Herbert Jordan

http://www.iliadtranslation.com . . .

By way of biography, here is a short article published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly Blog in January 2009. http://blogs.princeton.edu/paw/2009/01/personal_odyssey.html

PERSONAL ODYSSEY

A heartfelt translation, nine years in the making

In 1998 when Herbert Jordan '60 visited his daughter at St. John's College in Santa Fe, he picked up her copy of a translation of the Iliad. He read the first page and "it electrified me," he says. So he got his own copy and read every translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey he could find. A year later, tragedy struck when his only son died in a car crash at 16. At the urging of a friend, he began to teach himself to read Homer in the original Greek, as a way, he says, "to channel grief." He spent a couple years learning the language, spending four to six hours a day on the task.

As he began to learn the language and read the Iliad, says Jordan, "I felt that I could relate to the spirit of the original better than any of the translators I read." And he sensed "I was there, by the ships on the beach below Troy," says Jordan, who has had a wide-ranging career as an attorney, CEO of a window and door manufacturing business, and founder of a maple syrup production business and a charitable legal service. He tried his hand at translating the epic poem of gods and warriors, line by line, into English blank verse. The hardest part, he says, was "learning to deal with Greek irregular verbs."

Along the way he had some help from Henry Taylor, a Pulitzer-prize winning poet, who went over his drafts, coaching him on diction and tone. When he started the translation, Jordan had no intention of publishing it. But University of Oklahoma Press was impressed and last October published it.

A reviewer from Bryn Mawr Classical Review called Jordan's translation "remarkably lively and poetic" and a "very easy, vivid read."

Even though it took nine years in all to complete the Iliad, Jordan is already at work on his next project: translating the Odyssey.

By Katherine Federici Greenwood