Publisher's Synopsis
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,translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad
The poems in this lively, wide-ranging and richly enjoyable anthology are the work of priestesses and warriors; of philosophers and statesmen; of teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; of drunkards and brawlers; of grumpy old men, and chic young things. Their authors write – or sing – about 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 literature and book-culture emerged from an oral society in which memory and learning were transmitted through song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as understood by the greatest ancient poets – Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus – mingles and interacts with our expansive modern vision 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 were simply 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 volume full of fire and life: an undertaking of astonishing reach, and an accomplishment magisterial in its scope.
