The Iliad

De: Homer, Stephen Mitchell - translator

Narrado por: Alfred Molina

From the renowned translator of Rilke, Tao Te Ching, and Gilgamesh, a vivid new translation of Western civilization’s foundational epic: The Iliad.

Tolstoy called the Iliad a miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment. Homer’s story is thrilling, and his Greek is perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever sung or written. But until now, even the best English translations haven’t been able to re-create the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace, and pulsing rhythm of the original. Now, thanks to the power of Stephen Mitchell’s language, the Iliad’s ancient story comes to moving, vivid new life, and we are carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful.

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

Excellent translation

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Absolutely! Alfred Molina is every bit as good as a narrator as he is an actor. His talent helps add to the power of the Iliad.

Have you listened to any of Alfred Molina’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Absolutely masterful. I've always appreciated him and do so even more having heard his reading skill. He is melodious, powerful, and sensitive to every aspect of this epic novel.

Masterpiece!

If you have never fallen in love with The Iliad, please listen to this right now, and hear the story the way the ancient Greeks did. Enthralling story telling about the human experience, not just a war book. And the narrator is a master, too.

Loved it!

Hard and arduous I've tried to read this before, but this read like butter. Extraordinary. Look forward to reading Mitchell's translation of other works!

Grit & Guts

After 100+ audiobooks on Audible, I’ve finally found the best! This timeless story is delivered with such forcefulness by Molina that the words have a thickness which can be chewed. I’ve never gritted my teeth during an audiobook until now. Molina has a delivery which drips in swagger one moment and rage the next. You can feel the sand from the beaches of Troy in his throat. Achilles’ disgust with everything around him is visceral and biting to the say the least, thanks to Mitchell’s translation.
I can’t recommend this enough. If you’ve only ever dabbled in Homer, start here. If you’re squeamish, look elsewhere.

The spirit of the epic, reinterpreted

The last time I experienced the Iliad was when I had to read it as a freshman in high school. It was interesting to return to it with a more adult perspective, and to appreciate Homer's poetic imagery; the ancient ideals of heroic conduct; the timeless tragedy of war and human pride; and the way the ancient mind saw gods as capricious meddlers in human affairs, reaching down to bestir or chill the warrior's heart, or to guide a weapon towards or away from its target. To what extent Homer's audience really believed in the gods of his tale, or recognized them as dramatizations, is unclear to me. Yet, the genius of his story is that the audience can see it both ways. For generations of listeners, this tale must have stood like a Colossus with one foot in the real, solid world and one foot in the mists of myth.

Mitchell's translation aims to capture the way the Iliad was meant to be told: read aloud with feeling. He does so by stripping away a lot of the archaic phrasing and epithets that I remember from high school, leaving behind verse that's simple, tight, dynamic, and speaks directly to modern listeners. Some readers, of course, will be offended by his presumptuousness at "editing" a classic, but others will appreciate his efforts to make the passions of the story more accessible. A good litmus test is the scene where a soldier admonishes Paris as a "sissy" -- do you read that as a coarse, stinging insult (as was intended by the speaker), or a flagrant anachronism? (Most of the language isn't so "modern", but that was a more noticeable example.)

If you can roll with the "spirit of the work" interpretation, then Alfred Molina's masculine but sensitive audiobook performance is a great fit, capturing the frantic motion of combat, the smoldering resentment of Achilles, the feckless golden-boy attitude of Paris, and the anguish of Priam. No longer the dusty archetypes I remember from English class, the characters now come to life as human and flawed.