Download Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad AudioBook Free
"Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its "nobility", as has everyone ever since - but old critics praised it for its enargeia, its "bright unbearable certainty" (the term used when gods come to globe, not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her bank account focuses by converts on Homer's expanded similes and on the simple 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are bit more than labels, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's look. "The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation reveals it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan Battle - to keep in mind people's labels and lives without the utilization of writing. I hope it has its own coherence as some stories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal bank account of man in his world... appropriate for the soul of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as though its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking".
—Alice Oswald
