Desde que descubrí que la Ilíada tenía una frase que me iba a servir para mi trabajo de grado fijé como meta leerme el libro. Antes había tenido muchas ganas de leermelo, pero esta vez era diferente porque estaba de por medio mi salud mental, siento que si yo no me leo un libro que me tiene obsesionada no voy a poder seguir bien. Sé que puede sonar extraño, pero los libros son gran parte de mi vida, ellos dirigen cada uno de mis pasos, mis decisiones, mis pensamientos. Yo no sé qué haría en un mundo sin libros, probablemente no existiría.
La frase que me ayudó para mi tesis es la siguiente: "Nadie, pues, se dé prisa por volver a su casa hasta haber dormido con la esposa de un troyano y haber vengado la huida y los gemidos de Helena". Esta frase la relacino en mi tesis con la violación sexual utilizada como arma de guerra y otras frases que encuentro en el libro fueron igual de fructíferas cómo está. Tengo mucho que agradecer a la iliada y la Odisea porque son unos libros que me han inspirado profundamente y yo se lo recomendaría a cualquier persona con los ojos cerrados, eso sí a una persona que sea paciente y que quiera desarrollar un gusto por la mitología grecorromana. Además me han inspirado en mis escritos, resulta que los verbos encliticos son mi debilidad, los amo.
Recomiendo que primero te leas la Ilíada, luego la Odisea y después La Divina Comedia si quieres leerte específicamente estos tres libros.
En resumen: ¿Que tal es la Iliada?
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Excelente libro

What a story! I feel as if this has influenced nearly every book out there, there is so much between the pages of The Iliad. Amazing.

IM FREEEEEE WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFEEEEEEEE

Homer needed a better editor. Eleven pages listing soldiers' names? Really?

At least I'm done.

I would love to write like a blast of a sudden squall
whose strong five-beat rhythm can with light and thunder, churning
the dark page into a fury, and countless words
surge and toss on its pages, high-arched and white-capped,
and crash down onto the Internets in endless ranks:
just so did the translators charge in their ranks, each simile
packed close together.

Am I really going to bother reviewing Homer’s _Iliad_? I mean, what am I going to say that hasn’t been said by generations of scholars, reviewers or readers? Does another drop in the ocean matter? Well, even if it doesn’t I’ll give it a go I guess. Reading the _Iliad_ was mostly done by me as a correction to a perceived gap in my education. I had always known bits and pieces about the poem and its heroes from various sources and the culture in general, but I had never read the poem itself. Given that it is a foundational text (perhaps *the* foundational text along with its sister epic The Odyssey) of the western canon it’s a pretty big gap. Well, I did it! I found myself both compelled and, I will admit it, sometimes bored by the text (though mostly only when we came upon the epic tradition of having the lineage of each character spelled out in gruesome detail before said hero was gruesomely despatched by an enemy’s spear thrust). Still, once I made it through Book II’s interminable catalogue of the Achaean heroes who came to Troy along with the number of ships and men they brought with them I knew that nothing could stop me.

My biggest surprise was probably the way in which the heroes, all seemingly spawned by gods, are not all that unlike superheroes in a comic book: forces of raw destruction whose primary wish is for glory and the mad rush of violence and battle. And yet even these great figures pale next to the gods who play them like puppets on a string watching events unfold before them and giving a nudge here and there when the outcome for their favored side is in doubt (indeed, for me some of the most humourous moments came about when a god would unceremoniously pluck a warrior from the ground and punt him into the distance in order to keep him safe like some giant hand in a gamer’s favourite RTS strategy game). It was these images and analogies, inadequate as they may seem, that kept springing to mind for me as I read of the epic battle between the Achaeans and the Trojans. It was, in that sense at least, a surprisingly modern text for me.

The poem is chock-full, on both sides of the conflict, of men who are larger than life. Of course the great exemplars of each side, Achilles and Hector, stand heads and shoulders above the rest, but both armies are lousy with seeming giants whose every action in battle is a superhuman carnage fest; the roll call of the Achaeans alone is impressive: wily Odysseus, prideful Agamemnon, wise Nestor, courageous Diomedes, and both the Greater and the Lesser Ajax. Of course, if you’re not a hero and don’t boast either a god or at least a royal personage in your near lineage, then you’re really just spear fodder whose primary purpose is to allow the real fighters to show off their skill in the art of death-dealing. Indeed fighting is all about the individual fighter's glory and his desire for booty...stripping the corpses is more important than pursuing a tactical advantage. Ego is all. This is a frightening vision of what a world of superheroes might look like with the lowly peons at the whim of their violence and glory-seeking. The boast and the taunt are also on full display. Each hero seeks to undermine his opponent with a war of words before the spear has even left his hand. Lineages are vaunted, or disparaged; deeds are proclaimed, or ridiculed; most of all threats are made and reciprocated. Old Spidey of the glib tongue has nothing on these guys. (“I too could battle the deathless gods with words — it's hard with a spear, the gods are so much stronger. Not even Achilles can bring off all his boasts…” – Hector)

