Anthony Verity’s fine new translation of the Iliad is one of a trio to appear within the last year.1 Verity’s is the best of the three, as I hope to show. But his translation also does what good Homeric translations since Chapman have always done: it provokes broader questions about the state of English literature and the nature of poetry in general.

Verity takes minimal liberties with the original. Good: we need straightforward English translations of Homer which keep closely to the Greek, and Verity’s Iliad, supplemented by its useful apparatus and a sharply eloquent introductory essay by Emily Greenwood, sets a high standard for translation of that kind. Verity gives us English close enough to the lexical sense of the Greek that you could use it as a crib. And yet his text is readable, page after page. This involves a great deal of skill: the exotic conventions of Homeric verse mean that it is very easy for a close translation to issue in confusing English.

Such confusion often mars Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of the Iliad, which has just been re-issued (without alteration, but supplemented with maps, notes, and a useful introduction by Richard Martin).2Lattimore’s translation could be thought of as a rival of Verity’s, in that it competes on a similar ground. Lattimore’s chief claim for his version was its fidelity to the Greek: “I must try to avoid mistranslation,” he wrote, “which would be caused by rating the