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Old 01-03-2012, 03:18 PM   #22
HarryT
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It depends what your goal is, Nyssa.

Pope is a pretty good poet, but he is incredibly constrained by having to make everything into rhyming couplets. As such, he's basically paraphrasing the Greek to make it fit with what he's forced to write by the structure of his own poem.

A prose, or a free verse, translation is going to give you a much more accurate picture of what Homer's actually saying than is a metrical, rhymed, poem like Pope. That's why I said that the reason to read Pope is for the sake of Pope's poem. It's a brilliant, wonderful poem - a great achievement in its own right. It's just not Homer.

I'm pretty sure that there are a number of prose translations of the Iliad on PG. They'd perhaps be better to read?
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