The violence in the poem is explicit and all-pervasive, a veritable orgy of death and dismemberment. From the brains splattered inside helmets by a spear’s intrusion, to the “lethal hit that’s loosed [a body’s] springy limbs”, we are constantly presented with a panoply of violence that brings down the mists of death, a “dark [that] came whirling down across [their] eyes”, upon the stricken warriors. Homer was apparently no prude and was happy to indulge his audience’s apparent appetite for such scenes. The battle scenes are also truly cinematic, both in their colourful gore and in the superhuman skill displayed by the combatants, as foe after foe is handily dispatched in an almost balletic whirl of pure violence. Achilles is perhaps the most conspicuous in this, no more so than when he at last enters the fray near the end of the poem, maddened at the death of his friend Patroclus, and fells Trojans left and right:

Achilles now like inhuman fire raging on through the mountain gorges splinter-dry, setting ablaze big stands of timber, the wind swirling the huge fireball left and right — chaos of fire — Achilles storming on with brandished spear like a frenzied god of battle trampling all he killed and the earth ran black with blood.…so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car, sprays of blood shooting up from the stallions' hoofs and churning, whirling rims — and the son of Peleus charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms

Indeed the rage of Achilles is a primal thing. The seemingly excessive violence of his comrades and their enemies prior to his entering the fray is made to seem a pale, simpering thing in comparison. Achilles is a whirl of bloodlust, hatred and retribution whose only aim is the eradication of the Trojans and their great prince Hector as payment for the death of his old friend.

Despite the great power that each of these heroes displays, it is not necessarily an altogether innate function of the hero’s mighty thews and prowess alone, for it is made evident throughout the text that the real perquisite for success is the blessing of a god, regardless of the native power and skill of the individual fighter. The gods seem at first content to mostly sit on the sidelines, restricting themselves to aiding and abetting their favourite hero with a nudge here and a push there until, with the advent of Achilles and his killing rage, even Zeus fears that the outcome of the battle may change and the decrees of fate may be unbalanced by a mere mortal. He then lets the gods loose and they fight for their chosen sides in a free-for-all that is impressive in its violence and imagery where one telling things comes immediately to the fore: the gods are much less interested in maintaining the balance of fate for the betterment of the cosmos than they are at using this excuse to fight their own grudge matches against perceived and real slights from their divine rivals.

In many ways the gods are perhaps even more prevalent in the battle for Troy than are the human participants. This is fitting given the fact that a contest amongst the major goddesses, and the perceived slight of its result by the losers, were the direct antecedents to the war that would destroy a civilization. I’m not sure how Paris could have judged the beauty contest between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera in a way that wouldn’t have ended in bloodshed and mass genocide, but he certainly didn’t try very hard once the goddess of love dangled the prospect of Menelaus’ beauteous wife before him. This picking of love above worldly authority or wisdom and supremacy in war may seem like a purely pacific and even noble choice, but it often seems that even love as expressed in _The Iliad_ appears to be a fundamentally selfish thing. Helen, the human paradigm of beauty, and her divine patron Aphrodite, are both interested in ‘love’ not as something that expresses affection or devotion to another, but rather something that glorifies the self. Helen’s beauty is a great power and she uses it to glorify her own position. She deserts her husband and child for Paris and even this ‘love’ seems to be more a reflection of her own egoism and an expression of her power over him than any sort of true affection for the son of Priam. That being said there is one set of relationships that seem to look beyond the demands of heroic culture and the vanity of the self: these are primarily seen in the quiet moments of humanity in Hector’s love for his wife and child (and really for all of his family, even spoiled bratty Paris, and for Troy itself). One could also point to the love of Priam for his dead son, and the need to redeem his mutilated corpse at any cost (even unto walking into the enemy camp with only a servant and a cart full of booty), as another example of the love of others overcoming the love of self.

