Reading the Iliad in the Light of Eternity ('on the Iliad', 'the Iliad, Or the Poem of Force')

I PUBLISHED ORIGINALLY during the Second World War, Simone Weil's "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" and Rachel Bespaloff's "On the Iliad" are two of the last century's finest discussions of Western literature's preeminent epic. The former, said Elizabeth Hardwick, "is one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written." The other, wrote Robert Fitzgerald, "is about the best thing I have ever read on the art of Homer." (1) Penned in the authors' native French, the essays were rendered into English by Mary McCarthy. McCarthy's translation of Weil's appeared in November 1945, when Dwight McDonald published it in Politics. Its appearance in McDonald's journal came as no surprise to Bespaloff, who was then negotiating with American editors about a plan to print the two translations together in one volume, a plan unrealized until 2005, when they were finally bound together by the New York Review of Books under the title War and the Iliad.