Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love the Iliad. Over the past fifty years I have read it in many different translations. And there are many to choose from; a list of complete translations of the Iliad includes more than 70 versions. [...] In college, I of course read Lattimore, which at the time was (and indeed still is) the gold standard for scholarship. A few years later, I re-read it in the translation of Pope, initially a struggle, but once I got into the flow of it and of his somewhat archaic language, around the middle of book 2, magnificent. I have read most of the major modern translations as they came out. Robert Fitzgerald (I really like this translation and chose it to reread for a book discussion group a few years ago). Ian Johnson (an online translation, good for content and to my ear much as I think the original singers would have sounded, who as we know didn't repeat the poem word-for-word from memory but built it each time from stock phrases and filling in the gaps as they went, but not as smooth poetically as some other translations). Lombardo (I read about four books and skimmed the rest, finding his translation jarringly modernized with contemporary language and references that in my view seriously degraded the nobility of the original). Fagles (much celebrated, and enjoyable enough but not in my view as true to the feel of Homer as Lattimore and Fitzgerald). I have dipped into various other translations as they were available on line or as I visited university libraries that had these more obscure translations: Chapman, of course, because of Keats; Butler; and various others. With more than 70 translations of the Iliad available, do we really need another one? The answer is that this isn't really another Iliad as we know it. This is, instead, an abridgement of the full Iliad based on the highly controversial work of Martin West, who claimed to have identified and excised substantial parts of the standard text which he argued were not in the original version, whatever that was, but were later additions. West's work has been well discussed both in scholarly circles and in a very accessible review in the November 7, 2011 edition of the New Yorker. Mitchell's translation has been praised as fast moving, modern, highly accessible. From my reading of the first three books (as long as I could spend in the bookstore reading it) this is a fair comment, though I frankly don't find it any particular improvement over Fitzgerald or Fagles. But my primary complaint is that it is deceptive in purporting to the first time or occasional reader to be "The Iliad," when in fact it is, when compared with every other translation available, an abridgment of the Iliad. There is nothing on the covers of the book to suggest to one who finds it in the bookstore or on line that this is not the same Iliad that every English student and past reader of the Iliad has known. There is nothing to suggest that substantial portions of what has for centuries been accepted as the Iliad are totally missing. There is nothing to suggest that a student who chooses this translation to read for a course in Homer will be missing substantial portions of the text that other students will be reading (and that the professor will presumably expect the students to have read and be prepared to discuss). If a reader or purchaser is aware that this is an abridgment and that they will not be getting the full Iliad, and chooses to read it anyhow, that's fine. It is a perfectly acceptable translation, though in my view not any better than several other choices. But for the work to claim to be the Iliad when it simply is not is, I believe, deceptive and dishonest and cheats the reader who wants to read the same Iliad that his parents, his grandparents, and everyone who has read it before Mitchell has known and loved. If you have not yet read the Iliad, skip this translation and get one of the quality translations of the full work -- my own recommendations are Lattimore, Fitzgerald, or Fagles. If you already know the Iliad and are interested in knowing what West and Mitchell have stripped from the standard text, then go ahead and read this abridgment and see whether you think they have improved the work or not. But don't buy this is you want to read the Iliad. Because it isn't.