<From Alice Oswald’s introduction:

This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story. Matthew Arnold (and almost everyone since) has praised the Iliad for its ‘nobility’. But ancient critics praised its ‘enargeia’, which means something like ‘bright unbearable reality’. It’s the word used whengods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves. This version, trying to retrieve the poem’s enargeia, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.

Faber & Faber | hardback |ISBN: 9780571274161