le to exhume this buried Epic
from the superincumbent mass of episodical matter, and to restore
it to the modern world. For years past I have felt a longing to
undertake this work, but the task was by no means an easy one.
Leaving out all episodical matter, the leading narrative of the Epic
forms about one-fourth of the work; and a complete translation even
of this leading story would be unreadable, both from its length and
its prolixness. On the other hand, to condense the story into shorter
limits would be, not to make a translation, but virtually to write a
new poem; and that was not what I desired to undertake, nor what I
was competent to perform.

There seemed to me only one way out of this difficulty. The
main incidents of the Epic are narrated in the original work in
passages which are neither diffuse nor unduly prolix, and which are
interspersed in the leading narrative of the Epic, at that narrative
itself is interspersed in the midst of more lengthy episodes. The
more carefully I examined the arrangement, the more clearly it
appeared to me that these main incidents of the Epic would bear a
full and unabridged translation into English verse; and that these
translations, linked together by short connecting notes, would
virtually present the entire story of the Epic to the modern reader in
a form and within limits which might be acceptable. It would be, no
doubt, a condensed version of the original Epic, but the condensation
would be effected, not by the translator telling a short story in his
own language, but by linking together those passages of the original
which describe the main and striking incidents, and thus telling
the main story as told in the original work. The advantage of this
arrangement is that, in the passages presented to the reader, it is
the poet who speaks to him, not the translator. Though vast portions
of the original are skipped over, those which are presented are the
portions which narrate the main incidents of the Epic, and they
describe those incidents as told by the poet himself.

This is the plan I have generally adopted in the present work. Except
in the three books which describe the actual war (Books viii., ix.,
and x.), the other nine books of this translation are complete
translations of selected passages of the original work. I have not
attempted to condense these passages nor to expand them; I have
endeavoured to put them before the English reader as they have
been told by t