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Richmond Lattimore
Richmond Lattimore
Richmond Lattimore was the American classicist whose translations of the [[iliad|Iliad]] (1951) and [[odyssey|Odyssey]] (1965) remain, within the depth-psychological and philological traditions, the standard English texts of Homer. Working against the free-verse and prose versions popular in his day, Lattimore rendered Greek dactylic hexameter in a loose English six-beat line that preserved the epic register, the formulaic repetitions, and the syntactic weight of the original — the translation Snell, Dodds, and Havelock cite, and the one on which the Seba tradition’s Homeric quotation typically depends.
His versions of Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, and the New Testament Gospels apply the same scholarly-poetic discipline. Paired with his wife Alice Lattimore’s work on Greek lyric, his lifetime’s labor constitutes the corpus through which Anglophone readers of the twentieth century learned to hear the classical voice at full register. See lattimore-iliad and lattimore-odyssey.