Iliad - new translations

[D B Campbell]

Read any modern Bibles lately?

You'd be surprised, Robert.

I get the impression that new translations -- particularly of Homer -- are designed to engage younger readers who aren't really moved by the sonorous phrases that some of us here know and love. Also, I read somewhere that many new translations seek to capture the "feel" of the text by paraphrasing rather than translating literally. That probably works for poetry -- less successful for history, I'd've thought.

And, just as an aside -- I was amazed to see that a "new" English translation of Tacitus' Histories was actually a tidying-up exercise on a very old translation, without the "translator" having gone back to the original Latin text. Bizarre.