People still read books, you say?

 During the fair weather this week I have been reading The Iliad in Emily Wilson's translation on the front porch. 

My interest in Wilson's translation was piqued by ill-informed criticism of her work online and further stimulated by reading David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens, part art history and part political and cultural history. 

So to Wilson's Iliad: Fifty pages of introduction (much of it familiar), an explanation of her approach as translator, a formidable apparatus of informative endnotes, and 600 pages of iambic pentameter verse. It is a surprisingly fluid read. (Some years ago I started Robert Fitzgerald's translation but ground to a halt.) Though the occasional word choice sounds prosaic, the extended metaphors and repeated titles and phrasing keep the music. The violence and brutality come through with impact. I am half a dozen books in and eager for more. 

Each translation of Homer fits its time--think of Alexander Pope rendering The Iliad in rhymed couplets--and Wilson's seems to match ours. 

So why, at seventy-five, am I finally picking up Homer? 

First, do not be deceived by the way people talk in English department graduate lounges; nobody has read all the great books, and everybody is faking it. We pick up allusions and quotations in other works, acquiring an acquaintance that is no more than a shallow literacy. 

But the great books are there, to be picked up and savored whenever it occurs to us to look into them.

And at seventy-five: Franklin Roosevelt paid a courtesy call on Oliver Wendell Holmes and found the ninety-two-year-old reading Plato. "Why are you reading Plato, Mr. Justice?" he asked. "To improve my mind, Mr. President," Holmes answered. I am largely on the shelf, retired, doing a little occasional copy editing for The Baltimore Banner, but no longer teaching, no longer conducting workshops on editing, no longer hiring and supervising other editors--past it, as the British say. Even so, my mind remains, still subject to improvement, and my curiosity is not extinguished.