just not the case, and it's why poetic translations inevitably fall flat. I'm kind of tempted to do a side by side comparison (my copy is currently resting on top of Lattimore's translation), but I'm too lazy for that and so instead I'm just going to transcribe a few of my favourite passages:
Trojan allies: Inland mutants is such a great line. It's hilarious, it shows how the Trojans' allies are considered exotic, and it illustrates one of the important War Nerd principles about Red State-Blue State divides.
Wounded god:
Hera's Seduction of Zeus:
I think you have to love Thersites, the Atticus Finch of Ancient Greece: While he's not mentioned again in the Iliad, wikipedia reports that he is mentioned again in the lost Aethipois, where Achilles kills him "for having torn out the eyes of the Amazon Penthesilea that the hero had just killed in combat."
I love the depiction of the gods. Zeus as a gangland godfather, trying to keep his family in order; Poseidon as an Old God, completely out of touch with humanity and barely holding it together; and Ares as a blood-crazy, cynocephalic, always trailed by flies.
For anyone who liked this, I would recommend Guido Waldman's prose translation of Orlando Furioso or Matthew Stover's two Heart of Bronze novels, which manage to capture the Old Testament and post-Troy Greek world with a similar sci-fi/fantasy aesthetic that helps bring understand to an ancient and often alien mindset almost as well as Dolan does here.
Stray thoughts:
– It's clearly been a while since I've read the Iliad because I thought Dolan elided the Hephaestus-Aphrodite-Ares stuff with the net, because here he's married to Charis, but I went and checked and of course that story is in the Odyssey. There were a couple of other incidents like this as well. For example, I always forget about Chryseis preceding Briseis at the start of the Iliad, to the point that I'm starting to think that was something Homer was trying for.
– This is literally the only version of the ekphrasis of Akilles shield that didn't put me to sleep. Still, I've always thought it would make for a great pottery-style animated interlude in a film version.
–While I was waiting for Amazon to deliver this I hauled out my copy of Caroline Alexander's The War that Killed Achilles to brush up on all that kleos and timê stuff, but I got lazy and anyway, you really don't need it to enjoy this version of the Iliad, which you really should reead.
There's a great moment where war god Ares wants vengeance for the slaughter of his son, but when challenged he can't remember his son's name. And that's one of the areas where Dolan shines–most translators have the wrong kind of faithfulness to the text, peppering the text with Greek and Trojan names as if we were still in the bronze age and had nothing better to do that memorize them. Dolan gets to the point by reminding us where we've seen these names last, or skipping the names of individuals altogether and only relating their place in the story (ie in the boxing match at Patroklos's funeral games we're told that this is a sport for commoners and that's that).
The other thing Dolan gets right is that he conveys the fantastic elements of the story in ways that will be familiar to fans of science-fiction/fantasy. Try to see Iris 'coalescing' and relaying messages from the Overworld to Troy and not picture a Star Wars-type holograph projection. Other versions of the Iliad, I've found, lose their way here. And probably because their authors are as afraid of SF/F as much as Dolan loves it. They tend to get overly precious and poetic, or skip the divine/fantastic element altogether, like in the Brad Pitt version of Troy.
Dolan and the Iliad are a match made on Olympus. One of my favourite authors with what had for a long time been one of my favourite books. And Dolan of course knows exactly why it fell out of favour with me: because no one reads poetry anymore. Sometimes I wish it were otherwise, but that's just not the case, and it's why poetic translations inevitably fall flat. I'm kind of tempted to do a side by side comparison (my copy is currently resting on top of Lattimore's translation), but I'm too lazy for that and so instead I'm just going to transcribe a few of my favourite passages:
Trojan allies: Inland mutants is such a great line. It's hilarious, it shows how the Trojans' allies are considered exotic, and it illustrates one of the important War Nerd principles about Red State-Blue State divides.
Wounded god:
Hera's Seduction of Zeus:
I think you have to love Thersites, the Atticus Finch of Ancient Greece: While he's not mentioned again in the Iliad, wikipedia reports that he is mentioned again in the lost Aethipois, where Achilles kills him "for having torn out the eyes of the Amazon Penthesilea that the hero had just killed in combat."
I love the depiction of the gods. Zeus as a gangland godfather, trying to keep his family in order; Poseidon as an Old God, completely out of touch with humanity and barely holding it together; and Ares as a blood-crazy, cynocephalic, always trailed by flies.
For anyone who liked this, I would recommend Guido Waldman's prose translation of Orlando Furioso or Matthew Stover's two Heart of Bronze novels, which manage to capture the Old Testament and post-Troy Greek world with a similar sci-fi/fantasy aesthetic that helps bring understand to an ancient and often alien mindset almost as well as Dolan does here.
Stray thoughts:
– It's clearly been a while since I've read the Iliad because I thought Dolan elided the Hephaestus-Aphrodite-Ares stuff with the net, because here he's married to Charis, but I went and checked and of course that story is in the Odyssey. There were a couple of other incidents like this as well. For example, I always forget about Chryseis preceding Briseis at the start of the Iliad, to the point that I'm starting to think that was something Homer was trying for.
– This is literally the only version of the ekphrasis of Akilles shield that didn't put me to sleep. Still, I've always thought it would make for a great pottery-style animated interlude in a film version.
–While I was waiting for Amazon to deliver this I hauled out my copy of Caroline Alexander's The War that Killed Achilles to brush up on all that kleos and timê stuff, but I got lazy and anyway, you really don't need it to enjoy this version of the Iliad, which you really should reead.
October 8, 2017
It would be hard to overstate the impact John Dolan has had on my education. I began reading the War Nerd, written under the identity of "Gary Brecher," after the now-fb-less Connor Sullivan posted one of his articles to me early on in my time in college- early enough that I was one of the ding dongs speculating, "COULD Brecher be Dolan???" While I pay my homage to the Gary Brecher persona, I'd have to say the Dolan half was probably more important to my education.
There's a simple reason for this- I went to hippie school, sans requirements, and loaded my plate with history and sociology classes. I never took a literature class. Dolan's writings were Lit 101 (and a few extra classes alongside) for me. The list of writers I picked up because of his recommendations is nearly coextensive with the list of my favorite writers. So I get why the man himself might prefer Gary Brecher, but I'll always have a soft spot for Dolan. I'm glad the interests of the two -- literature and war -- coincided for this particular volume. Moreover, it'd also be hard to overstate how important the Iliad -- or, anyway, the children's Iliad I had -- was to me as a child. It was my favorite story, though I was disappointed to find that the grown-up versions were generally slogs. Probably worth it, especially for people whose interest in literature comes to a large extent through history, but slogs nevertheless.
Dolan sees the slog quality as an injustice to the poem. The Iliad was meant to be recited aloud- closer a to campfire tale than a school poem. It's meant to be gripping, a real emotional rollercoaster, and it's not meant to stint on the goods- gore, gloating, gods, descriptions of riches, feasts, and other things that bored peasants passing some time in the winter want to imagine. Dolan tries to bring this quality back to the Iliad for modern readers of English. He does so via prose translation. Dolan argues that sentence and paragraph structure does form modern readers what meter and rhyme did for our ancestors... and moreover, who reads epic poems today (I know, I know... a few of my fb friends)? He wants this read.
He delivers, right to a sweet spot that few works really go for these days (arguably, Fury Road did). The characters are more alive than ever before (in English, anyway)- angst teen death-dealer Achilles, aggrieved manager Odysseus, decent doomed Hector, vain late-stage-mob-boss Agamemnon, original fuckboi Paris, etc. He does something really special with the gods- their human qualities come through clearly but they never lose a truly weird, eerie quality. The granular, cynical grasp on the politics of war that made the War Nerd such a success comes out in his depictions of the Greek war effort, all squabbling chiefs, mission drift, and chaos. And he delivers the goods- the battle scenes have all the chaos, blood, pain, confusion you could want, but also the sheer joy of rage and action that draws so many to this story and stories like it. Dolan may have chosen prose here, but the poet is still there in his similes and apostrophes and probably other figures I'm missing because, you know, didn't take any literature classes.
At bottom, the Iliad is about an alien world, but with just enough familiar features to give us moderns some grasping points. Often, these points encourage -- delude -- people (whole generations, in some instances- cf the British ruling class in the 18th and 19th centuries) into thinking that these alien people actually were like us, or like what we could (or even should) be. Sometimes, sick of that, people go the opposite direction- claiming it's all so different you'll never understand it, except maybe if you immerse yourself in these languages, become a difficult prig about it, etc. In his take on the Iliad, Dolan illuminates an alien world in all of its splendor and terror -- a lot of both -- in a way that is relatable to us today, while never losing sight of the gulf between us and the Homeric. That balancing act alone is supremely difficult, let alone making it readable and entertaining. But Dolan has been making the alien seem familiar and the familiar alien, in his literary, historical, and (for lack of a better term) political writing for a long time now- and making it look easy, the sure sign of a master. *****
There's a simple reason for this- I went to hippie school, sans requirements, and loaded my plate with history and sociology classes. I never took a literature class. Dolan's writings were Lit 101 (and a few extra classes alongside) for me. The list of writers I picked up because of his recommendations is nearly coextensive with the list of my favorite writers. So I get why the man himself might prefer Gary Brecher, but I'll always have a soft spot for Dolan. I'm glad the interests of the two -- literature and war -- coincided for this particular volume. Moreover, it'd also be hard to overstate how important the Iliad -- or, anyway, the children's Iliad I had -- was to me as a child. It was my favorite story, though I was disappointed to find that the grown-up versions were generally slogs. Probably worth it, especially for people whose interest in literature comes to a large extent through history, but slogs nevertheless.
Dolan sees the slog quality as an injustice to the poem. The Iliad was meant to be recited aloud- closer a to campfire tale than a school poem. It's meant to be gripping, a real emotional rollercoaster, and it's not meant to stint on the goods- gore, gloating, gods, descriptions of riches, feasts, and other things that bored peasants passing some time in the winter want to imagine. Dolan tries to bring this quality back to the Iliad for modern readers of English. He does so via prose translation. Dolan argues that sentence and paragraph structure does form modern readers what meter and rhyme did for our ancestors... and moreover, who reads epic poems today (I know, I know... a few of my fb friends)? He wants this read.
He delivers, right to a sweet spot that few works really go for these days (arguably, Fury Road did). The characters are more alive than ever before (in English, anyway)- angst teen death-dealer Achilles, aggrieved manager Odysseus, decent doomed Hector, vain late-stage-mob-boss Agamemnon, original fuckboi Paris, etc. He does something really special with the gods- their human qualities come through clearly but they never lose a truly weird, eerie quality. The granular, cynical grasp on the politics of war that made the War Nerd such a success comes out in his depictions of the Greek war effort, all squabbling chiefs, mission drift, and chaos. And he delivers the goods- the battle scenes have all the chaos, blood, pain, confusion you could want, but also the sheer joy of rage and action that draws so many to this story and stories like it. Dolan may have chosen prose here, but the poet is still there in his similes and apostrophes and probably other figures I'm missing because, you know, didn't take any literature classes.
At bottom, the Iliad is about an alien world, but with just enough familiar features to give us moderns some grasping points. Often, these points encourage -- delude -- people (whole generations, in some instances- cf the British ruling class in the 18th and 19th centuries) into thinking that these alien people actually were like us, or like what we could (or even should) be. Sometimes, sick of that, people go the opposite direction- claiming it's all so different you'll never understand it, except maybe if you immerse yourself in these languages, become a difficult prig about it, etc. In his take on the Iliad, Dolan illuminates an alien world in all of its splendor and terror -- a lot of both -- in a way that is relatable to us today, while never losing sight of the gulf between us and the Homeric. That balancing act alone is supremely difficult, let alone making it readable and entertaining. But Dolan has been making the alien seem familiar and the familiar alien, in his literary, historical, and (for lack of a better term) political writing for a long time now- and making it look easy, the sure sign of a master. *****
October 5, 2019
John Dolan is the "War Nerd," and he has produced a gripping prose rendition of Homer's great epic in the "War Nerd Iliad." It sacrifices the poetry, formula, and repetitiveness, and leaves us with the story and the characters. Whereas the original, for attentive readers, will have all of this (both in the Greek and in the best of the verse translations), I think that Dolan did a wise thing in stripping the story down for new readers who might want their Iliad without all of the distancing. Of course, I think everyone should read the Iliad at least once in verse translation (whether Fagles, which I started with, or with Robert Fitzgerald's loose iambic pentameter, or Caroline Alexander's foreignizing free-verse line by line translation). But Dolan highlights the entertaining, quasi-comic, brutal, absurdist strain that is there in the Iliad, and he makes a very entertaining campfire story in prose.
Dolan, once known by his pseudonym Gary Brecher, wrote a column called "War Nerd," a column dedicated to war, to its strategy, tactics, and impact. He called his column "Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed." If I were to describe his Iliad, it would be "crude, humorous, un-P.C., yet deeply informed," for Dolan has, in my view, paid close attention to the dark humor at present in the human and divine actions of the Iliad's characters. Some of that irony is there in the poem; some man with a family background, with a wife or parents at home, is dispatched brutally by some dude on the battlefield. And the power of the Iliad comes from its relentless look at this sad irony; you could be undone by some random man on the battlefield, and sent to the underworld, bereft of life. No heaven here for the virtuous; all share a common estate in the underworld at the end of their lives. The terrifying bleakness of the Iliad is wonderfully brought out here.
His introduction is a compelling riff on the poet's meditation of the story through the Muses' revelation:
"I DIDN’T WRITE THIS STORY. I’m just delivering it. Every now and then it has to be repackaged and delivered. It comes from way back, from the gods."
And in his repackaging of the poem, he wonderfully uses dialogue to delineate character; just as Homer used character speech to sharpen and delineate the dramatic arc of his epic, so Dolan uses a quasi-novelist, quasi-journalist approach to liven up the story. One excellent instance is the conversation between Odysseus and Athena at the boats in book 2:
The close relationship of Athena and Odysseus receives much fleshing out in the Iliad's sequel, the Odyssey; for Dolan to so cleverly allude to it and to bring in the concurrent divine supremacy over human affairs and divine interest in their fate is to have touched on one of the most crucial features of the Iliad's cosmos, in which the gods are at once immortal self-absorbed beings and deeply interest spectators who influence the world in seen and unseen ways.
Other instances of dialogic expertise involve his rendition of the scene between Achilles and Lycaon, where in contrast to Homer's setting of blocks of speech against each other, Dolan creates a vividly dialogic rendition of the horrifying moment. And another creative choice he makes is the breaking up of Hector's soliloquy against Achilles' approach, making counterpoint out of it:
In Homer we have a full block of anguished torturous speech from a man who is doomed to fail and yet cannot avoid his doom due to both fate and to his own character and sense of pride. Dolan, revising the Homeric block-of-dialogue, makes a creative use of counterpoint between Hector's considerations as he sees Achilles come closer. It works like a piece of music, as two strains approach one another for a kind of final clash.
On the creative score, Dolan achieves high marks for dialogue, characterization, forward movement (capturing the fast-paced aspect of the Iliad). While I don't entirely agree with his characterization of the Iliad as a campfire story wrongly taken too seriously—the Greeks, early on, took Homer "seriously" enough to consider him canon, serious literature to be considered, enjoyed, and taught in school; the Romans did too, and imitated him, and contended with him—I do like the results he comes up with. For someone who wants to get started with the Iliad, I would recommend both Robert Fagles' translation (or Caroline Alexander's line-by-line free verse translation) and John Dolan's work.
One aspect I note in the War Nerd Iliad is that he portrays the Greeks as rough, mannerless, and barbarically chaotic, compared to the weak but more civilized Trojans. This is a dichotomy one can see, and Adam Nicholson's Why Homer Matter takes this view. But how much is it a simplification of a much more complex matter is worth pondering.
Another thing I like is that the War Nerd Iliad takes the gods and goddesses seriously enough as dramatic personages with vividness and force in the poem; looming in the background is a (very appropriate) modern analogue in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, with Zeus as the Godfather who is imperious, challenged, implacable, capricious, and lordly, and the other gods as part of one big dysfunctional god family. Part of the quasi-humorous, quasi-absurdist interpretation of the Iliad's battle action is justified by the absurdist humor of the Olympian gods, who are in a comedy of timeless eternity, free from mortality and aging. Samuel Butler, the humorist and author of the Way of All Flesh (and himself a prose translator of Homer), seems to be an influence in this (I can't say exactly how, though, since I have not read Samuel Butler).
Every translation is a work of interpretation, and Dolan's interpretations are compelling. Odysseus is ever the wise man and warrior among the Greeks; Achilles is imagined as a generally well-meaning man, not the meanest of the Greeks, the fastest and strongest and greatest of them all when it comes to violence, and the doomed one; Menelaus is the perpetual loser; Nestor the perpetual babbler; and Agamemnon the thuggish king, who is the villain of the work.
