Ilíada Liberada

The Iliad was composed in verse. It was conceived to be recited, and therefore uses 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 for musical accompaniment: the beginning of an uninterrupted tradition that has given rise to epic poems, ballads, and rap. But three thousand years have passed. Such is the temporal distance, so great the difference in cultural references between the audience that attended the recitation then and the current reader of Homeric texts, that it is futile to attempt to reproduce, even with the slightest approximation, the effect that the Iliad might have produced in the period surrounding its creation. As Jorge Luis Borges stated, a translation is, in fact, a new literary work. In his essay "The Homeric Versions," after analyzing various translations of the Homeric texts, Borges suggests that perhaps the most faithful of the Homeric versions is that produced by Samuel Butler (1835-1902) at the dawn of the 20th century. This is the text we have chosen, and which Miguel Temprano García has translated into Spanish.