Ever since John Dryden rendered the Aeneid into English and Alexander Pope performed the same task for the Iliad and the Odyssey, translation has been a high-prestige outlet for the epic imagination. My facility with Homeric Greek is a happy but now distant memory. Like most other readers I depend now on translators, and some recent versions of Homer make a point of accommodating ancient language and conventions to contemporary usage. Book 23 of the Iliad narrates the funeral games staged by the Greeks to memorialize Patroclus. In a poem as grim as the Iliad, the athletic contests offer one of the few occasions for levity. In his version of the boxing match, Robert Fagles introduces a comic touch of his own when Epeus puts himself forward with a confident boast: “I am the greatest!” That the voice of Muhammad Ali should suddenly break into a poem 3,000 years old shrinks the gap of time between contemporary American readers and the heroes on the plains of Troy. There is a similar effect in Fagles's rendition of the chariot race when Menelaus yells at one of his reckless competitors, “Antilochus—you drive like a maniac! Hold your horses!” The second exclamation evokes a Western wagon train, while the first momentarily visualizes the chariot as a hot rod. When Stanley Lombardo tackled Book 23 a phrase drawn from African American slapstick slipped into Odysseus's prayer to Athena to aid him in the footrace: “Hear me, goddess, and don't fail my feet now.” Athena obliges by causing the race's leader, Ajax, to stumble into a pile of cattle dung. “Shit! The goddess tripped me up,” Ajax complains with an expletive more American than Hellenic. The most recent translator of Homer, Emily Wilson, offers a fast-paced and plainspoken Odyssey with a strong rhythmic beat. Steering clear of Lombardo's vulgarism and Fagles's anachronism, she still strips her lines of the coatings of high style. Unapologetically, in her “translator's note,” she alerts readers to her preference for contemporary demotic language. “My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own.” Wilson's principle echoes Dryden's ambition for translation, more than three centuries ago: “to make Virgil speak such English, as he himself wou’d have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age.”