The last interpretation is interesting to note; many readers of the Iliad, probably most (this reader included), side with Achilles over Agamemnon in the poem's great quarrel of who is better and who is more justly authorized to exercise power and influence. Agamemnon does not have much of a positive reputation. He is imperious, lustful, brutal, inconsiderate, warmongering, boorish, and, in a way, shameless (anaides). That being said, for readers like Edmund Spenser, Agamemnon (inexplicably to us) is a model of good government alongside Ulysses (the equation between the two kings has some bearing in the Homeric poems). Yet Dolan heightens him as the great villain; the joke's on this king, and everyone hates him. Dolan also amplifies this by bringing in the curse of the house of Atreus, a curse obscured by Homer but very present in Greek tragedy. Tragedy exercises a subtle influence in Dolan's Iliad; Agamemnon is cursed to be the bad guy, and Menelaus is cursed to be the loser. Readers and listeners of Homer will be aware of this, of course, but Homer's decision to not explicitly render the curse and its implications is appropriate for the largely heroic and epic mode (which I will distinguish from simplistic comic-book "heroizing") in which he tells the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Of course, I remember hearing Dolan's inability to get through a poetic version of the Iliad, an inability that seems somewhat inconceivable to myself (I have read several different verse translations of the Iliad, and enjoyed all of them). For me, poetry is an appropriate vehicle to represent the Greek originals in English, and for the most part they have given us Homer's poems, whether in somewhat free yet creative poetry (George Chapman, Alexander Pope) or in foreignizing (Richmond Lattimore, Rodney Merrill), or in free verse (Robert Fagles, Caroline Alexander). Emily Wilson's Odyssey, a metrical blank verse Homer, provides an interesting model for how a new Homer can be made; by mixing the traditional formalism and the modern ear, reuniting an old love for meter and regularity with modern "freshness." I look forward to what Wilson will do with the Iliad, and I am hopeful it will turn out to be wonderful.
One other interpreter and translator of Homer that came to my mind when thinking of Dolan is the Elizabethan poet and dramatist George Chapman, who translated Homer into freely interpretive, but highly regular and highly musical (in its own way) verse. The fourteeners of Chapman's Iliad, an acquired taste, gives dramatic brawn and heft to the poem. Chapman the dramatist was crucially alert to the dramatic qualities of Homer's Iliad, and he heightened them by sidenotes of who speaks what (very helpful) and what kind of speech it is. Though one many quibble with Chapman's neo-Stoic Christian interpolations, or his constant ironizing of Menelaus (in this, he does with the cuckolded husband what Dolan does with Agamemnon), one must admire the freshness and vigor that still exists in the work. Many good readers respect Chapman, including those who know and are acquainted with the Greek original. That is good enough testimony for me, as is my own immersion in the work. With Chapman, I feel that, for all his interpretation, I am reading Homer. And I feel the same with Dolan. Chapman creates an Elizabethan dramatic narrative of philosophical, political, ethical, and dramatic import, understanding Homer very well but in his own way. Chapman's Homer is poetically wonderful, dramatically fiery, and full of hidden wisdom. Dolan creates an absurdist campfire story attuned to the nihilistic brutality that is there in the poem. Dolan's Homer is a politically-incorrect and intelligent storyteller whose story has grotesque bloody humor, capricious gods and capricious humans who reflect one another, and absurd war realities captured and memorialized for future memory. Both are valid, compelling, reckless (with respects to "faithful" translation), and highly different ways of reading the great story of wrath, rage, heroism, and war violence. (And both Chapman and Dolan treat Achilles fairly sympathetically, if not always approvingly). As Emily Wilson would point out, translations tell different truths about an original work; Chapman tells his truths, and Dolan tells his.
[I would add, briefly, that Alice Oswald's Memorial, a modern poem that memorializes the dead, captures the Iliad's memorial strain; but I won't elaborate much on that, because I spoke elsewhere about it].
I want to conclude this review by expressing an appreciation of how Dolan appreciates the "otherness" of the world of the Iliad. The world of this poem is very different from the world we live in, not just because there are divine beings interacting with mortals in ways we don't commonly imagine, but because there are different assumptions that separate the Iliad and us from each other. That being said, to recognize that otherness, and to come to love it, is to get a better appreciation for the work. Because, like Emily Wilson did for her Odyssey (and I trust she will do for her Iliad), he heightens up the ease and pleasure he finds in Homer, and creates an easy and pleasurable War Nerd Iliad. It's not Homer's original, but, then again, he didn't promise Homer's original; he promised a fun campfire story with import and strangeness, and he delivered.
Dolan, once known by his pseudonym Gary Brecher, wrote a column called "War Nerd," a column dedicated to war, to its strategy, tactics, and impact. He called his column "Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed." If I were to describe his Iliad, it would be "crude, humorous, un-P.C., yet deeply informed," for Dolan has, in my view, paid close attention to the dark humor at present in the human and divine actions of the Iliad's characters. Some of that irony is there in the poem; some man with a family background, with a wife or parents at home, is dispatched brutally by some dude on the battlefield. And the power of the Iliad comes from its relentless look at this sad irony; you could be undone by some random man on the battlefield, and sent to the underworld, bereft of life. No heaven here for the virtuous; all share a common estate in the underworld at the end of their lives. The terrifying bleakness of the Iliad is wonderfully brought out here.
His introduction is a compelling riff on the poet's meditation of the story through the Muses' revelation:
"I DIDN’T WRITE THIS STORY. I’m just delivering it. Every now and then it has to be repackaged and delivered. It comes from way back, from the gods."
And in his repackaging of the poem, he wonderfully uses dialogue to delineate character; just as Homer used character speech to sharpen and delineate the dramatic arc of his epic, so Dolan uses a quasi-novelist, quasi-journalist approach to liven up the story. One excellent instance is the conversation between Odysseus and Athena at the boats in book 2:
Then something comes over Odysseus, something huge. He is in a god-shadow; Athena is beside him. He has met gods before, and he knows the vertigo that comes when one of the greater gods stands beside you, as if a planet were leaning over your shoulder.
She speaks, starting in mid-conversation because she can read minds: “Yes, they’re stupid, they deserve to drown; but still, Odysseus, you have to stop them.”
He alone among mortals has the strength of mind to refuse the gravitational pull of that huge thing beside him. Resisting, he says, “Why? Why should I help them?” She says simply. “My Greeks must win.”
He’s a stubborn man. He grits his teeth, forces a question: “Why? Why must they win?”
She likes his strong, stubborn will, warms to him. If only he had a longer life span than a mosquito … But her job is to stop this, so she repeats, leaning a fraction more of her strength on him: “This time, my stubborn little Red-Beard, the Greeks must win.”
She ruffles his beard with a hand three times the size of his, whispering: “Not for their sake, nor their children, nor grandchildren …”
“I don’t understand you.”
Her shawl brushes his face, the cold dark of stars and the grim slice of the geological strata blanking the sunlight: “See? You live only a moment, you see only a little.”
He’s frozen, feeling the cold of deep time. She goes on, “But we’re alike in one way, Red-Beard. We both have to deal with fools. You with stupid men, and I with stupid gods. Now go, stop the fools from ruining my plans.”
The close relationship of Athena and Odysseus receives much fleshing out in the Iliad's sequel, the Odyssey; for Dolan to so cleverly allude to it and to bring in the concurrent divine supremacy over human affairs and divine interest in their fate is to have touched on one of the most crucial features of the Iliad's cosmos, in which the gods are at once immortal self-absorbed beings and deeply interest spectators who influence the world in seen and unseen ways.
Other instances of dialogic expertise involve his rendition of the scene between Achilles and Lycaon, where in contrast to Homer's setting of blocks of speech against each other, Dolan creates a vividly dialogic rendition of the horrifying moment. And another creative choice he makes is the breaking up of Hector's soliloquy against Achilles' approach, making counterpoint out of it:
Hektor has heard his parents’ cries, but he can’t go in. He stands alone on the plain, watching his death come running. Fast as Akilles is approaching, Hektor seems to have all the time in the world to decide what to do. He thinks, “If I go inside now, Polydamus will say, ‘I told you so!’ That’s the worst part. I was a fool, strutting around talking about bravery and honor. He said we should fight from the walls, and he was right.”
Akilles is close now. Hektor can see his snarling white teeth.
He thinks, “How can I face the widows? I’m the man who got their husbands killed. We could have fought with bows from the walls. The Greeks fear our archers; we could have picked them off. Now their husbands are lying dead out here. If I go in, the widows will glare at me, and they’ll be right.”
Akilles is in throwing range now. Hektor thinks, “If I can kill Akilles, the widows will forgive me. Polydamus will forgive me.”
Then he looks at Akilles and realizes he doesn’t have a chance in single combat.
So he thinks, “What if I slid off my shield, dropped my spear, took off my helmet, walked up to him unarmed, and offered to make a deal? I’ll offer half our wealth, plus Helen and everything Paris brought from Sparta.”
Akilles is close now, holding his spear low for a belly stab.
Hektor thinks desperately, “I could make every man in Troy swear to give Akilles half their wealth!”
Akilles is only a few paces off now.
