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]

(Thank you, comment length.)

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.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

All of this is wonderful and energizing to read; thank you. I like the quality of your thought, very much, and if you decided at some point to devote more of your writing time to critical works in the field (perhaps you already have or do!) I have no doubt the field would benefit thereby. (It's a conundrum I face: is it better that I forgo critical writing to spend more time working in more explicitly creative genres, or -- ? I wonder to what extent you wrestle with that.) It will take a while to absorb (you cover a great deal of ground quite succinctly), but I have printed out your replies and archived them for both immediate and later reference; and later I will reply at greater length.

As for the Bible, I have the Oxford Jewish Study Bible, which uses the JPS Tanakh (a fine translation for sure), and Robert Alter's translations of Torah, Samuel, and Psalms. Alter is awesome! The translations are beautiful (and it seems highly idiomatic; his reputation as a scholar of Hebrew is sterling) and his essays and annotations are superb. I envy your ability to read the gospels in the original Greek. I have Willis Barnstone's translation of the gospels, which I like very much, though I prefer to read them with traditional forms of pronouns restored. I also have Richmond Lattimore's New Testament, and about 25 other English translations, 16 of them in just two Oxford volumes of parallel NT's. I have an ambition to write a new "translation" of Mark, my favorite of the canonical gospels. (I urgently recommend John Carroll's profoundly heretical -- and I mean that as the most soulful compliment -- midrash on Mark, The Existential Jesus.)