The Iliad Audiobook By Homer, Emily Wilson - translator cover art

The Iliad

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The Iliad

By: Homer, Emily Wilson - translator
Narrated by: Audra McDonald
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About this listen

2024 Audie Award Winner for Literary Fiction & Classics

When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017―rendering the ancient poem in contemporary language that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)―critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic―the most revered war poem of all time.

Brought to life in vivid audio form, this crisp verse translation of The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world―the fierce beauty of nature and deities’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals.

Wilson’s musical iambic pentameter verse is brought to life in the evocative voice of narrator and Broadway legend Audra McDonald. In her thrilling reading, this magical and often horrifying tale gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes. The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson’s Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Emily Wilson (Translation) (P)2023 Audible, Inc.
Epic Poetry Ancient History Heartfelt Ancient Greece

About the Creator

The Iliad the Odyssey were not invented from scratch by any individual. These great written poems make artful use of a long oral tradition, developed over centuries by many illiterate singer-songwriters. The two epics were composed perhaps in the seventh century BC, by one person or several people, about whom we know nothing. Whoever she, he, or they were, Homer was the most popular poet of antiquity, known simply as The Poet. These metrical, musical, dramatic, thrilling, fast-moving, multi-vocal poems were often performed orally by professional poetry-actors (rhapsodes), and were well-known to everybody in the ancient world: old, young, female, male, rich, poor, educated, illiterate, slave, and free.—Emily Wilson

About the Translator

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

About the Creator- Audra McDonald

About the Performer

Audra McDonald is unparalleled in the breadth and versatility of her artistry as both a singer and an actor. The winner of a record-breaking six Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards, and an Emmy, in 2015 she received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. She won Tonys for her performances in Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, A Raisin in the Sun, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, which also served as the vehicle for her Olivier-nominated 2017 West End debut. On television, McDonald won an Emmy as the official host of PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center and is known for recurring roles on Private Practice (ABC), The Good Wife (CBS), The Good Fight (Paramount+), and The Gilded Age (HBO). Her film credits include Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast and MGM’s 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect. A Juilliard-trained soprano, McDonald maintains a major career as a Grammy-winning recording and concert artist. Her latest solo album, Sing Happy, was recorded live with the New York Philharmonic for Decca Gold. She is a founding member of Black Theatre United, a board member of Covenant House International, and a prominent advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights whose favorite roles are those performed offstage, as an activist, wife to actor Will Swenson, and mother.

What listeners say about The Iliad

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Best version of the Iliad

Great narration and neat history lesson if you are interested in the background of the literature

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Homer!

Such beautiful descriptions and epic story. Beautifully translated and read. This is a great masterpiece!

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stellar reading breathing life into a classic piece of work

the story is what it is classic literature written long time ago. (putting it simply I love ancient Greek stories more than the average person) but Emily Wilson breaths life into a piece of literature history that I feel most people have trouble getting into

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The author’s understanding and passion for the Iliad.

The introduction is way to comprehensive for a reader. The story does not require that level of transactional language, since an avid reader can easily follow the story. I prefer a less educational version and a more realistic to the original scripts.

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An epic for the ages

I read about 40% on kindle, and then finished as audio. The narrator was awesome for the intonations of the characters and really brought this oral tradition to life.

There’s a reason this book has endured for about 3 thousand years. The battles are epic, the emotion is raw, and the insults are hilarious. There is so much to love in the language that Wilson chose as well. Her translation is lovely and straightforward, and allows modern people to enjoy this story without being bogged down. This is perhaps the best translation I’ve read of the Iliad.

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A classic made modern

After deciding to catch up on classics I’d never read growing up, and happening upon Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey to start, I was so surprised at how accessible and entertaining it was that I waited anxiously for this release like it was the latest Harry Potter book. I just couldn’t settle for a stuffy, pretentious translation and reading of the Iliad after such a great experience with such a wonderful modern language translation and performance of the Odyssey. And it was worth the wait! I can’t recommend it enough to anyone else like me who wants to get to know these classics in a way that’s easy to understand and enjoy.

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the most accessible translation

Emily Wilson brings the original text to life. excellently delivered by Audra McDonald. Well worth a listen

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Listening to this performance is an experience like none other

I’ve read the Iliad before, but hearing the raw emotions in this performance was like being reintroduced to a story I knew so well. I ended this in tears, sobbing along with Priam, Andromache and Hecuba.

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Great translation!

Easy to understand and beautifully presented. Highly recommend. A good introduction to Homer as well as a great reminder to those familiar with the first of these two works.

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Effective Translation Of A Rather Boring Text

Perhaps Eminem described The Iliad best: "HI KIDS, DO YOU LIKE VIOLENCE? / WANNA SEE ME STICK NINE INCH NAILS THROUGH EACH ONE OF MY EYELIDS?" Wilson apologizes in the introduction that there aren't more words for "spear" because it comes up so often in this text, but Homer shows us that the number of places that spear can go in the human body (or in the ground, if altered in its flight by one of the deathless gods) is limitless! The combat is plentiful but not very strategic--the most interesting part of the many battlefield scenes is the ways that The Gods can intervene in subtle & not so subtle ways. Indeed, one of the biggest takeaways from the book is how fickle and petulant The Gods were seen to be. Besides the battles, the rest of the book is mostly about how petulant and exasperating humans can be.

If you do want to engage with this text, for a couple of reasons it might be better to read rather than listen to. First, while Audra McDonald does a great job of conveying gravitas (especially when characters are enraged or inconsolable), she does not differentiate the characters that much (and Homer doesn't help--all of the characters like to speechify in very similar ways), so it's easy to get lost if you space out and miss the identifying tag at the beginning of a diatribe. The other issue is that Emily Wilson has apparently painstakingly replicated Homer's naturalistic tone in order to give us an equivalent experience to that of the original audience . . . which means that it's hard to appreciate all the work she put into refashioning the text into iambic pentameter without seeing the line breaks.

Wilson's scholarly introduction really brings across the care she took with the translation, but while it does provide some valuable context for contemporary readers, it's hard not to call it a bit excessive . . . even if it is ultimately more interesting than the text it describes.

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