Haunted by Homer

Alice Oswald thinks The Iliad has been turned into a public school poem that glamorises war. So she has rewritten it – with the foot soldiers as heroes.

From a piece in the Guardian...

"I've always felt, with The Iliad, a real frustration that it's read wrong," Oswald says. "That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes – it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. Every translation you pick up is so romantically involved with the main story that the ordinariness of Homer, which I love so much – the poem's amazing background of peculiar, real people, just being themselves – is almost invisible." In her version, the absence of the monolithic main characters leaves the histories of the footsoldiers who died in their shadows exposed and gleaming, like rocks at low tide.

What's more, Oswald says, Homer is anything but a diversion: her poetry has been haunted by his for as long as she's been writing. She first encountered him at grammar school, in snatches and snippets at O-level, and then through The Odyssey in the sixth form. "I completely fell in love with it," she says. "I asked if I could forget about the rest of the syllabus and just do Homer, and amazingly, my teacher said yes. After I left school, I spent my year off reading The Iliad, which was almost better. Shockingly good."