Zitat des Tages über Ilias / Iliad:
It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.
I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.
Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.
I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.
The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.
'The Iliad' is about a war 1,200 years ago that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If you're being honest, you realize that, as an artist, you're not a policy maker.