There were a plethora of great moments in the poem, but this review is already getting overlong, so allow me to simply name the ones that immediately spring to mind: the night raid of Diomedes and Odysseus into the Trojan lines, the lone stand and battle cry of Odysseus after the Achaeans run in terror from pursuing Trojan warriors, the coming ashore of the Nereids at the bidding of Thetis to comfort Achilles, Athena’s arming with the storm-shield of Zeus, the gathering of the Rivers in Olympus, Hephaestus boiling a river god in his own bed in defence of Achilles, and the empowerment of Achilles before his death-dealing drive amongst the Trojans to name but a few. In the end this was a greatly entertaining read that surprised me in many ways. Of course, it wasn’t all dismemberment and bloody glory, there was human suffering and despair (both at the hands of the ‘heroes’ and of the gods) and many questions raised about freewill versus one’s fate (Fate seems to have the deck stacked in his favour). I was constantly surprised at little touches made by Homer: Zeus being wooed by Hera so she could distract him from aiding the Trojans (in the course of which he enumerates the allures of his former lovers as part of his seduction strategy…what a charmer!); Hector deciding to leave his men to face death alone in a tight moment and the twin episode of Hector’s very real fear of death, such a great fear that he actually runs away from Achilles in panic before deciding to face his fate (not exactly the inhuman hero I was expecting to see); Agamemnon showing himself to be a blustering politician, attempting to save face and excuse himself at the same time as he tries to apologize to Achilles. The fact that the poem both begins and ends in medias res may leave some modern readers a bit baffled (we enter the fray ten years after the war’s inception and leave with the city of Troy still standing), but it truly is a tour de force of the poet’s art. Whether Homer was one man or many, whether he composed it primarily from an amalgam of the existing tradition of epic poetic devices or it came primarily from the mind of a genius it is a work that does stand the test of time and is well worth the time of any reader (or listener) ancient or modern.

هی نگه داشتم بیام مثلا ریویو خوب بنویسم دیدم تواناییش رو ندارم، بمونه بعد خوندن اودیسه.
این تجربه ایلیاد خوندنم با قبلی خیلی فرق داشت؛ با گروهی هم‌خوانی کردم که بسیار جذاب و عمیق کتاب می‌خونن و باعث شدند که مدل دیگه ای بخونم.
مرسی سعید که باعث شدی بیام برا هم‌خوانی.

راجع به ترجمه و ورژنی که خوندم و شنیدم بگم:
این سری ترجمه امیلی ویلسون رو خوندم و گوش دادم.
کتاب اولاش یه سری توضیحات کلی و خوب داره، اون وسط هم متن ترجمه شده‌است که برای سارای الان بسیار قابل فهم تر از ترجمه ی نفیسی برای سارای ده دوازده سال پیش بود، هم‌چنین قسمت آخر کتاب یه سری توضیحات اضافه برا هر سرود داشت.
قسمت آخر توی اودیوبوک نبود و وقتی داشتی متن رو گوش می‌دادی می‌تونستی ای‌بوک رو بذاری جلوت و باهاش پیش بری؛ دلیل اومدن یه سری عبارات و شرایط و چیزای مرتبط با قسمت هایی از متن رو توضیح داده بود که خوب بودند.

معرفی هایی که بچه ها از خدایگان و دوره زمانی و کتاب های مرتبط با ایلیاد کردند خیلی برام خوب بود(هرچند نرسیدم یه سری از فایل هایی که فرستادید رو گوش بدم.)

حین خوندنش یه سری نظراتم راجع به متن رو همینجا آوردم.

نتیجه گیری اخلاقیم از داستان این بود که به درگاه همه خدایان دعا کنی هیچوقت کاریت نداشته باشن، نه خوبتو بخوان نه بدتو نه هیچی! اصلا متوجه حضورت نباشن وگرنه به طریقی بدبخت میشی. محبوب این یکی باشی اون یکی حسادت می‌کنه بخواد حال یکی دیگه رو بگیره تورو اون وسط میندازه.
شما در نظر بگیر وسط جنگی که راه افتاده خدای خدایان به باقی خداها اینو بگه:

The dying human beings interest me.

I like to watch from here. The rest of you,
go there, among the Trojans and the Greeks,
and help whichever side you each prefer.

اون وسط کلی چیز کنارش راجع به ایلیاد خوندم؛ از کمیک های مرتبط گرفته تا مقالاتی راجع به برهه تاریخیش و مسائل اشاره شده درونش و... که اون وسط باعث شد با بانوگشسپ نامه هم آشنا بشم.