Hektor realizes, “I’m talking nonsense! He won’t make a deal, he wants my life!"
His courage fails; he turns and runs.
Akilles follows, watching the angles so he can cut Hektor off if he breaks for the town gates
In Homer we have a full block of anguished torturous speech from a man who is doomed to fail and yet cannot avoid his doom due to both fate and to his own character and sense of pride. Dolan, revising the Homeric block-of-dialogue, makes a creative use of counterpoint between Hector's considerations as he sees Achilles come closer. It works like a piece of music, as two strains approach one another for a kind of final clash.
On the creative score, Dolan achieves high marks for dialogue, characterization, forward movement (capturing the fast-paced aspect of the Iliad). While I don't entirely agree with his characterization of the Iliad as a campfire story wrongly taken too seriously—the Greeks, early on, took Homer "seriously" enough to consider him canon, serious literature to be considered, enjoyed, and taught in school; the Romans did too, and imitated him, and contended with him—I do like the results he comes up with. For someone who wants to get started with the Iliad, I would recommend both Robert Fagles' translation (or Caroline Alexander's line-by-line free verse translation) and John Dolan's work.
One aspect I note in the War Nerd Iliad is that he portrays the Greeks as rough, mannerless, and barbarically chaotic, compared to the weak but more civilized Trojans. This is a dichotomy one can see, and Adam Nicholson's Why Homer Matter takes this view. But how much is it a simplification of a much more complex matter is worth pondering.
Another thing I like is that the War Nerd Iliad takes the gods and goddesses seriously enough as dramatic personages with vividness and force in the poem; looming in the background is a (very appropriate) modern analogue in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, with Zeus as the Godfather who is imperious, challenged, implacable, capricious, and lordly, and the other gods as part of one big dysfunctional god family. Part of the quasi-humorous, quasi-absurdist interpretation of the Iliad's battle action is justified by the absurdist humor of the Olympian gods, who are in a comedy of timeless eternity, free from mortality and aging. Samuel Butler, the humorist and author of the Way of All Flesh (and himself a prose translator of Homer), seems to be an influence in this (I can't say exactly how, though, since I have not read Samuel Butler).
Every translation is a work of interpretation, and Dolan's interpretations are compelling. Odysseus is ever the wise man and warrior among the Greeks; Achilles is imagined as a generally well-meaning man, not the meanest of the Greeks, the fastest and strongest and greatest of them all when it comes to violence, and the doomed one; Menelaus is the perpetual loser; Nestor the perpetual babbler; and Agamemnon the thuggish king, who is the villain of the work.
The last interpretation is interesting to note; many readers of the Iliad, probably most (this reader included), side with Achilles over Agamemnon in the poem's great quarrel of who is better and who is more justly authorized to exercise power and influence. Agamemnon does not have much of a positive reputation. He is imperious, lustful, brutal, inconsiderate, warmongering, boorish, and, in a way, shameless (anaides). That being said, for readers like Edmund Spenser, Agamemnon (inexplicably to us) is a model of good government alongside Ulysses (the equation between the two kings has some bearing in the Homeric poems). Yet Dolan heightens him as the great villain; the joke's on this king, and everyone hates him. Dolan also amplifies this by bringing in the curse of the house of Atreus, a curse obscured by Homer but very present in Greek tragedy. Tragedy exercises a subtle influence in Dolan's Iliad; Agamemnon is cursed to be the bad guy, and Menelaus is cursed to be the loser. Readers and listeners of Homer will be aware of this, of course, but Homer's decision to not explicitly render the curse and its implications is appropriate for the largely heroic and epic mode (which I will distinguish from simplistic comic-book "heroizing") in which he tells the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Of course, I remember hearing Dolan's inability to get through a poetic version of the Iliad, an inability that seems somewhat inconceivable to myself (I have read several different verse translations of the Iliad, and enjoyed all of them). For me, poetry is an appropriate vehicle to represent the Greek originals in English, and for the most part they have given us Homer's poems, whether in somewhat free yet creative poetry (George Chapman, Alexander Pope) or in foreignizing (Richmond Lattimore, Rodney Merrill), or in free verse (Robert Fagles, Caroline Alexander). Emily Wilson's Odyssey, a metrical blank verse Homer, provides an interesting model for how a new Homer can be made; by mixing the traditional formalism and the modern ear, reuniting an old love for meter and regularity with modern "freshness." I look forward to what Wilson will do with the Iliad, and I am hopeful it will turn out to be wonderful.
One other interpreter and translator of Homer that came to my mind when thinking of Dolan is the Elizabethan poet and dramatist George Chapman, who translated Homer into freely interpretive, but highly regular and highly musical (in its own way) verse. The fourteeners of Chapman's Iliad, an acquired taste, gives dramatic brawn and heft to the poem. Chapman the dramatist was crucially alert to the dramatic qualities of Homer's Iliad, and he heightened them by sidenotes of who speaks what (very helpful) and what kind of speech it is. Though one many quibble with Chapman's neo-Stoic Christian interpolations, or his constant ironizing of Menelaus (in this, he does with the cuckolded husband what Dolan does with Agamemnon), one must admire the freshness and vigor that still exists in the work. Many good readers respect Chapman, including those who know and are acquainted with the Greek original. That is good enough testimony for me, as is my own immersion in the work. With Chapman, I feel that, for all his interpretation, I am reading Homer. And I feel the same with Dolan. Chapman creates an Elizabethan dramatic narrative of philosophical, political, ethical, and dramatic import, understanding Homer very well but in his own way. Chapman's Homer is poetically wonderful, dramatically fiery, and full of hidden wisdom. Dolan creates an absurdist campfire story attuned to the nihilistic brutality that is there in the poem. Dolan's Homer is a politically-incorrect and intelligent storyteller whose story has grotesque bloody humor, capricious gods and capricious humans who reflect one another, and absurd war realities captured and memorialized for future memory. Both are valid, compelling, reckless (with respects to "faithful" translation), and highly different ways of reading the great story of wrath, rage, heroism, and war violence. (And both Chapman and Dolan treat Achilles fairly sympathetically, if not always approvingly). As Emily Wilson would point out, translations tell different truths about an original work; Chapman tells his truths, and Dolan tells his.
[I would add, briefly, that Alice Oswald's Memorial, a modern poem that memorializes the dead, captures the Iliad's memorial strain; but I won't elaborate much on that, because I spoke elsewhere about it].
I want to conclude this review by expressing an appreciation of how Dolan appreciates the "otherness" of the world of the Iliad. The world of this poem is very different from the world we live in, not just because there are divine beings interacting with mortals in ways we don't commonly imagine, but because there are different assumptions that separate the Iliad and us from each other. That being said, to recognize that otherness, and to come to love it, is to get a better appreciation for the work. Because, like Emily Wilson did for her Odyssey (and I trust she will do for her Iliad), he heightens up the ease and pleasure he finds in Homer, and creates an easy and pleasurable War Nerd Iliad. It's not Homer's original, but, then again, he didn't promise Homer's original; he promised a fun campfire story with import and strangeness, and he delivered.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 23, 2017
I wanted so much to give this book five stars. I love the Iliad, and I devour new translations. I've encountered this author's blog posts and he has a remarkably clear style that I really enjoy. And for the most part, he brings that clarity to his take on this ancient tale. But there are a few too many careless liberties taken with the myth for my taste. While I can understand changing accepted 'facts' (inasmuch as anything in myth can be accounted a fact), an author will normally have a reason for doing so, which is explained in the text. Dolan makes changes seemingly out of careless recollection.
How do you stuff up the Olympian family tree that badly? Athene is not Hera’s daughter, for one thing, nor is Hypnos her brother, and conflating Demeter and Persephone is lazy. He has Hera asking Zeus for ‘permission to see her parents, who are fighting again’ (her parents being Cronus and Rhea, only one of whom is imprisoned in Tartarus). I have to wonder what version of the Oresteia he read where Orestes kills Agamemnon, because I’m pretty sure the whole point of the cycle goes out the window if you do that. It's as though the author wrote his Iliad based on an imperfect memory of something he read in high school.
In short, read this, because it’s very good. But if you have any background in classics, it’s going to annoy you.
How do you stuff up the Olympian family tree that badly? Athene is not Hera’s daughter, for one thing, nor is Hypnos her brother, and conflating Demeter and Persephone is lazy. He has Hera asking Zeus for ‘permission to see her parents, who are fighting again’ (her parents being Cronus and Rhea, only one of whom is imprisoned in Tartarus). I have to wonder what version of the Oresteia he read where Orestes kills Agamemnon, because I’m pretty sure the whole point of the cycle goes out the window if you do that. It's as though the author wrote his Iliad based on an imperfect memory of something he read in high school.
In short, read this, because it’s very good. But if you have any background in classics, it’s going to annoy you.
