Stephen Mitchell

Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome acclaimed translator and scholar STEPHEN MITCHELL for a conversation about his new translation of Homer's The Iliad.

Tolstoy called The Iliad a miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment. Homer's story is thrilling, and his Greek is perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever sung or written.

In Stephen Mitchell's Iliad, the epic story resounds again across 2,700 years, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam flows in every word. And we are there with them, amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful.

Mitchell's Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West, whose edition of the original Greek identifies many passages that were added after the Iliad was first written down, to the detriment of the music and the story. Omitting these hundreds of interpolated lines restores a dramatically sharper, leaner text. In addition, Mitchell's illuminating introduction opens the epic still further to our understanding and appreciation.