Word: iliad
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SINCE THE PUBLICATION in 1961 of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey many have wished for an equally good English version of the Iliad, just as they were hoping in 1960 for an Odyssey to match the Iliad of Richard Lattimore. Fitzgerald admired Lattimore's translation so much that he foresaw "a century or so in which nobody will again try to put the Iliad in English verse." He has since retracted that prediction, saying that his thinking on the Iliad "had not at that point been fully developed...
...development has proceeded by leaps and bounds since then. Fitzgerald read three passages form his new translation of the Iliad to a packed auditorium at the Science Center on Tuesday afternoon. This work is the culmination of eight years of devotion, and when it is published early next year, it is likely to be greeted as enthusiastically as his Odyssey was. The audience at Tuesday's reading, sponsored by the Harvard Advocate, responded keenly to the pitch of his achievement...
...three of its walls. Partially restored by experts of Athens' Byzantine Museum, the impressive 21-ft.-long wall painting portrays a detailed, DeMille-like epic of invasion and bloodshed. Spyridon Marinatos, the chief excavator and director of Greece's department of antiquities, compares it to the Iliad. "Homer is poetry in words," he says. "This is poetry in color...
...General Education is now going out of favor. The emphasis on science following the first. Sputnik was the first blow to the idea that the well-educated man is one who has read the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Inferno. In 1966, Daniel Bell, Professor of Sociology, issued a critical re-appraisal of the Gen Ed concept, in a study commissioned by Columbia University, which was redesigning its General Education program. Since then, Gen Ed has become an increasingly unpopular idea, subjected to more and more criticism of its basic philosophy...
...think that the Iliad and the Odyssey are as modern today as they were four thousand years ago, while some of the books which sound very modern today will be forgotten a day later," he said, chewing his toast meditatively. "Now take the Sunday Times, which is so modern and so fresh Sunday morning. Monday it's already in the garbage." His eyes opened wide wonderingly. "How does it come? It seems that being modern is not enough. The word up-to-date. which people use nowadays so much and about which they make such a fuss is not really...