The Iliad Of Homer Books I Xii Volume 1 PDF Download

Excerpt from The Iliad of Homer, Vol. 1: With a Verse Translation, Books I-XII A Translation needs little or no preface: it is itself, well or ill done, its own apology or condemnation. I would therefore have met my reader unprefaced, had I not wished to profess and briefly defend my old-fashioned faith in verse as better than prose for translation of poetry. Prose or non-metrical translations of classical poets have of late found much favour. Carlyle has somewhere expressed his preference for them, saying 'we want what the ancients thought and said, and none of your silly poetry.' In spite of this, without wishing to disparage good prose translations, I still hold to metre. Granting that we do want to know - and to know accurately - what the ancient poet thought and said, I yet contend we can know this better with metre than without. For we best know what an author thought and said, if we receive from the translation the same impression that an intelligent scholar receives from the original. Now two things make up this impression: first, the matter, or meaning of the words; second, the form or metre. Give up the latter entirely, and you give up much: how much, the advocates of prose do not sufficiently realize. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.