Chloe Humphreys Humphreys itibaren Sawari, Maharashtra 431810, Indija
So much death. So much death. If you can get through that, it's an immense poem covering some of the great highs and lows of the human spirit (though, in realist and premodernist fashion, it covers more lows than highs). Every time I read the Illiad, I find it slogging up through the last eight or nine books, but you *need* to slog through those. In the end, and I know I'm running contrary to the general scholarship when I say this, I like the Odyssey more. You have to have seen the horrors of war in the Illiad, though, for the wandering, desperate attempt to regain humanity in the latter epic to make sense. I've read the Fagles and Fitzgerald, and prefer the Fagles, though I remember the Fitzgerald being intense in its own right. Fagles has a good way with a turn of phrase, and a respect for the traditional English spellings of the characters' names, both of which I respect (as we're reading the poem in English, after all, not Greek)