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temrisIt's Eid right now, and I have exams after a week. I had picked up a Turkish translation of the Iliad earlier this month and managed to finish it yesterday, but it was very boring. I'm not someone who gets bored easily when I'm reading something "historical". This was not the case with this work.
I'll share here my review I've posted on Goodreads.
This is one of the few epics I tried reading and atp I think it's just not something for me.I appreciated the historical importance of the work I had in my hands yet I found it very boring, repetitive and mostly uninteresting. How can you make a war sound so uninteresting? I'm not even someone who is looking for bloodshed, action-movie like sequences, I knew what was waiting for me, yet; it is so incredibly dull, or maybe the translation I've read was the reason. But it is very certain how repetitive it was regardless of the translation.
Basically, the whole poem is a loop. We are in a never ending loop... One side seemingly about to win until some gods help their own side, then this time it's the other side who's going to defeat them; oh no, look, now some other gods help the first ones! Wow, so exciting..!
There were many times where I've read like I was trying to fill some quota, and not reading for the sake of doing something I liked. But there were also some okay moments. They were really few in a 16000 something line poem.
It's been some time since I've read something so very revered and put on a high pedestal only to find something so bland. I mean, it's one of the literary works Westerns claim as one of the pillars of their "civilization", so... (It is funny how back then Greeks would be rightfully considered Eastern, but oh well. The West is always appropriating everything anyway.) You kind of build an idea of an amazing poem inside your mind.
Besides that, I was very annoyed at the introduction of the work in the version I've read. It really made me feel like we didn't read the same work, because it just couldn't stop glazing it, and the worst part of it is that it was a woman, claiming that the representation of women in the Iliad was so flattering and emotionally beautiful. Are you serious? I think it was just their way of trying to make the Anatolians seem so homely and domestically "fluff" or something, since Turkish culture is more connected with Anatolia, but I did not see those things in the poem. Both sides were quite literally equally bad towards women.
I am now going to just unleash my anger because I remember all those who claim something so absurd; that "a war broke out because of such a beautiful woman" and that "ancient civilizations regarded women the most, more than modern men" or something so stupidly tradcel. Y'all reading this from your asses or something?? ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ The man who "owned" Helen was angry because "his property was stolen" from him, not because he cared for her. And the abductor, equally, doesn't revere her for anything other than her beauty. Even the poet doesn't care about her as a human being.
In fact, I've also seen somewhere while I was researching to see if I was not understanding, or missing something; that someone claimed it's because throughout the whole poem, you can see that "beauty" in both men and women are revered most, and gives them their value. It is true, and like I said, since Westerners claimed this as their own and built their society upon works like this, now they make the whole world hell for all of us.
Finally, another complain about the translation: They claim that they kept the line numbers same with the original work. Okay, but then they didn't. I mean, they kept only the 5n ones. Because the others do not match, how can I use it to compare with other translations??? In fact, I tried to find one specific line in an English version, and I couldn't because of this.
I'll share here my review I've posted on Goodreads.
This is one of the few epics I tried reading and atp I think it's just not something for me.I appreciated the historical importance of the work I had in my hands yet I found it very boring, repetitive and mostly uninteresting. How can you make a war sound so uninteresting? I'm not even someone who is looking for bloodshed, action-movie like sequences, I knew what was waiting for me, yet; it is so incredibly dull, or maybe the translation I've read was the reason. But it is very certain how repetitive it was regardless of the translation.
Basically, the whole poem is a loop. We are in a never ending loop... One side seemingly about to win until some gods help their own side, then this time it's the other side who's going to defeat them; oh no, look, now some other gods help the first ones! Wow, so exciting..!
There were many times where I've read like I was trying to fill some quota, and not reading for the sake of doing something I liked. But there were also some okay moments. They were really few in a 16000 something line poem.
It's been some time since I've read something so very revered and put on a high pedestal only to find something so bland. I mean, it's one of the literary works Westerns claim as one of the pillars of their "civilization", so... (It is funny how back then Greeks would be rightfully considered Eastern, but oh well. The West is always appropriating everything anyway.) You kind of build an idea of an amazing poem inside your mind.
Besides that, I was very annoyed at the introduction of the work in the version I've read. It really made me feel like we didn't read the same work, because it just couldn't stop glazing it, and the worst part of it is that it was a woman, claiming that the representation of women in the Iliad was so flattering and emotionally beautiful. Are you serious? I think it was just their way of trying to make the Anatolians seem so homely and domestically "fluff" or something, since Turkish culture is more connected with Anatolia, but I did not see those things in the poem. Both sides were quite literally equally bad towards women.
I am now going to just unleash my anger because I remember all those who claim something so absurd; that "a war broke out because of such a beautiful woman" and that "ancient civilizations regarded women the most, more than modern men" or something so stupidly tradcel. Y'all reading this from your asses or something?? ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ The man who "owned" Helen was angry because "his property was stolen" from him, not because he cared for her. And the abductor, equally, doesn't revere her for anything other than her beauty. Even the poet doesn't care about her as a human being.
In fact, I've also seen somewhere while I was researching to see if I was not understanding, or missing something; that someone claimed it's because throughout the whole poem, you can see that "beauty" in both men and women are revered most, and gives them their value. It is true, and like I said, since Westerners claimed this as their own and built their society upon works like this, now they make the whole world hell for all of us.
Finally, another complain about the translation: They claim that they kept the line numbers same with the original work. Okay, but then they didn't. I mean, they kept only the 5n ones. Because the others do not match, how can I use it to compare with other translations??? In fact, I tried to find one specific line in an English version, and I couldn't because of this.
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Date: Saturday, 21 March 2026 05:45 pm (UTC)And the translation does matter a whole lot (the first one I ever read wasn't even translated from the Greek but rather the Latin and it was so so awful), for example as far as I can remember from doing comparative translations in school, the whole reason why the war started isn't because Menelaus is seeing Helen as property (though bronze age Greece and archaic Greece did have that problem) but because Paris:
a) Broke hospitality rules (xenia) which was a cornerstone of the societal contract at the time by doing all that. (And I get the feeling that the property line might come from the fact that Paris did also take like half the spartan treasury with him when he left? It wasn't just Helen)
b) Paris was traveling under a diplomatic banner which is why Troy was dragged into it (and then Troy refused to negotiate, though it was a difficult situation since this was all orchestrated by a god)
c) There was the pact that allied all those kingdoms together that needed to be called in or else the really uneasy alliance that was in place would fall apart
However it's very much not a poem for everyone, it's supposed to feel slow and boring at times (except when it's trying to make you feel sad), and it is a lot more confused than say the Odyssey (both come as a compilation of a long oral tradition, but the Odyssey benefits from having a more cohesive cast of characters rather than the mess that is the Iliad)
Oh god this is so long, I'm so sorry