فکر نکنم چیزی ازش بشه گفت که اسپویل محسوب بشه، خود هومر هم با این پیش زمینه اصلا نوشته که همه می‌دونن چی میشه و حالا بذار پوئتیکش کنم، هی اون وسط مثلا فورشدو(اسپویل) می‌کنه آینده رو.

بخوام الان ازش کوئت هایی که برداشتم رو بیارم خیلی پخش و پرت و بی ربط میشن ولی یکم اون اولش از توضیحات راجع به وحشت جنگ برا زنان داشت:

The rape and abduction of an elite woman in peacetime, like the removal of Helen from her husband’s house in Sparta, is a terrible violation of social norms, because it threatens the male homeowner’s control over his own household, including its wealth, its social power, and the subordinate household members. Paris has done something not only ethically questionable, but also extremely imprudent. But in wartime, there are bad consequences for those who kidnap women only when a god’s desires or honor are violated—as with Chryseis, whose priestly father has a special relationship to Apollo.
The horrors of war for women and children were well-known to ancient storytellers and audiences, who would have included women and children. These horrors are implicit in The Iliad. But mortal women’s experiences are not as central in this epic as they were in other ancient Greek poetry, such as wedding songs, songs of lament, and, later, Athenian tragedy.

یه قسمتی بالا سر جنازه هکتور زنش داره به بچه‌ش میگه بدبخت شدیم و حالا برا طفل صغیر این تکه رو خیلی هارش و رک میگه:

And you, my child, will either come with me,
and do humiliating work, enslaved
to some harsh overlord, or else a Greek
will grab your arm and hurl you from the wall—
a dreadful death—in anger because Hector
had killed perhaps his brother, son, or father.

تو گیر و دار جنگ آکیلیس قهر کرده بود و پاتروکلوس هی خودشو می‌کشت پاشو برو جنگ با امثال این حرف ها:

But you, Achilles,
you have become impossible! I hope
the kind of anger you are fostering
never takes hold of me—you monstrous hero!
How can a person in the future learn
anything good from you, if you refuse
to save the Greeks from this catastrophe?
You have no pity. Peleus the horseman
was not your father, Thetis, not your mother.
Gray sea and soaring rocks gave birth to you,
and so you have an unrelenting heart.

که آکیلیس گوشش بدهکار نبود ولی بعدش که داشت غصه میخورد تازه عاقل شده بود و حرف های خوبی میزد:

If only conflict were eliminated
from gods and human beings! I wish anger
did not exist. Even the wisest people
are roused to rage, which trickles into you
sweeter than honey, and inside your body
it swells like smoke.

یه چیز جالبی که داشت با اینکه این‌همه خداها و بزرگاشون خرابکاری میکردند باز خیلی براشون احترام می‌ذاشتن، گویی که اشتباهاتشون هم مقدس و با اندیشه‌ست.
ولی خب خودشون به هم تیکه زیاد می‌اندازند ولی باز هم متن برمیگرده به تقدس و احترامشون.

Great father Zeus, will any mortals bother
to tell their plans and schemes to deathless gods
in any place across the boundless world?
Do you not see?

یه جا که اصلا زئوس خیلی دیگه مسخره میشه، میخواد مخ ها رو بزنه بعد میاد بهش از خوشی هاش با باقی زن ها میگه:

“You can go later on that journey, Hera,
but now let us enjoy some time in bed.
Let us make love. Such strong desire has never
suffused my senses or subdued my heart
for any goddess or for any woman
as I feel now for you. Not even when
I lusted for the wife of Ixion,
and got her pregnant with Pirithous,
a councillor as wise as any god.
Not even when I wanted Danae,
the daughter of Acrisius, a woman
with pretty ankles, and I got her pregnant
with Perseus, the best of warriors.
Not even when I lusted for the famous
Europa, child of Phoenix, and I fathered
Minos on her, and godlike Rhadamanthus.
Not even when I wanted Semele,
or when in Thebes I lusted for Alcmene,
who birthed heroic Heracles, my son—
and Semele gave birth to Dionysus,
the joy of mortals. And not even when
I lusted for the goddess, Queen Demeter,
who has such beautiful, well-braided hair—
not even when I wanted famous Leto,
not even when I wanted you yourself—
I never wanted anyone before
as much I want you right now. Such sweet
desire for you has taken hold of me.”

بعد اون وسط هرا نگران خاله زنک بازی بقیه خداهاست:

But what if one of the immortal gods
witnesses us up there in bed together,
and goes away and tells the other gods?

کلا خداهای جالبی بودن.

خلاصه که همین دیگه… تا تکه مرتبط با ایلیاد ویل دورانت رو کامل بخونم ببینم چیزی می‌خوام اضافه کنم یا نه.

Ha sido difícil terminarlo. No tengo ninguna duda de que es el libro más denso que he leído aún así algo me animaba a continuar. He aprendido mucho de los dioses griegos y el lenguaje que usa Homero de por si es precioso cuente lo que cuente pero encima hay escenas súper emotivas. Lo recomiendo , eso sí, hay que cogerlo con ganas.

It took me more than a month to read The Iliad. Rather than being annoyed, I'm actually thankful for that. It gave me much more appreciation for the whole poem.

Homer's descriptions are majestic. A painter through words. Vivid. Beautiful.

I really loved the character arcs, especially Achilles and Hector. Homer managed to touch the complex personalities of humans, and with it their respective individualities. More than the war, the book talks about nobility and honor.

A definite 5/5 for me. Looking forward to The Odyssey!

‘‘La Ilíada’’ es una historia amplia y estratificada sobre la guerra que mezcla los mundos del individuo con el de su "nación" y con el de los grandes dioses divinos inmortales, donde cada capa es fascinante. Como historia sobre la guerra, también es una historia sobre la destrucción de vidas y la insensibilización cada vez mayor de los lectores. Por esta razón y muchas otras, ‘‘La Ilíada’’ es una historia profundamente inquietante.

Encontrarse con esta obra es como entrar en un museo donde numerosos productos de importancia secundaria o terciaria en galerías más pequeñas conducen hacia un gran atrio central que contiene la Ilíada. El poema es el centro estético de toda la colección. Ésta es la gran paradoja de la literatura griega: no se abre con algo rudo, primitivo, que necesita desarrollo o refinamiento. No, lo que tenemos es una obra de una perfección tan asombrosa que sigue siendo el estándar con el que se mide todo lo demás.

Muchos hombres mueren en esta historia, en la cual, cada uno de ellos tiene alguna habilidad legendaria, alguna vida prometedora, que es interrumpida por otro que tiene otra habilidad legendaria y otra vida prometedora. Cada hombre tiene un nombre adicional adjunto al suyo, el de su padre, que lamentará su pérdida. Con esto, Homero retrata con una honestidad inquebrantable el terrible costo de la guerra, donde se destruyen vidas, se destrozan familias y las ciudades están condenadas a la destrucción. La muerte de cada hombre es dramática, gráfica, cuerpo a cuerpo y cara a cara, un concurso en el que todos los hombres son iguales y, sin embargo, ninguno es tan bueno como Aquiles. Este hombre cuya gloria se hace por su gran poder, que solo se revela por su gran vanidad. Se niega a luchar durante años y, como resultado, todo el ejército de su nación es casi aniquilado por completo.

Creo que vale la pena mencionar mucho sobre el alcance de los personajes que se exhiben en este cuento, porque vale la pena señalar que ninguno de ellos es particularmente detallado o completo. De hecho, diría que estos personajes son profundamente superficiales. No obstante, esto no me importó, aunque la falta de desarrollo del personaje era algo confusa. Dicho esto, me permitió construir una comprensión muy simple de los hombres y (pocas) mujeres en esta historia, por lo que los conecté casi de manera singular con ciertos rasgos o ideas de carácter.

Leer esto fue un trabajo duro debido a que sus muchas páginas están llenas de descripciones gráficas aparentemente interminables de asesinatos en el campo de batalla, pero de vez en cuando hay un pasaje que es tan asombroso o ridículamente sangriento que hace que valga la pena su lectura. En última instancia, esta es una historia maravillosa sobre la guerra, la cual encapsula los extremos de la experiencia humana y la Ilíada lo expresa con palabras. Es hermoso, terrible, estúpido y noble a la vez. A pesar de que los personajes son dioses, semidioses y héroes, todos se sienten totalmente humanos. Son mezquinos e irracionales y se contradicen a diario, pero también se preocupan por el amor, la gloria, el honor y la familia. Muestra que la línea entre el bien y el mal está dentro de cada persona, no entre grupos: amaba y odiaba a los troyanos y a los griegos, según la página en la que estaba en ese momento. Definitivamente se gana su lugar como un clásico atemporal.

I want to read about ancient gay people!

i wish i could do some messed up shit then just be like oh sorry actually the gods made me do that . i actually really want to pick up other translations (i’m looking at you caroline alexander) and experience it again but different! there’s so much emotion i just am so interested in how different translators handles it! (im not going to rate this bc ? it feels weird rating it ? but i loved it obviously)