Translations of the most seminal work in Greek literature (and possibly in Western literature) abound. It would be hyperbole to equate the task of naming them with the “δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ᾿” (Hom. Il.2.489, “ten tongues and mouths”) needed for the catalogue of ships, but there are a lot of translations out there. Jeffrey Duban offers a classical translation largely distinguished by “an intermittently archaizing diction and style responsive to the [poem’s] extreme antiquity” (p. xli). The classical in the title is a reaction to modern translations that, in Duban’s view, lose the feel of the original through the illusory aim of rendering Homer as contemporary as possible. But while the language is meant to feel old-fashioned, the approach is not, since Duban claims innovation through his creative (“art-making” p. xlii) diction and novel twelve-syllable metre. How this “newness in venerability” (p. xl) comes across to the reader is my main concern in this review.
Much of the Introduction presents the rationale behind the translation, supported by linguistic detail that may seem rather fine-grained (e.g., particles, the subjunctive mood) for a reader without Greek. Certainly, translations such as Wilson (2023) and the revised Rieu (2003) provide much fuller background on the narrative and historical context of the Iliad, although Duban’s website, Poem of Troy includes a succinct overview of the Homeric Question. The Introduction elaborates the case for a translation that aims to mirror rather than compensate for the antiquity of Homer, while taking a swipe at what Duban (p. 8) calls the “Yo, Achilles” approach. The premise is that the Iliad would have seemed obscure even to a classical audience of native ancient Greek speakers; the existence of glossai, the first what can be styled commentaries on Homer (Bierl et al., 2015), for problematic lexis proves the point. The Introduction details concrete mechanisms for translating this stylistic effect, explored as follows.
The most striking feature, to respect the tradition of the poem and its reception through the ages, is archaism. Duban’s own example (p. 13) is his description from book 2 (Il.2.222-223) of Thersites, the ugliest man in the Iliad, as “Disdained by the Danaans, held in their despite” [emphasis added]. The OED marks despite the noun as obsolete or archaic. Duban considers the archaism to be “dictionally heightened” (p. 13), but the effect is not used in isolation. Despite contributes to the translation’s /d/ alliteration (“Disdained…Danaans…despite”) and allows for syntactic parallelism with two participle clauses (“Disdained…held…) in asyndeton. This combination of lexical choice, syntactical arrangement and alliteration marks what Duban intends as an elevated translation style.
In effect, Duban is positioning himself as foreignizing rather than domesticating translation, in the sense of accentuating the value of what is alien to the reader’s contemporary experience (Munday, 2012). In diachronic translation, archaism is a well-established strategy for foreignizing, as highlighted by Venuti (1998) in his rendering of a Gothic Italian text into English. Venuti credits his use of archaism with “[immersing] the reader in a world that is noticeably distant in time” (p. 27), producing an effect of strangeness without sacrificing comprehensibility. This tension between strangeness and comprehensibility is on occasion taken to its limits by Duban. While individual words and phrases such as “comely” (περικαλλές), depicting Nestor’s cup (Il.11.632), and “thrice confounded” (τρὶς δὲ κυκήθησαν) (Il.18.229), the Trojans’ triple panic at Achilles’ three war cries, are readily decipherable in context and well motivated, “comely cup” being alliterative, and “confounded” through its Latin ancestor confundere close semantically to the root verb κυκάω, the accumulative effect can be challenging, particularly in conjunction with non-canonical word order. Take the formulaic introduction to a speech, “Answered him Helen of thundering Zeus begot” (Il.3.199). The participle “begot” is obsolete and follows its complement, “of thundering Zeus”, which permits the alliteration of “him Helen” but is grammatically convoluted. To pursue foreignization and stress the otherness of Homer, Duban is prepared to manipulate the full range of language options, lexical (archaism), syntactical (non-canonicity) and phonological (alliteration).
An innovative aspect of this translation is the twelve-syllable line, credited with allowing more flexibility to the line because of its length and variable metre. To illustrate, Duban gives the opening verse of the Iliad a trochaic (stressed-unstressed) rhythm “Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles”, while the sixth line, “From when the two contending parted first as foes” is iambic (unstressed-stressed). Indeed, probably the most interesting material in the Introduction is on metre. Acknowledging that no English metre can approximate the dactylic hexameter because the phonological realisation is different, Greek meter is measured by syllable length, English by syllable stress, Duban aims to recreate the flow of the poetry in the oral resources available to English. Chief amongst these, as in the “comely cup” example, is alliteration. But for Duban, alliteration goes beyond sound effect. He provides convincing examples of how alliteration achieves coherence by semantic association as in the gruesome “χύντο χαμαὶ χολάδες” (Il. 4.526, “spilled to the ground his intestines”). Presumably, the /d/ in “spilled” would be devoiced to /t/, through the regressive assimilation characteristic of connected speech, to mirror the alliteration (“spilled/intestines”). It is difficult to appreciate metre through lines written on a page, so Duban’s attention to poetic form is tribute to the Iliad as oral performance, which is consistent with his aim of highlighting the poem as an artefact of historical tradition.
To illustrate the translation through an extended passage, I have chosen the famous scene in book 6 where Hector and Andromache converse. Hector responds to Andromache’s angst over the war and pleads for him to be more cautious.
