The Iliad

Man seduces another's wife then kidnaps her. The husband and his brother get a gang together to steal her back and take revenge. The woman regrets being seduced and wants to escape whilst the man's entourage resent the position they have been placed in. Yet the battle lines have been drawn and there is no going back...

Not the plot of the latest Hollywood thriller, but the basis of The Iliad - the Greek classic that details the war between the Greeks and the Trojans after the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta. Based on the recent, superb M.L West edition of the Greek, this Iliad is more readable and moving than any previous version. Thanks to the scholarship and poetic power of the highly acclaimed Stephen Mitchell, this new translation recreates the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace and continual thrust and pull of the original, while the Iliad's ancient story bursts vividly into life.

“Well-forged and clean-limbed, the excised epithets will be a loss to some; to others a judicious cut.”

The verse is well-forged and clean-limbed, pulsing along in an unobtrusive pentameter...Mitchell has re-energised it for a new generation SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
A sturdy, muscular, and nuanced translation that will surely bring many new readers to this great work, "one of the monuments of our own magnificence", in Stephen Mitchell's happy formulation -- John Banville
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Stephen Mitchell is a bestselling translator. His translation of Gilgamesh sold over 800,000 copies in the States and was described by Harold Pinter as 'a revelation'. He also received great acclaim for his translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus and the Book of Job. He was educated at Amherst College, the Sorbonne and Yale University.

Man seduces another's wife then kidnaps her. The husband and his brother get a gang together to steal her back and take revenge. The woman regrets being seduced and wants to escape whilst the man's entourage resent the position they have been placed in. Yet the battle lines have been drawn and there is no going back...Not the plot of the latest Hollywood thriller, but the basis of The Iliad - the Greek classic that details the war between the Greeks and the Trojans after the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta. Based on the recent, superb M.L West edition of the Greek, this Iliad is more readable and moving than any previous version. Thanks to the scholarship and poetic power of the highly acclaimed Stephen Mitchell, this new translation recreates the energy and simplicity, the speed, grace and continual thrust and pull of the original, while the Iliad's ancient story bursts vividly into life.

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