Ilíada liberada

The Iliad was composed in verse. It was conceived to be recited, and therefore uses the dactylic hexameter, a type of six-foot verse in which long and short syllables alternate in a way that gives the recitation a characteristic rhythm, ideal to be accompanied with music: the beginning of an uninterrupted tradition that has given rise to epic songs, blind romances and rap. But three thousand years have passed. Such is the temporal distance, such is the difference in the cultural references between the public that then attended the recitation and the current reader of the Homeric texts, that it is vain to try to reproduce, even with a minimal approximation, the effect that the Iliad could produce in the dates close to its creation. According to Jorge Luis Borges, a translation is, in fact, a new literary work. In his essay The Homeric Versions, after analyzing various translations of the Homeric texts, Borges ventures that perhaps the most faithful of the Homeric versions is the one made by Samuel Butler (1835-1902) at the dawn of the 20th century. This is the text that we have chosen, and that Miguel Temprano García has translated into Spanish.