With this sensational beginning, Wilson throws down the gauntlet for all future comers. It's comparable to her own earlier opening salvo from the first page of The Odyssey (her 2018 translation), where she calls Odysseus "a complicated man"; the adjective in the Greek original is polytropos, literally 'of many turns'. But by choosing 'complicated', Wilson was making a sly nod to younger readers who read 'complicated' as 'problematic'. Here, with the Iliad, Wilson makes similarly inspired word choices, which make this book an attractive proposition for first-timers and students. Menelaus is "acting crazy" during a line, which prompts somebody else to be "flabbergasted", both of which I am sure would make classicists shudder. In my view, these choices elevate the translation and make it more relevant for contemporary audiences. Not to mention, compared to The Odyssey (which is a swashbuckling adventure story, plot-wise), The Iliad is a profoundly sad book where bodies drop at an alarming rate, even by medieval standards. The overarching themes of the book are loss, grief and the kind of madness that grief eventually brings about (something a classicist might call 'melancholia'). As a translator working for younger readers, you must do something to make it a more attractive prospect. As Wilson writes in the introductory essay, "The attempt to repair one loss leads only to further losses. Hector's homecoming happens after death. Achilles mourns his beloved friend, Patroclus, and eventually shares his grief with the grief of others. But his friend is dead, and always will be. So are countless others, including those who are forgotten and unnamed. The past can never be undone. The dead never come back to life."

Taslima Nasreen

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