This is for ivy-crowned, loud Dionysus,

Glorious Semele and Zeus’s bright son.

Sleek-haired nymphs took him from his kingly father

Into their arms—devoted foster mothers

In Nysa’s hollows. As his parent wished it,

He grew, the gods’ peer, in a fragrant grotto—

They raised him so the world could sing his glory.

Later, festooned with laurel leaves and ivy,

He wandered forest places, and the nymphs came

Behind him, while the endless woods reechoed.

Welcome now, Dionysus, with your grape-wealth.

Bring us in joy to see this season next year,

Achilles

Memnon of Aethiopia in Marker

Sing, Muse, of Artemis, the archer’s sister,

The arrow-raining girl raised with Apollo.

Her horses drink in Meles with its deep reeds.

Her pure gold chariot speeds its way through Smyrna

To viny Claros. Silver-bowed Apollo

Sits waiting for the long-range arrow-pourer.

To you and other goddesses, I sing this:

Be joyful. It is you that I begin with,

But after you another hymn must follow.

————

Each word, stanza, punctuation, capitalization (and lack thereof) and space, is intentional.

The ending to the intro of Emily Wilson's translation of the the Iliad goes hard. Yes, this is a wall of text post, but its worth your time. The whole intro builds to this moment:

"But over the past century, in the wake of the two world wars and amid shifting attitudes towards masculinity and heroism, The Iliad has received renewed attention. Recent interpretations often view The Iliad as a poem less of glory than of mourning. In its attentiveness to the visual as well as auditory qualities of the world, The Iliad can feel entirely at home in our own image-focused media landscape. Twenty-first-century readers and listeners may see the inequalities in the poem’s social worlds with particular clarity. The emotional intensity of the poem’s representation of conflict feels in tune with the anguish and partisanship of our era. We are now in a period of crisis not for a specific nation but for humanity, inhabiting a planet that is becoming less and less habitable. A new kind of heartbreak can be felt in The Iliad’s representation of a city in its last days, of triumphs and defeats and struggles and speeches that take place in a city that will soon be burned to the ground, in a landscape that will soon be flooded by all the rivers, in a world where soon, no people will live at all, and there will be no more stories and no more names. You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time."