Lombardo's 1990s translation of the Iliad interprets the work into colloquial English. For a modern reader, the fresh, direct imagery can help make the epic more understandable and relatable. For example, Lombardo's language helps the reader grasp the in-your-face swagger of Achilles' character. When he decides not to fight at the beginning, Achilles, the greatest of warriors, uses the blunt language of a modern soldier: "You keep your goddamn hands off, you hear?'' When he faces the trickster Odysseus, he frames the warrior's heroic code as "I hate like hell / The man who says one thing and thinks another," making it a clear expression of his straightforward nature.
Lombardo also varies the translation of images that normally have just one translation, such as the oft-used "rosy-fingered dawn." Homer uses this phrase as a marker to note transitions in the story. Lombardo brightens the translations: "Dawn came early, touching the sky with rose," then, "Dawn spread her roselight over the sky" and in yet another rendering, "Light blossomed like roses in the eastern sky." This variety makes the various dawns more vivid and encourages the reader to stop and ponder the beauty of the scene, rather than brushing over the words as mere placeholders. Likewise, Homer's typical bird imagery to describe speech is also rendered in different ways. When Athena speaks to a human, ''she . . . feathered ... words into his ear''; but when Hector crows triumphantly over the very decent Patroclus as he is dying, Lombardo captures some of Hector's brutality in bragging at that moment: ''His words beat down on Patroclus like dark wings.''
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