Little is known about the poet Homer but he is thought to have composed the Iliad in teh second half of the eight century BC and according to tradition lived on the island of Chios in the east Aegean. Stephen Mitchell is a bestselling translator. His translation of Gilgamesh sold over 800,000 copies in the States and was described by Harold Pinter as 'a revelation'. He also received great acclaim for his translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus and the Book of Job. He was educated at Amherst College, the Sorbonne and Yale University.
The verse is well-forged and clean-limbed, pulsing along in an unobtrusive pentameter...Mitchell has re-energised it for a new generation * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * A sturdy, muscular, and nuanced translation that will surely bring many new readers to this great work, one of the monuments of our own magnificence , in Stephen Mitchell's happy formulation -- John Banville Well-forged and clean-limbed, the excised epithets will be a loss to some; to others a judicious cut. * THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH *