Memorial - Alice Oswald

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad
for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics
praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the
word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves).
To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story,
and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the
brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more
than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and
unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.

'The Iliad
is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the
aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives
without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a
series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account
of man in his world... compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which
was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its
language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.'
-
Alice Oswald