1/ Finally completed the Iliad, using John Dolan’s (aka The War Nerd) translation over the Loeb version (as recommended by Luttwak). Dolan is good at capturing the bloody nature of Bronze Age combat, and also the idea that these men were drawn on by the voices of the Gods.
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2/ Dolan’s stated intention is to recapture the Iliad as as a sort of action film adventure of the Die Hard type, not a dry exercise in scholarship. He doesn’t quite succeed because to do that he needs to write more like Tom Clancy. In this case, his style is still too stiff.
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3/ It’s still a little too much like a Loeb translation in some ways, perhaps just the nature of the material. You can’t go too far without having to rename it altogether. Dolan remains strongest in his “War Nerd” persona, which was funny & well executed.
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4/ He drops a few little postmodern bits into his Illia. We have “Afrodite” instead of “Aphrodite” to invert traditional standards of beauty, and there’s a measure of “white knighting” for the supposedly put upon goddesses who want to kill all men.
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5/ Perhaps it’s Dolan who wants to kill the successful men, and save those maiden goddesses? I don’t know. Summary: Strong depiction of gods drawing men on contra our internalised psychology, good & frank “action man” type speech, good descriptions of feasting...
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6/...good asides that make honest points about what’s going on and make the characters feel recognisable in our world rather than statues (as in Loeb), & some humour. Downside, overly rigid style doesn’t quite achieve what he wants & odd postmodern intrusions.
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7/ Dolan is always trapped between his affection for Rambo, Die Hard, “the Bronze Age”, and “fascism” and his resentful “war nerdy” postmodern leftist take. He combines the two, sort of Schopenhauer meets Marx, awkwardly...sometimes I think he’s going to give in...
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8/...but then he starts to moralise about the British Empire or is sentimental about the girl soldiers of the PKK. Being sentimental about girl soldiers—Israeli and Kurdish—is a hobby of the two sides of the left, the neoconservatives and the postmodern left repsectively.
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