The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. University of Chicago Press; 608 pages; $35. Buy from Amazon.com

The Iliad. Translated by Anthony Verity. Oxford University Press; 512 pages; £16.99. To be published in America in November; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

The Iliad. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Free Press; 466 pages; $35. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Memorial. By Alice Oswald. Faber and Faber; 84 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

BLOODY but beautiful, is there a greater poem than the “Iliad”? Depicting a few weeks in the final year of the Greek siege of Troy, Homer's epic glitters with bronze spears and the blazing sun. Rich with his famous similes and repeated expressions, it describes a war in which men can pause from fighting in order to speak of their family lineage in terms of “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity”; in which Gods can yank warriors back by their hair or cover them in a cloud of mist if it is not yet their turn to die. It is both brutally realistic (once you have heard how Phereclus died by a spear through his right buttock into his bladder, you won't forget it) and belonging to another world—as the Greek epithet for Homer, theois aoidos or “divine singer” suggests. It is no wonder that the “Iliad” is a text that people constantly turn back to, and continually translate.

And yet, it comes as something of a surprise that this month there are four translations competing for the status of a definitive “Iliad”. Richmond Lattimore's translation, originally from 1951, has been reissued with scholarly notes and a new introduction. For years, Lattimore's version has been a standard text, particularly in his native America. It is not hard to see why. Both lucid and learned, Lattimore writes with a certain grace, capturing the combination of nobility and speed which over 100 years ago Matthew Arnold famously heard in Homer's work.

In certain respects, both Stephen Mitchell and Anthony Verity are setting their versions against Lattimore's. Mr Verity, a former Master of Dulwich College in London, declares that his translation “does not claim to be poetry.” Mr Mitchell, a translator who had little Greek before starting out on this project, claims that his version is more reliable as he bases it on a different edition of the text from Lattimore's. By doing so, Mr Mitchell cuts what has, for centuries, been included in the performance tradition of the “Iliad”. Gone is the whole of Book Ten (“baroque and nasty”, apparently), most of the adjectives and fixed epithets that contribute to the life of Homer's figures and, subsequently, most of the poetic value of Homer's work. It is doubtful, for example, that Zeus, the father of the universe, would ever exclaim as Mr Mitchell has him do, that “I have a sensible plan”, or even that Achilles, tempestuous as he is, would rally “To hell with that man…I don't give a damn about him.”

Similarly, although Mr Verity is far more restrained and scholarly in his translation, he too fails to capture the full force of Homer's work. In Mr Verity's translation, Achilles's outburst above becomes the prim “I abominate his gifts, and I value him no more than a splinter.” Such differences may seem slight in comparison, but the accumulated result, whether of Mr Mitchell's colloquialisms or Mr Verity's carefulness, render these both rather dull literary works. Both Mr Verity and Mr Mitchell give Hecuba's speech to her husband, Priam, when he tells her of going to retrieve their son Hector's body from Achilles, a certain shrillness not necessarily heard in the Greek. “Good God! Are you out of your mind?” wails Mr Mitchell's version, while Mr Verity's is similarly brusque: “You are mad! Where has your good sense gone…” In contrast, Lattimore captures something far nearer to the original, a mother mourning her son's death: “Ah me, where has that wisdom gone for which you were famous?” Homer's epic is not just composed of harridan wives and brave men. It encompasses the whole messy breadth of humanity, and so needs a decent translation to bring this about.

Paradoxically, Alice Oswald manages to achieve this, even if her “Memorial” is about an eighth of the length of the “Iliad”. Ms Oswald has audaciously set out to translate the book's atmosphere, rather than its story. A poet known for her landscape verse, Ms Oswald read classics at Oxford. The result is a work by someone who not only understands Homer's Greek, but who also has an ear for modern verse. It is a delight to read. Although some of the best-loved moments in Homer's text are referred to only obliquely or fleetingly—when Achilles, mourning, covers his face in earth at the news of the death of his companion, Patroclus, or when Andromache is seen running a bath for an already-dead Hector—Ms Oswald has captured a certain spirit of Homer's text, preventing the reader from missing these narrative moments too much.

Ms Oswald translates Homer's similes literally, but paraphrases the rest, creating a modernised version that delights in the unexpected. She brings the poem's violence shockingly to life: a figure dies as quickly as “a lift door closing”, suddenly obscured from view, while another soldier, stripping the dead, has “tin-opened them out of their armour”. Diomedes kills “Red-faced quietly like a butcher keeping up with his order”. Ms Oswald is aware that these characters can at times seem more horrific than heroic: “This is horrible this is some kind of bloodfeast”. And Hector waits for Achilles, “Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running”, both arrogant and charming at once.

Ms Oswald's “Memorial” strips the “Iliad” down to its bare bones, capturing the terrifying brevity and brutality of the deaths (240 named, many more anonymous) that Homer depicted. With no gods in her version, it could seem rather bleak. And yet there is a liveliness to her poem—part elegy, part war memorial—that prevents it from becoming so. Read Richmond Lattimore's translation for the epic scale and narrative of Homer's poem. But read Alice Oswald in order to be reminded how such an everlasting work can still shock, even in the 21st century.