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Memorial

Written by: Alice Oswald, Eavan Boland - afterword
Narrated by: Mark Ashby
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Publisher's Summary

"Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its "nobility", as has everyone ever since - but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its "bright unbearable reality" (the word used when gods come to earth, not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.

"The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world... compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking".
—Alice Oswald
©2011 Alice Oswald, Afterword copyright 2012 by Eavan Boland (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Classics Poetry Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature World Literature
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Profile Image for Caleb

Phenomenal, but you're better off buying it as a book

The text is brilliant. The idea is to portray the impact the Iliad might have had on the ancient Greeks who were listening to it - focusing entirely on the people who died, and the way they died - who may have lost friends or family in the same way. Sometimes it focuses on who the person was as well, it's a hundred eulogies and I've never heard anything like it.

The problem, though, is the narration. It isn't bad, but it's out of place. It sounds like the narrator is reading the actual Iliad in the way a passionate classics professor might - and again, that's not bad, it's just not the somber tone it really needs. You can find samples of the author reading passages on youtube and compare it to the sample here and you'll see what I mean. And it's a shame because it really feels like something that should be heard rather than read.

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