October 19, 2017
Besser als die sorgsam von Sex und übermäßigem Blutvergießen gereinigten, für die Jugend bearbeiteten Klassikerversionen meiner Kindheit, aber in der zweiten Hälfte ist mein Interesse doch erlahmt. Dafür kann John Dolan aber nichts, es liegt an der Geschichte. Anfangs passieren noch Dinge, aber dann geht es sehr lange nur noch darum, dass mal die eine Seite die Oberhand gewinnt und dann wieder die andere, und die Götter mischen sich in einer Weise in die Handlung ein, dass einem die billigen Tricks in "Game of Thrones" wie elegantestes Autorenhandwerk erscheinen. Dingokles kämpft gegen Dongleas! Gott A fährt in Dingokles, woraufhin sich Gott B provoziert fühlt und in Dongleas schlüpft! Der Speer von Dingokles fällt wirkungslos zu Boden! Etc.
December 31, 2018
A very enjoyable rendition of The Iliad in modern prose speech, full of slang and sly inserted commentary, which makes it more than just a prose translation in contemporary daily-usage English. It'll probably not be to the taste of purists, but any fan of the Trojan epic will find this delightful. I, for one, am hoping Dolan does The Odyssey next.
August 22, 2021
John Dolan claims that "Iliad" was meant to be told as a campfire story, rather than the didactic undergraduate text that most of us had to suffer through in college. I won't pretend to know how "Iliad" was meant to be presented, but Dolan's modern retelling is by far the most violent book I have ever read.
Against the background of blood, guts, broken skulls, ruptured organs and severed limbs the noble heroes and the commoners butcher each other mercilessly. Both the Greeks and the Trojans know how the story ends, but the slaughter must continue and duty must be fulfilled. Meanwhile the squabbling gods manipulate each other and the humans, and continue to animate and foment the conflict.
As I was reading, I couldn't help thinking about modern society's implicit assumption of agency and dispositionalism. Instead in "Iliad" there is a shared understanding that the final outcome of the war is predetermined, and yet any particular warrior's short-term survival and honor is a function of luck, skill and some minor god's sentiment that day. How are we to think of consciousness and free will in antiquity?
Luckily such questions didn't impinge on my consciousness for too long, all I had to do was turn the page and the gore of next arm-to-arm combat would monopolize my attention.
Against the background of blood, guts, broken skulls, ruptured organs and severed limbs the noble heroes and the commoners butcher each other mercilessly. Both the Greeks and the Trojans know how the story ends, but the slaughter must continue and duty must be fulfilled. Meanwhile the squabbling gods manipulate each other and the humans, and continue to animate and foment the conflict.
As I was reading, I couldn't help thinking about modern society's implicit assumption of agency and dispositionalism. Instead in "Iliad" there is a shared understanding that the final outcome of the war is predetermined, and yet any particular warrior's short-term survival and honor is a function of luck, skill and some minor god's sentiment that day. How are we to think of consciousness and free will in antiquity?
Luckily such questions didn't impinge on my consciousness for too long, all I had to do was turn the page and the gore of next arm-to-arm combat would monopolize my attention.
February 8, 2020
Tbh I'm not a huge fan of "modernising" adaptations but this one just really really worked for me. Outrageous, funny, and yet still poetic. I'm inspired to try a more "traditional" translation again - in part out of curiosity to see how it matches up with this one.
January 3, 2025
I'm not ashamed to admit that I took several runs at The Iliad (Fagles) and couldn't get through it until The War Nerd Iliad, which I read in two sittings, completely engrossed.
Not that I'm a scholar or something, but this is a translation of The Iliad that reads like a novel instead of an opportunity for a translator to show off his iambic chops or free verse chops or the written equivalent of one of those 90's guitar instrumentals.
I get that The Iliad was originally read aloud around camp fires and was probably in verse to make it easier to remember, but now modern man reads silently on subways and tries to avoid eye contact.
The Iliad is a story one needs to experience viscerally, not peer at from behind marble columns. And this is where Mr. Dolan really gets it right because you start out on a beach as Greeks are killing your brothers and humiliating your father. Before long you are slipping on blood and guts on the battlefield. Then you are hanging out in the realm of the Gods, listening to their constant bickering and drams. Before long you are worried for Hector, the best of all the mortals born of Troy, [Warning: 2,800-year-old spoiler] tricked by Athena, left alone with Achilles.
It's no more violent than your average video game, by which I mean it's pretty darn violent.
I'm giving it to my 14 year old son to read. Since he really liked the graphic novel Odyssey by Gareth Hinds, I'm pretty sure he'll like this.
Highly recommended. Great stocking stuffer for teenagers or someone who wanted to read a "classic" but couldn't find the handles on one.
If you have already read this book, then I highly recommend checking out The War Nerd, a collection of his columns, mostly from The Exile. And Pleasant Hell, a memoir about growing up in the East Bay town of Pleasant Hill and going to school in Berkeley.
Not that I'm a scholar or something, but this is a translation of The Iliad that reads like a novel instead of an opportunity for a translator to show off his iambic chops or free verse chops or the written equivalent of one of those 90's guitar instrumentals.
I get that The Iliad was originally read aloud around camp fires and was probably in verse to make it easier to remember, but now modern man reads silently on subways and tries to avoid eye contact.
The Iliad is a story one needs to experience viscerally, not peer at from behind marble columns. And this is where Mr. Dolan really gets it right because you start out on a beach as Greeks are killing your brothers and humiliating your father. Before long you are slipping on blood and guts on the battlefield. Then you are hanging out in the realm of the Gods, listening to their constant bickering and drams. Before long you are worried for Hector, the best of all the mortals born of Troy, [Warning: 2,800-year-old spoiler] tricked by Athena, left alone with Achilles.
It's no more violent than your average video game, by which I mean it's pretty darn violent.
I'm giving it to my 14 year old son to read. Since he really liked the graphic novel Odyssey by Gareth Hinds, I'm pretty sure he'll like this.
Highly recommended. Great stocking stuffer for teenagers or someone who wanted to read a "classic" but couldn't find the handles on one.
If you have already read this book, then I highly recommend checking out The War Nerd, a collection of his columns, mostly from The Exile. And Pleasant Hell, a memoir about growing up in the East Bay town of Pleasant Hill and going to school in Berkeley.
October 16, 2017
I confess that I never finished the Iliad when I was assigned it in high school. There seemed to be an interesting story somewhere in there, but the academic translation was impenetrable and life is too short to pretend to care about English class.
But the original work was never meant to be academic prose. It's one of the great cultural epics of all time, full of violent murder, gory deaths, cheating bastard gods, family squabbles, and low humor. It was one of the defining epics of a violent, mostly illiterate civilization. This version brings all that back to forefront. This is a story that people who actually fought wars with melee weapons would appreciate.
I advise anybody that likes violent war stories and dark humor to give it a try.
But the original work was never meant to be academic prose. It's one of the great cultural epics of all time, full of violent murder, gory deaths, cheating bastard gods, family squabbles, and low humor. It was one of the defining epics of a violent, mostly illiterate civilization. This version brings all that back to forefront. This is a story that people who actually fought wars with melee weapons would appreciate.
I advise anybody that likes violent war stories and dark humor to give it a try.
December 10, 2017
A raw, gruesome and occasionally very funny retelling of the Iliad—written in flawless prose. Couldn't put this down once I'd started. The gods turn out to be fascinating and weird, and the humans are nothing like us moderns. I also liked how Dolan sometimes inserts himself into the narrative to provide some backstory or explain some historical detail. If you're a 'war nerd', enjoy weird books or simply never got around to studying the Iliad because it seems too daunting, this is for you.
July 31, 2021
Translator John Dolan delivers a stripped down, punch ‘em up, knock ’em down, let the gods sort ‘em out telling of The Iliad. Nothing pretentious or snooty here: just war and gore, and a lot of laughs along the way.
It’s enough, by god, to reaffirm a fella’s faith and do the funky Western Civilization one more time.
It’s enough, by god, to reaffirm a fella’s faith and do the funky Western Civilization one more time.
January 16, 2019
John Dolans authorial voice comes through loud and clear
June 5, 2021
The War Nerd Iliad is a bit different from the previous version that I read (the one translated by Rieu) in that it diverges much more significantly from Homer's text, so that it's something between a translation and a retelling. As the title indicates, this is not just Homer's Iliad, it's a distinctively War Nerd-ish version of the Iliad.