Τὴν δ᾿ αὖτε προσέειπε μέγας κορυθαίολος Ἕκτωρ·
“ἦ καὶ ἐμοὶ τάδε πάντα μέλει, γύναι· ἀλλὰ μάλ᾿ αἰνῶς
αἰδέομαι Τρῶας καὶ Τρῳάδας ἑλκεσιπέπλους,
αἴ κε κακὸς ὣς νόσφιν ἀλυσκάζω πολέμοιο·
οὐδέ με θυμὸς ἄνωγεν, ἐπεὶ μάθον ἔμμεναι ἐσθλὸς
αἰεὶ καὶ πρώτοισι μετὰ Τρώεσσι μάχεσθαι,
ἀρνύμενος πατρός τε μέγα κλέος ἠδ᾿ ἐμὸν αὐτοῦ.
εὖ γὰρ ἐγὼ τόδε οἶδα κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν·
ἔσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτ᾿ ἄν ποτ᾿ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐυμμελίω Πριάμοιο. (Il.6.440-449)Then responded great flashing-helmeted Hector:
“Woman, I too to these matters attend; indeed,
I were shamed by the Trojans and trailing-mantled
Trojan wives were I to vacillate and cower,
Avoiding war; nor thus does my spirit propose,
As I have learnt ever valiant to be, fighting
Foremost amongst the Trojans, garnering glory
For my acclaimed ancestry and for myself.
For this to a certainty I conclude: the day
Will come when hallowed Ilium shall leveled lie.(p. 196, ll. 490-499)
Here there is plenty of evidence of what, for the sake of “newness in venerability”, Duban refers to as elevated style. Lexically, there are adventurous vocabulary choices such as the compound “trailing-mantled” and doublet “vacillate and cower”. Grammatically, word order is rearranged for impact: in “For this to a certainty I conclude”, to conclude with the verb “conclude”, linguistic iconicity, creates a tension before the final pronouncement, excusing the rather bureaucratic-sounding phraseology. The fatefulness of the last line is further brought out by the emphatic alliteration “hallowed Ilium shall leveled lie”. On the other hand, the alliteration in “garnering glory” and “acclaimed ancestry” seems to over-stretch the meaning as the Greek simply says “seeking to gain great glory for my father and myself”. Maintaining the elevated style can come at the cost of a literal translation, but it meets Pope’s (1783) criterion in the preface to his translation that “the fire of the poem is what a translator should principally regard” (p. 23).
It would be remiss not to test Duban against competing translations, and Poem of Troy compares his translation of the poem’s opening seven lines with those of Lattimore (1951), Fitzgerald (1974), Fagles (1990), and Wilson (2023). It is informative to see a direct line-by-line comparison, although Duban’s commentary can be overparticular. For instance, Duban is correct that Fitzgerald’s “the will of Zeus was done” is an imprecise translation of the Greek imperfect (1.5 ἐτελείετο “was being done”), but Duban’s own translation, “Zeus’ intent advanced”, does not feature the imperfect aspect, and the active verb does not mirror the Greek middle-passive. Only Fagles represents the imperfect, “the will of Zeus was moving toward its end”, but Fagles’ free verse is too free for Duban’s liking. Duban reserves most respect for Lattimore’s six-beat translation where each line corresponds to its Greek equivalent. Tellingly, Lattimore’s first line, “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles”, only differs from Duban’s in using “anger” rather than the more archaic “wrath” (Wilson’s preference is for wrath too.) I would venture that of the translations cited here, Duban is the most conscious of the antiquity of the poem, chiefly realised by an archaism that is creative but can appear idiosyncratic.
The least I can say about Homer’s Iliad in a classical translation is to concur with a previous reviewer’s comment (Beale, 2025) that “[i]t’s certainly different.” Not different for the sake of being different, but different because of a commitment to preserving the otherness of the Iliad that even ancient audiences would have experienced. Duban’s rendering is an ambitious attempt, largely successful, to break away from translations promising the illusion of contemporary resonance and instead offer “newness in venerability” through a style that is innovative in its use of archaism and other poetic effects. It is more a literary than literal translation, as you would expect with verse rather than prose, so it seems very suitable positioned within that loose category of reading for pleasure. However, it would also be of interest to students consulting a range of translations to elucidate language and meaning. Those just curious should find their curiosity rewarded.
References
Beale, (2025, July 18). Review of the book Homer’s Iliad in a Classical Translation, by J. M. Duran. Classics for All. https://classicsforall.org.uk/reading-room/book-reviews/homers-iliad-classical-translation
Bierl, A., Latacz, J., & Olson, S. D. (Eds.). (2015). Homer’s Iliad: The Basel commentary. Prolegomena (B. W. Millis & S. Strack, Trans.; Contributions by F. Graf et al.). De Gruyter.
Duban, J. M. (Trans.). (2025). Homer’s Iliad in a classical translation. Clairview Books.
Fagles, R. (Trans.). (1990). The Iliad. Viking.
Fitzgerald, R. (Trans.). (1974). The Iliad. Anchor Press.
Lattimore, R. (Trans.). (1951). The Iliad. University of Chicago Press.
Munday, J. (2012). Introducing translation studies: Theories and applications (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Pope, A. (1783). The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer: Translated by Pope. A new edition. In four volumes. Vol. 1. C. Bathurst, J. Buckland, W. Strahan, J. Rivington and Sons, T. Davies [and 30 others in London].
Rieu, E. V. (2003) The Iliad (Trans. P. Jones & D. C. H. Rieu, Rev. & updated; P. Jones, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Venuti, L. (1998). The scandals of translation: Towards an ethics of difference. Routledge.
Wilson, E. (Trans.). (2023). The Iliad. W.W. Norton & Company.