JULY WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be talking about all the books I read in July. This month I read 5 books. Let’s dive in:

1. CLASSICS AND POETRY: Iliad by Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo

This is the fourth translation of The Iliad by Homer that I pick up in the last two years trying to find my favorite in the vast array of translations readily available of this epic poem. This is a translation that I did not know about. A fellow ardent reader of classics told me about it and suggested I give it a try. So I did, and the first thing that stood out to me about it was the cover because a black-and-white picture of Allied soldiers attacking a Normandy beach on D-Day is the last thing you’d expect to see on the cover of The Iliad. But why does this picture  of WWII on the cover of Homer’s epic poem make sense? The picture, according to Daniel Mendelsohn, isn’t “to make the West’s oldest and most authoritative verse composition seem more ‘relevant.’ The grimly beautiful outside of this Iliad is in every way an apt symbol for what lies within” for the poem indeed does not shy away from depicting the violence, gore, and death that accompanies war.

Another thing that stood out to me is how Lombardo indents and italicizes every simile, of which there are many, in the poem in order to make them more conspicuous to the reader’s eye from the rest of the text. He does this in the audiobook too, but here he narrates each simile with background music to better distinguish them from the rest of the narration. These similes are frequent and at times quite long, but each one of them compares a hero and his doings to something that inevitably reminds us to the world during peacetime.

A third thing that Lombardo does very well is the way he translates the epithets. Unlike Emily Wilson, who translates some of these stock epithets and phrases the same way in several parts (or different books) of the poem, Lombardo translates them in a slightly different way depending on the context. Yes, he sacrifices being strictly faithful to the original for the sake of reducing repetitiveness but I think that this is good because it is this repetitiveness that most commonly bores modern readers. It is one of the main reasons, for example, why Emily Wilson’s new translation of the poem bored me. The other is because she translated it in a pentameter iambic verse, the same one Shakespeare wrote, and I have always had a love/hate relationship with pentameter iambic verse; sometimes I can read it, sometimes I cannot. Most of the time, though, I cannot. Lombardo, on the other hand, dispenses with lyricism and uses contemporary language; sometimes too contemporary, in fact. And this is occasionally jarring because the beauty conveyed in the original is irrevocably lost. But Lombardo sacrifices this beauty for the sake of clarity and precision that conveys very well the main themes of the poem: “self-destructive pride, the cathartic allure of violence, the elusiveness of peace and, finally, the terrible costs of forgiveness.” In other words, this translation is straightforward and written in a language that makes the poem accessible to modern readers.

This is also what Emily Wilson tries to do in her translation, make the poem more accessible to modern readers, and yet, for me, Stanley Lombardo’s translation worked better than Emily Wilson’s. This, however, is not the case for everyone. And despite the fact that I liked Lombardo’s translation more than Wilson’s and Butler’s, it is also still not my favorite. This is mostly because in several passages, like I said before, the contemporary language was a bit too contemporary for my liking. But this is exactly what Lombardo is aiming for: his style is vernacular or conversational. If this is what you’re looking for when you pick up The Iliad, then considering giving this translation a chance. If not, then steer away. You’re not going to like it.

Do I recommend it? Yes. But, like I said, it may not be a translation for everyone.

2. HISTORICAL FICTION AND MYTHOLOGY: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

This is the third time I pick this book up; the first few times I read it, I gave it a New Favorite rating. This time, however, I was more judicious about my rating and it suffered a bit. This book is a retelling of The Iliad told from Briseis’s, Achilles’ war prize, point-of-view. I still like it, but I read it while I was also reading Lombardo’s translation of The Iliad and actually reading the retelling alongside the original material gave me a lot of food for thought.

I love the first part of the novel. Barker’s retelling of life in the Achaean camp and later of the plague that afflicts the Greeks after Agamemnon refuses to give Chryseis back to her father is very well done. However, the novel starts to suffer after the end of Part I when the author includes Achilles’s point-of-view in the narration. I understand the importance of including his perspective in a retelling of The Iliad; after all, Achilles is the main character of this epic poem, but if Barker’s intention was to give a voice to the women of Troy, making Achilles a point of view character in the novel ultimately deters from this. It also changes the focus of the story.

A second issue that I had with this novel was that Barker does not include the gods of Olympus in the story at all, and this is, in my opinion, a huge disservice to the source material. But I also understand that Briseis is a slave (though she was a queen once) and her point-of-view probably didn’t make it easy to include the gods. However, I still think that not including them in the retelling axed a lot of material that could’ve made this book a lot better.

3. FANTASY NOVELLA: The Fall by Ryan Cahill

This is a novella that introduces the reader to the world of The Bound And The Broken. I have been hearing a lot of good things about this self-published series that I wanted to give it a try. Hopefully it will be exactly what I need to return to the genre. So far, it’s a step in the right direction. I liked this introduction to this new world with dragons and warriors that ride them. 

4. NONFICTION AND SCIENCE: Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond by Professor Alice Roberts

This is the third book of an unnamed trilogy where the author talks about advances in genomics to study ancient DNA (aDNA) and make predictions of what the life of people who lived thousands of years ago was like. Focused exclusively on cemeteries and gravesites located in Britain, the first book of this series, Ancestors, studies the DNA of the earliest inhabitants of the island in a tour of prehistoric Britain through seven burial sites. The second book, Buried, seeks to shed light on how people lived in Britain during the first millennium; some of the burial sites talk about in this book include those of  The third book, Crypt, focuses on burial sites of people who lived in Britain during the Middle Ages. In this book, however, the author also tries to determine if the individual died from a disease, for example, the Bubonic plague or syphilis, known epidemics of the time, and how these diseases left their mark on the bones of the sick person.

5. NONFICTION AND SCIENCE: The Land of Open Graves by Jason de León

This book is an unforgiving and scathing critique of United States immigration policy, specifically the “Prevention through Deterrence” program implemented nationwide by Border Patrol in 1994. This strategy relies on rugged and desolate terrain to impede the flow of people from the south. The Land of Open Graves is hard book to read, not because of its technical language and jargon but because of its topic. It doesn’t shy away from relating and showing through pictures the realities of death and violence in the desert. This book is the “culmination of six years of ethnographic, archeological, and forensic research on the social process of undocumented migration between Latin America and the United States that Jason De León conducted between 2009 and 2015.” Originally published in 2015, this book is nonetheless still relevant, ten years later, because undocumented immigration is one of the main points of contention between Mexico and the United States today.  

I highly recommend this book.

That’s everything I read this month. Thank you for reading.