This will not give you a rounded view of the literature, but it's a lot of what I'd take to a desert island. The problem with the second half of the question is that I don't usually read classical poets in translation. I have an answer in the case of Lucan—seek out Joyce Jane Wilson and Susanna Braund, avoid Robert Graves like the plague—and I can point you toward Peter Green for Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, but that might be it off the top of my head. I think Anne Carson's Sappho is well-regarded. Ted Hughes did versions of Seneca. I will have to get back to you. I'm not sure promising to provide translations myself would be a good idea, unless you're really willing to wait.
I also have (moving on to the middle ages) Robert M. Durling's translations of Inferno and Purgatorio, from Oxford. Not, I suspect, the most well known recent translations, but I was intrigued by the editions in the store and decided to take a risk on them. I don't believe his translation of Paradiso has been published yet.
I haven't heard of him at all and I never fell in love with Mandelbaum, so I will look these up! Thank you.
It's daunting, and it seems I must read Homer before Virgil, and Homer and the Bible and no doubt any number of other things before Dante, etc.
When you've done all of that, however, take the time for Seamus Heaney's "Station Island." His pilgrim's Vergil is James Joyce.
I do appear to have committed myself to devoting a fair amount of my "free" reading time for 2010 to a close reading of most of the Bible, a document I have decidedly mixed feelings about, central-document-of-western-civilization syndrome and all that. If I can fold some Shakespeare in there it would be a good thing.
What translations are you using? I am not really qualified to speak on any of them, as I don't read Biblical Hebrew (until we get into the Gospels, which I have read in the original), but I can recommend the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh; it was given me by a close friend who is a cantor and I trust his language skills.
Actually I'd rather fold Homer into it, but don't want to bring the whole effort crashing down, which is so easy to do.
It is possible to read the Iliad and the Odyssey without pages of notes. There is much to be gained from close study, but it might be useful for you to approach them first as narratives or pieces of myth, then within the framework of oral tradition and heroic epithets and composition-in-performance. I can recommend a few starter books if you're interested.
I have a huge volume of Eugenio Montale, who I stumbled upon; I really like some of it. All that Mediterranean light.
But so much poetry is opaque to me.
Why?
Who are your favorite female poets?
God. So much of my poetry is in boxes, I know I'm forgetting someone. Rika Lesser is one of my absolute favorites: I discovered her through her first collection Etruscan Things (1983), which gives voice to the artifacts and archaeology of that civilization, and have continued to like her through later books in her own voice and her translations of Göran Sonnevi. Another is H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who is one of the very few people I've read in English who sounds as though she composed in classical Greek; she started with the Imagists and is probably best known for Trilogy (1944—1946), a three-book response to the Blitz; she was also in a silent film with Paul Robeson in 1930. In a more contemporary vein, Theodora Goss; Francesca Forrest; Greer Gilman.
no subject
This will not give you a rounded view of the literature, but it's a lot of what I'd take to a desert island. The problem with the second half of the question is that I don't usually read classical poets in translation. I have an answer in the case of Lucan—seek out Joyce Jane Wilson and Susanna Braund, avoid Robert Graves like the plague—and I can point you toward Peter Green for Ovid's Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, but that might be it off the top of my head. I think Anne Carson's Sappho is well-regarded. Ted Hughes did versions of Seneca. I will have to get back to you. I'm not sure promising to provide translations myself would be a good idea, unless you're really willing to wait.
I also have (moving on to the middle ages) Robert M. Durling's translations of Inferno and Purgatorio, from Oxford. Not, I suspect, the most well known recent translations, but I was intrigued by the editions in the store and decided to take a risk on them. I don't believe his translation of Paradiso has been published yet.
I haven't heard of him at all and I never fell in love with Mandelbaum, so I will look these up! Thank you.
It's daunting, and it seems I must read Homer before Virgil, and Homer and the Bible and no doubt any number of other things before Dante, etc.
When you've done all of that, however, take the time for Seamus Heaney's "Station Island." His pilgrim's Vergil is James Joyce.
I do appear to have committed myself to devoting a fair amount of my "free" reading time for 2010 to a close reading of most of the Bible, a document I have decidedly mixed feelings about, central-document-of-western-civilization syndrome and all that. If I can fold some Shakespeare in there it would be a good thing.
What translations are you using? I am not really qualified to speak on any of them, as I don't read Biblical Hebrew (until we get into the Gospels, which I have read in the original), but I can recommend the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh; it was given me by a close friend who is a cantor and I trust his language skills.
Actually I'd rather fold Homer into it, but don't want to bring the whole effort crashing down, which is so easy to do.
It is possible to read the Iliad and the Odyssey without pages of notes. There is much to be gained from close study, but it might be useful for you to approach them first as narratives or pieces of myth, then within the framework of oral tradition and heroic epithets and composition-in-performance. I can recommend a few starter books if you're interested.
I have a huge volume of Eugenio Montale, who I stumbled upon; I really like some of it. All that Mediterranean light.
But so much poetry is opaque to me.
Why?
Who are your favorite female poets?
God. So much of my poetry is in boxes, I know I'm forgetting someone. Rika Lesser is one of my absolute favorites: I discovered her through her first collection Etruscan Things (1983), which gives voice to the artifacts and archaeology of that civilization, and have continued to like her through later books in her own voice and her translations of Göran Sonnevi. Another is H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who is one of the very few people I've read in English who sounds as though she composed in classical Greek; she started with the Imagists and is probably best known for Trilogy (1944—1946), a three-book response to the Blitz; she was also in a silent film with Paul Robeson in 1930. In a more contemporary vein, Theodora Goss; Francesca Forrest; Greer Gilman.