Homer’s Illiad in Sevilla Magazine

Achilles vs Hector fight

I am in love with Homer’s Illiad ever since I read it in Sinhala in Sevilla magazine. Magazine was published even before I was born (published in 1963) and I had the pleasure of reading it in late 1980s as a schoolboy. The story was so beautiful and so were the drawings. I have uploaded two images above. Try to read the wonderful Sinhala in it.

Again I came across with a Sinhala translation – can’t remember who did it – of the same story. It had given wonderful names for the characters in the story. Achilles was named අඛිල, Patroclus – පත්‍රලෞකුස and Hector – හැකිතර. It was more of an adaptation than a translation and was not bad.

I watched the DVD, Troy in which Brad Pit played Achilles and enjoyed it a lot. My worry was that Helen in this movie was not beautiful enough as per the story. Selection of Orlando Bloom as Paris was sensible though. The fierce fight between Achilles and Hector was excellently done. Wish I could watch it on big screen.

I have three versions of Illiad with me, the Wordsworth Classics version, a Penguin version and the poem version. I tried to read it for pleasure but I feel I need a proper literature teacher’s support for it as all three versions contain old English to a great extent. The other problem is that the difficulty in remembering various characters and places. Unfortunately my favorite English literature teacher, Mr. Nimal Gunawardhana died in 2009 and other teacher is too old to teach. It is very difficult to find capable teachers who can teach classical literature today.

Trojan Horse