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An inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost.

About the Author

SIMONE WEIL (1909-1943) was one of the first female graduates of the Ecole Normale Superieure and taught philosophy in provincial schools from 1931 to 1938. A socialist, she worked for a time on the Renault assembly line and volunteered to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, a mystical vision led Weil to convert to Roman Catholicism, though she refused the sacrament of baptism. Weil fled France for the United States in 1942, where, in solidarity with the people of Occupied France, she drastically limited her intake of food, so hastening her early death from tuberculosis. Rachel Bespaloff (1895-1949) was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family-her father was the Zionist theoretician Daniel Pasmanik-and raised in Geneva. Bespaloff intended to pursue a musical career, but after an encounter with the thinker Leo Shestov, she devoted herself to the study of philosophy. One of the first French readers of Heidegger, Bespaloff published essays in the 1930s about Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Andre Malraux, and Julien Green, among other philosophers and writers. In 1942, she left France for the United States, where she worked as a scriptwriter for the French Section of the Office of War Information before teaching French literature at Mount Holyoke. In 1949, Rachel Bespaloff committed suicide, leaving a note that said she was "too fatigued to carry on." Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book, American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South , has just been published. (December 2008) Hermann Broch (1886-1951) was the author of The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil, among other novels.

Reviews

"* 'The publication of Simone Weil's essay... [was] an event of great importance to those of us who read it. This is one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written' Elizabeth Hardwick * 'This book is about the best thing I have ever read on the art of Homer, and unless you have tasted the poem in Greek, Mme. Bespaloff will serve better than the translations to convey how distant, how refined an art it was' Robert Fitzgerald * 'Weil's 'The Iliad, or The Poem of Force' and Bespaloff's 'On the Iliad' remain the twentieth century's most beloved, tortured, and profound responses to the world's greatest and most disturbing poem' The Atlantic Monthly"