The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse
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Summary
The poets in this book are philosophers and statesmen; priestesses and warriors; teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; drunkards and brawlers; grumpy old men and chic young things. They speak of hopes, fears, loves, losses, triumphs and humiliations. Every one of them lived and died between 1,900 and 2,800 years ago.
The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literary book culture emerged out of a society structured by song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as practised by the greatest ancient poets - Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus - mingles and interacts with our expansive modern understanding of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare.
Anyone looking for a picture of what ancient poets were up to when they weren't composing national epics, manuals in verse or pieces for the tragic or comic stage - when they were instead singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times - can find it here. It is a magisterial accomplishment, astonishing its ambition and thrilling in scope.
The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literary book culture emerged out of a society structured by song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as practised by the greatest ancient poets - Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus - mingles and interacts with our expansive modern understanding of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare.
Anyone looking for a picture of what ancient poets were up to when they weren't composing national epics, manuals in verse or pieces for the tragic or comic stage - when they were instead singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times - can find it here. It is a magisterial accomplishment, astonishing its ambition and thrilling in scope.
Reviews
[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
A. E. Stallings, Daily Telegraph