Product Description

George Chapman's translations of Homer are the most famous in the English language. Keats immortalized the work of the Renaissance dramatist and poet in the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Swinburne praised the translations for their "romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur," their "freshness, strength, and inextinguishable fire." The great critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) wrote: "For more than two centuries they were the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what Greek was. Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language."

This volume presents the original (1611) text of Chapman's translation of the Iliad, making only a small number of modifications to punctuation and wording where they might confuse the modern reader. The editor, Allardyce Nicoll, provides an introduction and a glossary. Garry Wills contributes a preface, in which he explains how Chapman tapped into the poetic consonance between the semi-divine heroism of the Iliad's warriors and the cosmological symbols of Renaissance humanism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131189 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 741 pages

Colin Burrow, London Review of Books
This cheap reprint of a scarce and very good edition of a great work is a thing to be welcomed.

Review
Nicoll's gently modernised edition of Chapman's Homer [is] a work to be admired, bought, even read right through. . . . This cheap reprint of a scarce and very good edition of a great work is a thing to be welcomed.
(Colin Burrow London Review of Books )

Review
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
(John Keats )

Customer Reviews

Bad glossary makes this otherwise fine edition useless
Chapman's 1611 translation of Homer is probably the best that's been done into English, and this edition is well designed and printed. BUT Chapman can't be read without a glossary -- he invented literally hundreds of words and has special meanings for hundreds more. The academic num-nums that put this stupid Bollingen edition together gave absolutely no indication in 600 pages of text as to which words are defined in the glossary -- not a footnote, not an asterisk, nothing. Your choice is to look up virtually every one of the hundreds of thousands of words of text to see if it's in the glossary, or just to read blindly on knowing that you're probably missing 50 percent of the meaning of the text. Someone should have lost their job over this piece of university nonsense.

A grand story told in stately fashion
Keats made it famous, but few today read George Chapman's masterful translation of the Iliad. It is to be hoped that this Princeton edition will make this elegant translation more accessible. As in the works of Shakespeare, the archaic brand of English utilized by Chapman takes some getting used to. It is well worth the effort, however. This translation has a music and vitality missing from many later efforts. The introduction to this edition gets it right in advising readers to move fast through the text. It will prove surprisingly easy to comprehend if one avoids slogging through, and though many of the words are oddly spelled, their pronunciation is the same as in contemporary English. Highly recommended.

Wonderful, elegant and well worth reviving.
This is a wonderful book whose scenes will be in your imagination forever, as will many of its vivid passages and phrases. No praise is too much for this book.This is a book to be carried everywhere. This is a random example:

Praise of Homer

That he to his unmeasur'd mightie Acts, Might adde a Fame as vast; and their extracts In fires as bright, as endlesse as the starres... He at Joves Table set, fills out to us, Cups that repair Age, sad and ruinous; And gives it Built, of an Eternall stand With his all-sinewie Odyssean hand. Shifts Time and Fate; puts Death in Lifes free state; And Life doth into ages propogate..........