Memorial - Softcover

Oswald, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571274188 ISBN 13: 9780571274185

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2012

Synopsis

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since -- but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its 'bright unbearable reality' (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably - and unforgotten - in the copiousness of Homer's glance.

'The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt - in the aftermath of the Trojan War - to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world... compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.'

- Alice Oswald

About this title

Review:

'Oswald doesn't so much revise as explode the tradition of translation ... [her] radiant poetry of remembrance will not be readily forgotten.' -- Independent

p > 'This is remembering on a grand scale. This is a concentrated, intense, multi-tasking elegy. And it is written with a freshness to match Homer's own ... I long to hear Memorial performed; it would be tremendous. As the death toll rises, one becomes aware that only one thing survives - a life force carrying everything with it: the poem itself.' -- Observer p/ >

'It is a delight to read ... a modernised version that delights in the unexpected... Read Alice Oswald in order to be reminded how such an everlasting work can still shock, even in the 21st century.' --Economist

'Precise and scalpel-sharp ... The words are Homer's but refracted through [Oswald's] own lucent poetic imagination. She stitches into this unadorned fabric some of the glorious similes of Homer ... It is an exquisite and brutal thing taken entirely on its own terms. It's a major achievement.' -- Guardian

'Magnificent ... This beautiful, bleak poem ... Oswald has achieved a miraculous feat. She's exposed a skeleton, but foundsomething magnificently eerie and rich. She has truly made, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Spender, a "minature iliad", taut, fluid and graceful, its tones knelling like bells into the clear air, ringing out in remembrance of all the untimely dead.' --Telegraph

Book Description:

Memorial, by Alice Oswald, is a glitteringly original new poem which is also a version of Homer's Iliad, from the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning poet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0571274188
• ISBN 13: 9780571274185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96