The Iliad was composed in verse. It was meant to be recited, with a characteristic rhythm, ideal for being accompanied by music: the beginning of an uninterrupted tradition that, passing through chansons de geste and troubadour poetry, arrives at rap.
Three thousand years have passed, however. Such is the temporal distance, such is the difference in cultural references between the audience that attended the sung poem of that time and today's reader of Homeric texts: it is vain to try to recreate, even with the slightest approximation, the effect that the Iliad could produce at the time of its creation.
According to Jorge Luis Borges, a translation is, in fact, a new literary work. In his essay The Homeric Versions, after analyzing various translations of Homeric texts, he ventures that perhaps the most faithful of the versions is the one made by Samuel Butler (1835-1902) at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is the text we have chosen and that Daniel Russo has translated into Italian.
Eduardo Pelegrín Martínez de Pisón, better known by his pseudonym Calpurnio, was commissioned to illustrate the work. He thus completes the work that, on the basis of tenacious research and documentation, he had begun for the Odyssey (Classici Liberati, 1).
Two texts complete this edition of the Iliad. First, The Trojan Women, Euripides' tragedy adapted by Alberto Conejero, where women are at the center, victims who suffer the destruction of their city, their homes and their families.
Finally, in "From War to Literature: Women as the Narrative Engine of the Iliad", Andrea Marcolongo talks to us about the power of the female word, which repairs, heals, rebuilds. And passes on.
