G. D'Ancona, H. Karamanoukian, M. Ricci, T. Salerno, J. Bergsland (eds); Intraoperative Graft Patency Verification in Cardiac and Vascular Surgery . Futura Publ. Comp, Armonk, NY 2001. (248 pages). ISBN 0‐87‐993‐488‐3

There are many, many translations of Homer’s Iliad, more, it seems, every year. When new ones come out, I wonder what improvements they have to offer and whether they will distinguish themselves. Will one of them, in other words, go on to be the “definitive” translation? In keeping with contemporary practice, Anthony Verity’s and Stephen Mitchell’s recent translations of this epic of epics are highly readable and accessible. But that’s where the similarities end. Let’s start with Verity. Samuel Johnson quotes Richard Bentley’s famous assessment of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad: “A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but youmust not call it Homer.”1 Verity’s Iliad is a fine literal translation, but one couldn’t call it poetry. Verity himself makes that point up front: “[the translation] does not claim to be poetry: my aim has been to use a straightforward English register and to keep closely to the Greek, allowing Homer to speak for himself” (xxix). One can admire his candor. Still, someone who purports to translate the father of Western poetry without aspiring to poetry is acknowledging from the start that an essential component of the original will be missing from the translation. Although Homer’s Iliad is an intensely musical experience, Verity’s isn’t even verse, but a prose translation with line breaks inserted so that the English line numbers correspond to the Greek. Mitchell is a better versifier. Most of his lines could be called accentual pentameter, and he pays closer attention to end stops and enjambments. He strives, above all, he writes, to be “rapid” (lix, lxi). To achieve this end, he regularly omits epithets and patronymics—all the formulaic elements of Homeric style. Mitchell also omits Book X (known as “The Doloneia”) and many other passages the text-critic Martin West has marked as interpolations. If, however, Mitchell were as interested in “getting back to an original” (lviii) text of Homer as he writes in his introduction, one would think he would retain formulaic language as a hallmark of Homeric style. In fact, Mitchell omits so many characteristic elements of this style that he seems less interested in getting back to what Homer composed than in simplifying it. Furthermore, although Mitchell’s translation is both readable and swift, it holds little appeal for classroom use because of the omissions. Instructors like me who encourage an appreciation of formulae as an essential component of Homer’s style will have no use for Mitchell’s translation. Mitchell’s claim that “throughout Homeric poetry the fixed epithet simply fills out the meter and is usually irrelevant to the context” (lx) is naïve, as will be shown. One would assume a reader wants to experience Homeric epic with all its idiosyncrasies rather than an “abridged” or “simplified” rendering. We can begin by comparing Verity’s and Mitchell’s translations of a “pedestrian” passage, one with a list of names. Here various Greek warriors are standing up to offer themselves as a rival to the Trojan prince Hector in a duel: