and yet more Trojan dead

Trojans and Greeks from the Vergilius Romanus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another list of Trojan dead, this one even odder, because it occurs (in the Iliad) in the context of a panic-stricken rout of the Greeks desperately fleeing for their own gates.  All their best men have been wounded and withdrawn.  Hector and the Trojans are in full baying pursuit.  Two Lapiths, Peripoites and Leonteus, are holding the gates while the Greeks stream inside.  But every NAMED warrior that dies is a Trojan, and Oswald just gives them in a list, one after another, one per line.  She doesn't tell us they're Trojan or which Lapith kills them, unlike Homer; just the list:

And Pylon
Ormenos
Hippomachos
Antiphates
Menon
Iamenos
Orestes

Then a simile, based on the simile at the beginning of book 3, right after the catalog of ships and of Trojans.

Like the war cries of cranes going south escaping the rainEvery winter the clang of their wings going over usAnd the shock of their parachutes
Landing on someone else's fields

"Clang" translates κλαγγη, which appears 3 times in these lines in Greek.  "Someone else's fields" translates "bringing slaughter and death to the Pygmy men, and evil strife" in Homer.  Like the rest of this translation it is a marvel of compression. But what does it mean here?

In Homer, this simile describes the army of the Trojans and their allies, moving and calling noisily (unlike the Greeks, marching silently and, one gathers, breathing steam from their nostrils), carrying war the way the cranes carry war over the ocean to the pygmies.  But that was nine books ago.  Who is like the cranes here?  The Trojans aren't landing on someone else's fields in Book 12; they are directly attacking the Greek camp.  

But who is "us"?  "We" aren't the Greeks; we're just reading the Iliad. We're spectators.  The Trojans may be landing directly on the Greek fields and attacking their camp, but for us, they're still just flying overhead, parachuting onto someone else's fields.

And the simile isn't "like cranes"; it's "like the war cries of cranes".   The war cries of cranes sound like something: they sound like the list of names, being read out.  THOSE are the war cries; the names of the Trojan dead.  The cranes here like the cranes in the Iliad are flying over our heads, carrying, telling, the deaths of someone else.

And the cranes are out there because they've been forced out by winter storms and rain; torrent imagery again, where torrent = war. Perhaps not here though.

Not sure about why it's a regular event.  Perhaps because we know the Iliad so well.

Related articles

• An Iliad by Denis O'Hare & Lisa Peterson, based on Homer's The Iliad translated by Robert Fagles, directed by Lisa Peterson, with Denis O'Hare and Stephen Spinella, New York Theatre Workshop (letstalkoffbroadway.typepad.com)