Lombardo writes in short, punchy lines with a contemporary American register. His Book 1 opens with "Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, / Black and murderous," two lines that move fast and land hard. Alexander stays closer to the Greek sentence structure, giving readers "Wrath, sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus' son Achilles," a longer, more formal construction that keeps the word "wrath" where Homer puts it. Lombardo's diction throughout the passages runs colloquial: Ares becomes "a shifty lout" in Book 5, a phrase that has real energy but sits in a different register than anything else in the epic tradition. Alexander writes "double-faced," plain and literal. Both are verse, but Lombardo's lines are shorter and more variable, while Alexander's tend toward longer, more loaded units. Alexander trained as a classicist, and her translation keeps close to the Greek word order and epithets. In Book 9, she renders the two-fate passage with "my return home is lost, but my glory will be undying," staying parallel and formal to match Achilles' rhetorical balance. Lombardo removes the parallelism and rephrases: "my glory will be undying forever," adding "forever" and dropping the structural echo. His version reads well aloud and moves quickly through narrative. He also cuts more freely: in Book 21 he omits Achilles' lines about dawn, dusk, and midday as the possible time of his own death, condensing to "I too / Am in death's shadow." Alexander keeps those lines. Lombardo gains momentum; Alexander keeps the original's specific texture.
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Wrath—sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus' son Achilles,
that inflicted woes without number upon the Achaeans,
hurled forth to Hades many strong souls of warriors
and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs,
for all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished;
sing from when they two first stood in conflict—
Atreus' son, lord of men, and godlike Achilles.