Thursday, March 5, 2015

Carlo Rotella on Muhammad Ali, Homer, and translation

I am happy to discover that Carlo Rotella’s essay “The Greatest” is online, courtesy of the University of Chicago Press. For years I’ve been guarding a xeroxed copy of the essay’s December 1998 appearance in Harper’s, where it was presented as an excerpt from a longer essay published elsewhere. But no: these seven paragraphs appear to be the thing itself. The starting point for Rotella’s thinking is a boxer’s boast in Iliad 23: “I am the greatest.”

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

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