The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse

A window onto the past, full of fire and life- two immortal traditions as the English language has never seen them beforeThe 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.

[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
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 -- Peter McDonald TLS
A monumental work of selection, translation and annotation, the astonishing accomplishment of Christopher Childers -- C. Luke Soucy 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
Read cover to cover, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse offers the reader an unprecedented and shockingly complete grasp of the most influential lyric corpus in the Western world. This is not a book one should simply ‘check out’. This is a book to own and treasure all one’s life, shelved beside one’s preferred Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Collected Shakespeare. This book is one of the major literary events of this decade -- Elijah Perseus Blumov Literary Matters
A remarkable achievement by any standard. Its range, authority and ambition places it in an entirely different category from most popular anthologies … Anyone with a serious interest in how classical poetry can be presented to the general reader will want to have a copy … Childers has managed to produce notes and commentary on the poems which provide both a treasure-house of detail and a rich store of memorable, teachable and above all useful takeaways. Few people have the combination of depth, range and plain speaking that Childers pulls off time and again -- Victoria Moul PN Review
An extraordinary achievement, in scope, scale and skill -- Professor Richard Jenkyns

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.

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