Poetic injustice

‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad first published in 1951. It was a doubt he was grateful his friends and family had refrained from expressing in the long labour of translating the Greek. But he had a response for any who dared: it was ‘a question which has no answer for those who do not know the answer already’. Homer exists to be translated, largely for what Peter Green has called ‘its uncanny universalist insight into the wellsprings of human nature’. Homer is one of the sources of truth; it demands to be known. The last 200 years have had no shortage of candidates come to drink at that well — more than 40 English Iliads in the 19th century, another 30 in the 20th and eight so far in the 21st, a Victorian level of production, nearly all of them coming out of America.