About

This new edition of Simone Weil's famous essay on the Iliad gives it a very different status thanit has in the version in which I and probably many other readers of BMCR first encountered it.My old copy is a pamphlet published in 1956 by Pendle Hill a Quaker study center nearPhiladelphia. There Weil's essay which began its life in English in the November 1945 issue ofPolitics is offered as an aid to spiritual meditation in a tradition of pacifism. In a briefintroduction it is contextualized as a response to a defining catastrophe of the thencontemporary world. The Iliad or The Poem of Force was written in the summer and fall of1940 after the fall of France. It may thus be read as an indirect commentary on that tragicevent which signalized the triumph of the most extreme modern expression of force. Holoka'snew edition also accords the essay great respect but in a different form. Now it is not anauthoritative tract that speaks for itself but a classic work of literature requiring the sametreatment as a Greek or Latin text. We are given a French text drawn from a recent scholarlyedition to which we can compare the new studiously faithful translation that is also provided(the earlier somewhat freer translation having been guaranteed simply by the credentials of itsauthor Mary McCarthy) in addition the text is elucidated through an introduction and acommentary.