In general, Dolan has added more exposition to the text. The motivations and feelings of the characters are described to a much greater extent than by Homer, which necessarily encodes interpretations into the text which go beyond what Homer says. For example, the book begins from the perspective of Chryseis, the Trojan girl who Agamemnon has taken captive, describing her anguish at being separated for her family and her disgust at Agamemnon. It is quite likely that this is how she would have felt, but there is nothing to explicitly indicate it in the original text, which in fact pays absolutely no attention to the perspective of Chryseis at all. This probably made sense for an ancient Greek audience, for whom it was simply a fact of life that girls were regularly abducted from their families and passed around between warlords as property, and there was little use in having much empathy for them; for the modern audience, this is a much stranger and emotionally affecting thing to read about, and we appreciate the storyteller affording it some more words, letting it sink in. So this is the kind of thing Dolan has done to make the story more compelling for modern readers. In general I think these additions are appropriate; while they cause the text to diverge, they serve to heighten the underlying fidelity to the story by compensating for the contextual disjunction between us and the original audience. There are probably some additions that are a bit more inventive than that, but none of them struck me as particularly inappropriate.
Besides additions there are also removals. The Homeric epithets are either gone, or altered to be less strange; for the final sentence, Rieu has "Such were the funeral rites of horse-taming Hector", while Dolan has "That was how they buried Hector, the best of men"---"the best of men" is a complete invention, and adds an opinion expressed in the narrator's voice that is not there in Homer (even if Homer does portray Hector quite positively), but it does sound more fitting to a modern reader. The Catalogue of Ships has been omitted, as have some of Nestor's speeches, replaced by lines like "Then Nestor gave a long and boring speech", which keeps the narrative flowing according to the expectations of a modern reader, even if I personally probably wouldn't have minded them remaining. One thing Dolan does generally preserve is the methodical cataloguing of precisely which people were killed, what part of the body was pierced through, which internal organs spilled out, etc., in the battle scenes.
In any case, I seem to have found it a lot easier to read than the Rieu translation; I think it took me a couple of weeks or so to get through the Rieu translation, since I would only read it in small chunks before getting bored, whereas Dolan has produced something that is a lot more "un-put-down-able" (I ended up finishing it in three days). (Of course you can never be sure this is due to the book itself---maybe I'm just less busy at the moment.)
In general, Dolan has added more exposition to the text. The motivations and feelings of the characters are described to a much greater extent than by Homer, which necessarily encodes interpretations into the text which go beyond what Homer says. For example, the book begins from the perspective of Chryseis, the Trojan girl who Agamemnon has taken captive, describing her anguish at being separated for her family and her disgust at Agamemnon. It is quite likely that this is how she would have felt, but there is nothing to explicitly indicate it in the original text, which in fact pays absolutely no attention to the perspective of Chryseis at all. This probably made sense for an ancient Greek audience, for whom it was simply a fact of life that girls were regularly abducted from their families and passed around between warlords as property, and there was little use in having much empathy for them; for the modern audience, this is a much stranger and emotionally affecting thing to read about, and we appreciate the storyteller affording it some more words, letting it sink in. So this is the kind of thing Dolan has done to make the story more compelling for modern readers. In general I think these additions are appropriate; while they cause the text to diverge, they serve to heighten the underlying fidelity to the story by compensating for the contextual disjunction between us and the original audience. There are probably some additions that are a bit more inventive than that, but none of them struck me as particularly inappropriate.
Besides additions there are also removals. The Homeric epithets are either gone, or altered to be less strange; for the final sentence, Rieu has "Such were the funeral rites of horse-taming Hector", while Dolan has "That was how they buried Hector, the best of men"---"the best of men" is a complete invention, and adds an opinion expressed in the narrator's voice that is not there in Homer (even if Homer does portray Hector quite positively), but it does sound more fitting to a modern reader. The Catalogue of Ships has been omitted, as have some of Nestor's speeches, replaced by lines like "Then Nestor gave a long and boring speech", which keeps the narrative flowing according to the expectations of a modern reader, even if I personally probably wouldn't have minded them remaining. One thing Dolan does generally preserve is the methodical cataloguing of precisely which people were killed, what part of the body was pierced through, which internal organs spilled out, etc., in the battle scenes.
In any case, I seem to have found it a lot easier to read than the Rieu translation; I think it took me a couple of weeks or so to get through the Rieu translation, since I would only read it in small chunks before getting bored, whereas Dolan has produced something that is a lot more "un-put-down-able" (I ended up finishing it in three days). (Of course you can never be sure this is due to the book itself---maybe I'm just less busy at the moment.)
November 14, 2024
I absolutely loved this book. For anyone who has trouble understanding/appreciating Greek literature, READ THIS BOOK. I found the narrative style to be incredibly engaging and exciting. I'm not usually a fan of war novels, but this book was interesting and enjoyable throughout.
March 30, 2019
When I read this when I was younger, I rooted for Zeus and the Greeks. On a second read, the Greeks are huge jerks, and I find the Trojans rather nice. Paris is one of the greatest idiots of history. Glad that Dolan was able to turn this into a short, readable version. DON'T GIVE ANYONE THE APPLE.
December 5, 2017
the iliad as Evil Dead 5
August 28, 2021
The idea of a prose version of the Iliad seemed so strange to me... But it worked! And it highlighted aspects that I really hadn't considered before
February 10, 2018
Tremendous -- crisp, clear prose chock full of gore, grime, lust, and terror. This isn't poetry, and it doesn't feel like a faithful rendering of the original Greek. No "Sing, goddess, the anger..." here. Instead, Dolan helps us to understand the jokes (and there are some!), the mechanics and details of archaic warfare, the hierarchy and mores of proto-Greek society. He also puts the smoke, dirt, shit, and fear back in combat, something that the flowery prose of an Alexander Pope, say, might hide from modern eyes.
Not for everybody, but this is a great re-telling of a foundational text of Western civilization. It's weird and alien and funny and horrifying, and it's worth your time.
Some snippets that stood out:
* On single combat prior to a day's fighting.
"There’s a ritual to this, a proper way to start the day’s fight. The armies don’t run at each other immediately; that would be uncivilized. First, there must be single combat, a quaint old custom from the days before men learned to make barley. Back in those days, warriors were scarce resources. You spent them one at a time. When one band met another, the best man from one band stepped out and so did his opposite number, and everyone else stood and watched to see who killed who. It was a good way to keep from wasting a whole generation in one battle. A warrior costs so much to raise. But these days towns are growing, warriors are cheap, and these single combats are really just an opening act. Whoever wins, Trojans and Greeks will end up attacking each other, and men will die in hundreds. Still, the ritual must be followed. It’s a matter of pride: Our best can kill your best."
* Why did the Homeric Greeks love spears so much?
"He pulls out his sword and lunges. But swords are bad weapons; the metal-workers haven’t really got it figured out yet, the tech support isn’t there yet. When you hit someone on the helmet, the sword usually … Menelaos’ sword hits Paris on the helmet, and shatters."
* The economics of head protection, and poor Ekepolas.
"For now, the Trojans’ big shields are holding. A few of their men are down, but as long as the shield wall holds, the Greeks can’t do much damage. The Greeks need someone to charge, break that wall. Antilokas tries first. He runs at the Trojan shields and slams his spear right into the forehead of Ekepolas, who’s holding his shield a little low. Antilokas’ spear point goes through the thin metal of the helmet (metal is expensive, and bronze is heavy, so helmets are thin), then through skin, skull, brain. The world goes dark for Ekepolas."
* Maybe Dolan is an anti-poet?
"Hektor jumps up, grabs the chariot reins, and rides right through the Greeks, killing as he goes. Some he tramples, others he spits on his spear, others he hacks with his sword in passing, as if he was lopping branches while driving through an orchard. The chariot bounces over corpses, and the blood and juices splash up, marking the wheels, even the sides of the cart. Bodies pop like gourds, foul gases squirt out with the bile."
* Are eagles-clutching-snakes a universal? I've only encountered this in Aztec myth before.
"But Hektor’s party sees something that makes them stop dead, halfway across the ditch. It’s an eagle flapping slowly over them with a snake in its talons. The snake is blood red."
* The warrior class understands how they earn their keep.
'Sarpedon drags his friend Glaukos up to the wall, shouting, “We must break through! Nobles, lead the way! War is when we nobles earn our meat, when we show our peasants why they feed us!" '
* I don't think I'm particularly squeamish, but some of the deaths we encounter are difficult to read about. There are any number of young people being murdered and mutilated. Life was cheap.
"Penelos calmly yanks his spear out of the eye, takes out his sword, and chops off Iliones’ head and holds it up, showing it to jeering Greeks, then Trojans. He turns the bloody face close to his own and says, “Why, it’s the rich boy, Iliones!” Then he turns the severed head toward the Trojans and says, “Iliones says, ‘Tell Mother and Father I won’t be coming home! And tell my wife not to make dinner for me!’” As the Greeks laugh, Penelos tosses the head toward the Trojans and roars, “And he says you’ll all be joining him any day now!” The Trojans feel their knees go soft as water."
