Pope writes in heroic couplets, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter that impose a formal symmetry on everything they touch. In the Book 9 passage, he turns Achilles' spare two-path choice into "Short is my date, but deathless my renown," a line that sounds polished and epigrammatic. Reck works in looser verse with irregular line lengths and no consistent rhyme. His version of the same speech reads: "if I stay here and continue combat / I won't go back but have undying fame." The rhythm is closer to spoken English. Pope's diction runs archaic throughout, using "foredoom'd," "boots it," and "thy better." Reck's register is contemporary, occasionally colloquial, as when Athena in Book 5 calls Ares "that crook, that lunatic, that renegade." Pope completed his translation in 1715-1720 and was celebrated for it in his own time, though critics later questioned how faithfully it rendered Homer's plainness. His priorities are formal elegance and rhetorical force. The couplet structure adds weight and wit, but it also smooths over the Greek's directness. In the Book 6 leaves passage, Homer gives five lines to the image; Pope expands it into six tightly balanced lines with explicit moral pointing ("They fall successive, and successive rise"). Reck's four lines stay closer to the Greek's movement and stop where Homer stops. Reck does not chase rhetorical finish, and some passages read more plainly than the Greek warrants. Pope's version rewards a reader who wants English poetry as a primary experience; Reck's suits a reader who wants a cleaner path to what Homer actually says.
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' maniac rage:
ruinous thing! it roused a thousand sorrows
and hurled many souls of mighty warriors
to Hades, made their bodies food for dogs
and carrion birds—as Zeus's will foredoomed—
from the time relentless strife came between
Atreus' son, a king, and brave Achilles.