This was my third (maybe fourth) time reading The Iliad but Emily Wilson's translation is by far the best translation I've read. Her translation came out just a couple of years ago and truly gives the story the epic feel it deserves. It is clean and clear and bold. It felt to me like this is what the story sounded like when it was shared around the campfire for millennia. This is a superior translation and a real work of art just in terms of the translation process alone. I already have Wilson's The Odyssey on the top of my book stack all queued up. A remarkable achievement.
That being said, I find the story of The Iliad super depressing and dark. To modern ears it can seem repetitive, lots of heroes dying and dying and dying. The gods are capricious and manipulative. The Greeks and Trojans violent pawns in a hopeless tragedy of death and destruction. And not much gets resolved. Contrary to the popular imagination of those who haven't read the poem, the kidnapping of Helen is only alluded to and the Trojan Horse and the Fall of Troy not mentioned at all.
The story takes place over just a few days near the end of the ten year war and it ends abruptly. It is not a feel good story! There are moments of grandeur, heroism and humor but so much of that is washed out in murderous and barbaric violence. War has always been a terrible scourge of the Human race.
Of course, I'm reading it with modern eyes and those are modern observations. It is still a towering work in the western literary tradition and a good read. And this translation is fantastic. But at the end I felt like a lot of humanity's violent instincts have not really evolved all that much in three thousand years. And that made me sad.