* Of course, life was also expensive? A paradox, really.
"With Hippotoas suddenly half-blind, stumbling awkwardly, Ajax has time for a perfect spear-thrust into the head. The spearhead punches through helmet, skull, and brain, so hard that Ajax’s spear hand slams into Hippotoas’ helmet. Hippotoas’ parents never got any return on all the food they gave their boy. You can spend all that money raising a young man and then lose your profit in one moment to an enemy spear. There’s no riskier investment."
* For all that he's revered and covered in glory, this is how Achilles wins his fame. He's a cold-blooded butcher.
"Likaon understands at last that he’s going to die. He drops his arms and goes silent. Akilles stands over him, picking his spot. He’s fascinated by the big sobbing breaths; catching their rhythm, he darts the sword-point inside the collarbone just as the lungs are expanding, to pop the heart like a wine-skin."
* Human sacrifice, a remnant of an earlier age. Also, see butcher, above.
"Then the Trojans, human sacrifices. Some of the others are uneasy about this. It’s a little old-fashioned, extreme. But no one feels like quarreling with Akilles at the moment. The twelve Trojans he took alive are fine boys—just boys; Troy, short on manpower, has been filling its ranks with children. The boys stare terrified at the giant who drags them, roped at the neck, to the pyre. He stabs each one in the heart, chops the rope that tied him to the coffle, and throws the body onto the edge of the woodpile. The boys die silently."
* Humor, and also an example of the extent to which the gods interfere in human activity.
"But Athena isn’t done with her pranks. She’s so offended with Ajax for daring to race against her dear Odysseus, that she trips him near the finish line. He falls face-first into a pile of cow guts left over from the sacrifices. The men fall over themselves laughing at the sight of him skidding through half-digested grass, popping gut-tubes and getting up spitting cow dung out of his mouth."
Not for everybody, but this is a great re-telling of a foundational text of Western civilization. It's weird and alien and funny and horrifying, and it's worth your time.
Some snippets that stood out:
* On single combat prior to a day's fighting.
"There’s a ritual to this, a proper way to start the day’s fight. The armies don’t run at each other immediately; that would be uncivilized. First, there must be single combat, a quaint old custom from the days before men learned to make barley. Back in those days, warriors were scarce resources. You spent them one at a time. When one band met another, the best man from one band stepped out and so did his opposite number, and everyone else stood and watched to see who killed who. It was a good way to keep from wasting a whole generation in one battle. A warrior costs so much to raise. But these days towns are growing, warriors are cheap, and these single combats are really just an opening act. Whoever wins, Trojans and Greeks will end up attacking each other, and men will die in hundreds. Still, the ritual must be followed. It’s a matter of pride: Our best can kill your best."
* Why did the Homeric Greeks love spears so much?
"He pulls out his sword and lunges. But swords are bad weapons; the metal-workers haven’t really got it figured out yet, the tech support isn’t there yet. When you hit someone on the helmet, the sword usually … Menelaos’ sword hits Paris on the helmet, and shatters."
* The economics of head protection, and poor Ekepolas.
"For now, the Trojans’ big shields are holding. A few of their men are down, but as long as the shield wall holds, the Greeks can’t do much damage. The Greeks need someone to charge, break that wall. Antilokas tries first. He runs at the Trojan shields and slams his spear right into the forehead of Ekepolas, who’s holding his shield a little low. Antilokas’ spear point goes through the thin metal of the helmet (metal is expensive, and bronze is heavy, so helmets are thin), then through skin, skull, brain. The world goes dark for Ekepolas."
* Maybe Dolan is an anti-poet?
"Hektor jumps up, grabs the chariot reins, and rides right through the Greeks, killing as he goes. Some he tramples, others he spits on his spear, others he hacks with his sword in passing, as if he was lopping branches while driving through an orchard. The chariot bounces over corpses, and the blood and juices splash up, marking the wheels, even the sides of the cart. Bodies pop like gourds, foul gases squirt out with the bile."
* Are eagles-clutching-snakes a universal? I've only encountered this in Aztec myth before.
"But Hektor’s party sees something that makes them stop dead, halfway across the ditch. It’s an eagle flapping slowly over them with a snake in its talons. The snake is blood red."
* The warrior class understands how they earn their keep.
'Sarpedon drags his friend Glaukos up to the wall, shouting, “We must break through! Nobles, lead the way! War is when we nobles earn our meat, when we show our peasants why they feed us!" '
* I don't think I'm particularly squeamish, but some of the deaths we encounter are difficult to read about. There are any number of young people being murdered and mutilated. Life was cheap.
"Penelos calmly yanks his spear out of the eye, takes out his sword, and chops off Iliones’ head and holds it up, showing it to jeering Greeks, then Trojans. He turns the bloody face close to his own and says, “Why, it’s the rich boy, Iliones!” Then he turns the severed head toward the Trojans and says, “Iliones says, ‘Tell Mother and Father I won’t be coming home! And tell my wife not to make dinner for me!’” As the Greeks laugh, Penelos tosses the head toward the Trojans and roars, “And he says you’ll all be joining him any day now!” The Trojans feel their knees go soft as water."
* Of course, life was also expensive? A paradox, really.
"With Hippotoas suddenly half-blind, stumbling awkwardly, Ajax has time for a perfect spear-thrust into the head. The spearhead punches through helmet, skull, and brain, so hard that Ajax’s spear hand slams into Hippotoas’ helmet. Hippotoas’ parents never got any return on all the food they gave their boy. You can spend all that money raising a young man and then lose your profit in one moment to an enemy spear. There’s no riskier investment."
* For all that he's revered and covered in glory, this is how Achilles wins his fame. He's a cold-blooded butcher.
"Likaon understands at last that he’s going to die. He drops his arms and goes silent. Akilles stands over him, picking his spot. He’s fascinated by the big sobbing breaths; catching their rhythm, he darts the sword-point inside the collarbone just as the lungs are expanding, to pop the heart like a wine-skin."
* Human sacrifice, a remnant of an earlier age. Also, see butcher, above.
"Then the Trojans, human sacrifices. Some of the others are uneasy about this. It’s a little old-fashioned, extreme. But no one feels like quarreling with Akilles at the moment. The twelve Trojans he took alive are fine boys—just boys; Troy, short on manpower, has been filling its ranks with children. The boys stare terrified at the giant who drags them, roped at the neck, to the pyre. He stabs each one in the heart, chops the rope that tied him to the coffle, and throws the body onto the edge of the woodpile. The boys die silently."
* Humor, and also an example of the extent to which the gods interfere in human activity.
"But Athena isn’t done with her pranks. She’s so offended with Ajax for daring to race against her dear Odysseus, that she trips him near the finish line. He falls face-first into a pile of cow guts left over from the sacrifices. The men fall over themselves laughing at the sight of him skidding through half-digested grass, popping gut-tubes and getting up spitting cow dung out of his mouth."
August 26, 2019
Yes, I read The Iliad in college and mostly I forgot all the things in it and remembered just sort of a general fog about it when my professor was not talking about it. I liked to hear my professor talk about it, though. It was a good class, I'm just a little thick. John Dolan knows this about me and it is why he, uh, abridged the Catalog of Ships.
So, a couple of takeaways from this reading:
1) Agamemnon was the biggest dumb-dumb of just a plethora of dumb-dumbs, but he got to be in charge. Whenever you feel like you got impostor syndrome, remember that. You'll feel better. "That idiot led a whole-ass army extremely badly and still won a war. I can certainly, therefore, give this damn presentation and not get fired from my job."
2) I always thought the idea of putting Medusa's head on a shield had to be kind of awkward. But this book reminded me that gods are, just, like, real big. Real big. So, the shield would also be real big -- big enough that a human head covered in snakes would about do for the boss in the middle. This is the least important thing anyone could learn from Homer's classic epic poem, but I did learn it.
I have no opinions on where this telling of the story fits in the educational realm, but the author's intention was to take the old story and make it entertaining to the modern English speaking reader. In this I think he succeeds. Good job, John!
So, a couple of takeaways from this reading:
1) Agamemnon was the biggest dumb-dumb of just a plethora of dumb-dumbs, but he got to be in charge. Whenever you feel like you got impostor syndrome, remember that. You'll feel better. "That idiot led a whole-ass army extremely badly and still won a war. I can certainly, therefore, give this damn presentation and not get fired from my job."
2) I always thought the idea of putting Medusa's head on a shield had to be kind of awkward. But this book reminded me that gods are, just, like, real big. Real big. So, the shield would also be real big -- big enough that a human head covered in snakes would about do for the boss in the middle. This is the least important thing anyone could learn from Homer's classic epic poem, but I did learn it.
