θεός νύ τις ἦ βροτός ἐσσι;

[sovay]

I like Robin Williamson's "Fool's Song (Columbine)," but I really wish he had included the verses Hope Mirrlees wrote for Lud-in-the-Mist (1926).

"There are windfalls of dreams, there's a wolf in the stars,
And Life is a nymph who will never be thine,
With lily, germander, and sops in wine.
With sweet-brier,
And bon-fire,
And strawberry-wire,
And columbine."

My poem "Leukothea's Odyssey 6" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit.

Comments

[sovay]

Am I right to consider Fagles a good first translation of those works? Are there other translations you consider essential?

I may be in the minority; I don't actually like Fagles that much. His translations of the Homeric epics feel overworked to me: he makes the language exciting, but in the process somehow misses the point that there is deep strangeness and echo in it already. I tend to recommend a combination of Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald for the Iliad and the Odyssey, since the former is very faithful to the Greek (to the point where it defamiliarizes the English, although not as extremely as I think might be tried) and the latter is highly charged as poetry (in ways that play with register rather than holding it all to the same pitch, which I think is another problem I have with Fagles). I haven't read his Iliad, but I do like Stanley Lombardo's Odyssey; he properly renders κάμμορος as "tricky bastard." (It's something Athene calls Odysseus a lot.) And while it is not so much a translation of the Iliad as a series of versions, Christopher Logue's War Music, taken as a project with the later volumes All Day Permanent Red and Cold Calls, is essential. The Aeneid is trickier; in this case, I'm lukewarm about Fitzgerald (he oversteps my tolerance for infidelity to the text), Fagles I have the usual arguments with, and I actively recommend against Allen Mandelbaum (who comes across as though he's trapped somewhere in the nineteenth century). There is fortunately, very recently, Sarah Ruden; her language is unadorned and elides more than it expands, which is not necessarily accurate to the hexameters behind it, but she may be the first translator of the Aeneid I've encountered where I like both their English and their sense of the Latin. I should check out Stanley Lombardo. I wouldn't mind if Seamus Heaney ever produced a version, but so far I think he's confined himself to individual passages, like 6.98—148 (the Sibyl and the Golden Bough) in Seeing Things (1993).

(You may be interested in Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies' Homer Multitext Project, which lets you look at three manuscripts of the Iliad from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. It's fun.)

Who are your favorite classical poets and translations?

Yikes. I may not be able to answer the second question in all cases, but I can at least get to the first. I think I'm conventional: I love the Greek lyric poets, especially Sappho, Alkaios, Anakreon, Archilochos, and Mimnermos (and I have a soft spot for Hipponax fr. 120 W: λάβετέ μεο ταἰμάτια, κόψω Βουπάλωι τὸν ὀφθαλμόν—"Hold my coat, I'm going to punch Boupalos in the eye"); I love the Homeric hymns; the Iliad and the Odyssey should go without saying, but especially the latter; I can take or leave some of the Alexandrians, but Kallimachos is fantastic and Lykophron's Alexandra is like Finnegan's Wake twenty-two centuries too soon. I like some of Pindar. I like Theokritos' Idyll 11. If you're including drama, Euripides writes gods that are not human; they are terrifying, which they should be.

For Latin poets, my first loves were Catullus and Ovid; I do like Vergil, although I don't re-read him with the same frequency; I do want to re-read Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. With the Silver Age, I added Lucan, whose unfinished anti-epic the Pharsalia or Bellum Civile is black-humored and occasionally batshit; Seneca's tragedies are in a similar vein of ghosts and gore which eventually gave us The Revenger's Tragedy, Hamlet, and probably a lot of film noir. I did not imprint on Horace or Martial, but they are filed mentally as poets I should give another chance. I actually like Plautus and Terence. And if you want non-classical Latin, the Carmina Burana rock even without Carl Orff.