Paperback : HK$188.00
Newly translated according to a scheme of staggering ambition, an anthology unlike any now available
Composed between the early-agricultural 'song culture' of 800 BCE, when praise poems and dirges mingled in a world peopled with gods and monsters, and the time of Imperial Rome, the corpus of Greek and Latin lyric poetry is as densely rich in formal interrelation and allusion as anything we know in English verse. Poets like the Greek Callimachus and the Roman Horace self-consciously modelled themselves on earlier bards - Sappho and Mimnermus, Pindar and Alcaeus - and produced poetry thick with references and resonances from the work of their exemplars. Yet, as a rule, for the reader in English translation, much of this fascinating interplay is inaccessible. One translator approaches a given poet in one way; another translator approaches the next poet in another. We receive the part, but lose the whole.
In an undertaking of astonishing ambition, Christopher Childers has sought to remedy this situation by translating the most representative and significant poems from both languages in a single volume, and according to consistent principles of translation. No other book now available so much as attempts this. A decade in the making, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse gives us back the full complexity and play of two immortal traditions as we have never seen them before.
Newly translated according to a scheme of staggering ambition, an anthology unlike any now available
Composed between the early-agricultural 'song culture' of 800 BCE, when praise poems and dirges mingled in a world peopled with gods and monsters, and the time of Imperial Rome, the corpus of Greek and Latin lyric poetry is as densely rich in formal interrelation and allusion as anything we know in English verse. Poets like the Greek Callimachus and the Roman Horace self-consciously modelled themselves on earlier bards - Sappho and Mimnermus, Pindar and Alcaeus - and produced poetry thick with references and resonances from the work of their exemplars. Yet, as a rule, for the reader in English translation, much of this fascinating interplay is inaccessible. One translator approaches a given poet in one way; another translator approaches the next poet in another. We receive the part, but lose the whole.
In an undertaking of astonishing ambition, Christopher Childers has sought to remedy this situation by translating the most representative and significant poems from both languages in a single volume, and according to consistent principles of translation. No other book now available so much as attempts this. A decade in the making, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse gives us back the full complexity and play of two immortal traditions as we have never seen them before.
Glenn W. Most (Afterword by, Introducer)
Glenn W. Most teaches Classics and related fields in the Committee
on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; until 2020 he was
Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di
Pisa.
Christopher Childers (Anthology Editor, Translator)
Christopher Childers studied Classics at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and poetry at Johns Hopkins University. He
lives in Baltimore, where he teaches Latin, coaches squash and
tennis and watches over his pet fish and budgies.
[A]n inspired and enlightening lunacy … here is a work of
staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly
pleasant reading … The risk of a single translator rendering many
poets might be a homogenising flatness, but Childers retunes his
instrument for different effects, adding a string, slapping on a
capo, going electric or harmonic. Perhaps most originally, Childers
aims to get us to perceive connections across not only centuries
and poets but languages. Different metrical patterns are associated
with different subgenres or ‘vibes’, and Childers is programmatic
in his rendering of said patterns … Childers consistently, and
sometimes brilliantly, turns out translations that also work as
English poems … Childers’s elegant prose wears its learning
lightly, and is often stealthily hilarious … The notes also point
us to allusions to these poems or translations of them in the whole
sweep of Anglophone poetry, and beyond, making this a relevant
sourcebook for readers of Western poetry of any era … This book
would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in classical
literature: it practically amounts to a degree in classical
literature in translation
*Daily Telegraph*
For a long time the words ‘lyric’ and ‘poem’ have amounted to much
the same thing ... Questions of origin ought to be important: so,
where does the lyric begin? One answer – a capacious and generous
one – is given by Christopher Childers’s anthology, in which
translations of both Greek and Latin lyric poetry are offered in
large servings, with extensive and ambitious commentary … This
Penguin Book is both bold and worthwhile, as it puts on display
such a wide range of ancient poems … Childers is a readable and
learned guide to the very long story his anthology sets out to tell
… Childers operates, of course, in a language to which Greek and
Latin are as foreign as one another. It is a vast undertaking, with
demands that go far beyond those presented by the familiar kinds of
all-purpose classical translation into (more or less) free verse.
Childers remains close to the Greek and Latin, and works in
metrical, largely rhymed, English forms … He can certainly turn
poems into new poems, not husks ... with his particular facility in
rhyming couplets he can pull off the unlikely feat of making even
Ovid’s Tristia (Sad Poems) compelling … Impressively often,
Childers’s touch is sure and natural, and he is not defeated by
either the tonal sophistication of Horace’s Odes or by Pindar’s
combination of sonority and subtlety … his fundamental insight,
which drives the entire anthology, is that poetic form matters ...
he is not wrong
*TLS*
My overall impression of this volume is that it is an extraordinary
feat. The translations are very impressive for their technical
accomplishment. I loved the liveliness of Childers' use of multiple
different verse forms, and management of meter and rhyme ...
Childers is particularly good with comic and semi-comic poets -
Catullus, Anacreon, Martial etc. - but he also rises to the
challenge of making the complex lyrical leaps of Pindar and
Bacchylides feel sonically alive. Over and over, I was impressed
both by Childers's technical abilities and his vivid way of evoking
the multiple voices in this rich tradition
*Dr. Emily Wilson*
This is an extraordinary achievement, in scope, scale and skill. I
hope that it will make a splash, as it deserves to. The
translations are remarkably faithful to the originals, especially
given the constraints of rhyme (the use of which I applaud)
*Professor Richard Jenkyns*
A monumental work of selection, translation and annotation, the
astonishing accomplishment of Christopher Childers
*The Classical Outlook*
Impressive … Provides a roll-call of the greatest poetic voices to
emerge in antiquity … Many unexpected delights [are] to be found in
this striking volume
*Australian Book Review*
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