I have no opinions on where this telling of the story fits in the educational realm, but the author's intention was to take the old story and make it entertaining to the modern English speaking reader. In this I think he succeeds. Good job, John!
May 19, 2018
Probably the best description comes from the translator himself, War Nerd John Dolan: "You may have heard of this story as something called The Iliad, found only on undergraduate syllabi. But this story was never meant as a textbook. This is a campfire story, the greatest of all tal tales. It moves easily from tone to tone—from raw slapstick comedy, to ultraviolence that makes Clockwork Orange seem like a panto for Eton lads, to hard-earned pathos that will moisten your mucous membranes whether you like it or not."
April 9, 2025
I love the voice Dolan writes in, and the sardonic, sarcastic tone he is so well known for translates surprisingly well from the misery of 90s Russia and contemporary conflicts to the misery of warfare in antiquity. Far more compelling than the book I remember slogging through in high school, with just enough mocking contempt directed at its subjects to make it genuinely funny at times.
February 15, 2020
Superb retelling (not a new translation) of Homer in contemporary language and in the style of 'campfire stories'. Really conveys the brutality and sheer alien nature of life in the Bronze Age. and brings the old stories vibrantly to life. I mean who can resist the description of Zeus as a 'horndog'?
May 27, 2018
I love the Radio War Nerd podcast, but this is one of the worst books I've ever read.
December 27, 2019
I like John Dolan's short form writing/podcasting work (as The War Nerd), so I freely admit bias here. As a translation, it feels like a 5-star adaptation that takes a work that's foreign in time and place and transports it as eminently understandable to a contemporary American audience. But I don't have the experience with other translations and a particularly deep understanding of the surrounding mythology to really be a great judge of its quality in adhering to/properly explaining the original text. However, it all felt eminently readable and enjoyable to a modern-day reader while still imparting useful cultural cues throughout.
Dolan's choice to move from verse to prose makes the whole thing enjoyable and natural - it's useful to have modern translations that don't adhere to pre-modern literary structures. From my uninitiated perspective, it's hard to tell whether Dolan or Homer has a soft spot for the Trojans. While perhaps its a modern day affection for the underdog, they come out as more cultured, more diverse, and more well-behaved than the rowdy Greeks. You feel empathy for their plight, and on the other side, as a reader I palpably felt disgust at some of the crassness of the Greek leadership.
The Iliad itself is a book I hadn't read before, though I know most of the story through abridged versions and other media. I didn't realize how much the Gods interfered throughout every piece of the story nor the tremendous level of explicit violence in the battle scenes. Because it is a "classic" it's hard to rate as a reading experience. As a modern reader, I probably wouldn't want as many pages extolling the details of Hephaestus' shield for Achilles, but the presence of that description is a hint about the values of the culture who created and remembered this story (and Dolan does a good job keeping the description moving forward). So even things that I'd ding a modern story for end up being culturally relevant windows to the past. So if you're interested in the ancient Greeks, this is a 5 star story and a 5 star translation. And Dolan keeps it funny as well, which is an achievement in translating humor to a story from another culture separated by two millenia!
However, as I don't care that much about the ancient Greeks, I don't think I can give it a full 5 stars for me personally. It's a fascinating and important cultural artifact as well as a gripping and exciting war story, but there have been many battles and many sieges throughout history and many works written about ancient Greece. It's important that it exists, and it's great to have this resource in particular as a readable and understandable version. But I don't know if it's important/meaningful/insightful for anyone in particular to read the (War Nerd) Iliad unless you're already interested in the subject at hand or, like me, just want a fun romp through the past (which I got in spades).
Dolan's choice to move from verse to prose makes the whole thing enjoyable and natural - it's useful to have modern translations that don't adhere to pre-modern literary structures. From my uninitiated perspective, it's hard to tell whether Dolan or Homer has a soft spot for the Trojans. While perhaps its a modern day affection for the underdog, they come out as more cultured, more diverse, and more well-behaved than the rowdy Greeks. You feel empathy for their plight, and on the other side, as a reader I palpably felt disgust at some of the crassness of the Greek leadership.
The Iliad itself is a book I hadn't read before, though I know most of the story through abridged versions and other media. I didn't realize how much the Gods interfered throughout every piece of the story nor the tremendous level of explicit violence in the battle scenes. Because it is a "classic" it's hard to rate as a reading experience. As a modern reader, I probably wouldn't want as many pages extolling the details of Hephaestus' shield for Achilles, but the presence of that description is a hint about the values of the culture who created and remembered this story (and Dolan does a good job keeping the description moving forward). So even things that I'd ding a modern story for end up being culturally relevant windows to the past. So if you're interested in the ancient Greeks, this is a 5 star story and a 5 star translation. And Dolan keeps it funny as well, which is an achievement in translating humor to a story from another culture separated by two millenia!
However, as I don't care that much about the ancient Greeks, I don't think I can give it a full 5 stars for me personally. It's a fascinating and important cultural artifact as well as a gripping and exciting war story, but there have been many battles and many sieges throughout history and many works written about ancient Greece. It's important that it exists, and it's great to have this resource in particular as a readable and understandable version. But I don't know if it's important/meaningful/insightful for anyone in particular to read the (War Nerd) Iliad unless you're already interested in the subject at hand or, like me, just want a fun romp through the past (which I got in spades).
January 6, 2023
Dolan’s rendition of the Iliad is quite an impressive feat- written in plain English, though not exactly in an unreadable way (such as the infamous no fear Shakespeare) or with too many personal flourishes. Rather, it modernizes the myth in tasteful way, bringing out the campfire story spirit it was meant to evoke for its listeners. (not readers!) It was ultimately a good choice to switch out often stiff “epic poetic” writing in favor of prose, thus allowing the reader better understand. Of course most of that is paraphrasing the introduction, but it is quite a fun read, that brings life to characters all too often rendered flat. It has an episodic feel to it- likely the result of its original telling being done in multiple sessions, rather than one sitting. The scenes are gory and random, with characters introduced at their deaths and mourned or mocked briefly. It helped me to better appreciate Greek mythology as well- something I’ve often felt the need to distance myself from out of embarrassment from its enthusiasts, on the left and right. One noteworthy problem though, is that Achilles and Patroclus aren’t gay enough. This can probably be chalked up to Dolan’s old, old background in academia, and though he is ostensibly left- I’m not sure on some of his opinions on how gay this time period and its stories actually were.
May 29, 2018
This book unashamedly sets out to rescue the Iliad from academe. This is a very necessary task as Homer has been mugged by the fanatics of multifocalisers, gender theorists and other such people who weren't exactly that common in the eighth century BC (lucky eighth century....) What we have isn't really a translation, but a paraphrase with interesting material thrown in as we go along. It works brilliantly - the drive of the poem is brought out in a magnificent fashion. As Nolan rightly points out, poetry is an outdated medium so this Iliad is in modern prose. Sadly that means no Achilles swift of foot, wine dark sea, owl eyed Athena etc, but unlike the anaemic Rieu Penguin edition here you can see why epithets have been suppressed and agree. There are some super touches like the living worms on the scales of Fate and the notion of souls falling to Hades. I also enjoyed Poseidon a great deal. Some things didn't work quite as well for me - I thought more could have been made of Apollo in battle, but his general characterisation was excellent, as was that of the Gods in general. If you like classics and like to hear it speak to the world not a tiny clique, read this book.
June 28, 2018
This was a bit of a strange read. I'm familiar with the Iliad, as anybody is in the Western world, I expect, who went to a half-decent school. But we actually read the Odyssey.
So I was genuinely absorbing all of the details of the story while also trying to reconcile the style of John Dolan's writing.
To be clear, it's quite good! It's many times easier to read than the weird English translations I remember from school. And Dolan actually sort of contextualized a lot of behavior of the gods in a way that I actually understood.
In the more classical translations that I remember, you're always sort of wondering if things don't make sense because of a major cultural difference or a misunderstanding about Homer's intentions with the gods or just because the prose is bad. This is much more clear.
But as clear as it is, it feels like he maybe could have done more to beef up his telling of the story. It's fairly rote as far as I can tell, but I actually kind of wish he took more liberties for the sake of telling a more complete story.
So I was genuinely absorbing all of the details of the story while also trying to reconcile the style of John Dolan's writing.
To be clear, it's quite good! It's many times easier to read than the weird English translations I remember from school. And Dolan actually sort of contextualized a lot of behavior of the gods in a way that I actually understood.
In the more classical translations that I remember, you're always sort of wondering if things don't make sense because of a major cultural difference or a misunderstanding about Homer's intentions with the gods or just because the prose is bad. This is much more clear.
But as clear as it is, it feels like he maybe could have done more to beef up his telling of the story. It's fairly rote as far as I can tell, but I actually kind of wish he took more liberties for the sake of telling a more complete story.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 84 reviews