The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation

by Adrian Poole (Editor), Jeremy Maule (Editor)

Overview

Great Britain has a long and grand tradition of poets translating classical authors. Virtually every great poet from Chaucer on has tried his or her hand at translation, with the results often rivalling or even excelling the ancient original. This unique anthology presents the best of these translations, ranging from King Alfred, Alexander Pope, and Ben Jonson, to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ezra Pound, and Ted Hughes. The book offers a vast array of responses to the song, verse, and drama of ancient Greece and Rome, and to poets themselves as varied as Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, and Juvenal. Organized by classical author and text, the book gathers and juxtaposes English versions, sometimes of the same passage or poem, to dramatize the endless renewal of one great poetic tradition in and through another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192142092
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/23/1995
Series:	Oxford Books of Verse
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	9.28(w) x 6.32(h) x 1.72(d)

About the Author

Adrian Poole is University Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Jeremy Maule is Newton Trust Assistant Lecturer in English, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Editorial Reviews

"An amazing and interesting body of work."—School Library Journal

"Provides both a wealth of classical verse and a delight through variations in translation....This once-in-a-generation scholarly work should be acquired by both public and academic libraries."—Choice

"Lovers of the classics and English poetry will happily lose themselves in this book for hours on end."—Booklist

"A new anthology of classical verse in translation is greatly to be welcomed. This Oxford book will deservedly attract many superlatives...this handsome volume will be much to read and enjoyed but not bettered for years to come. A veritable feast."—The Anglo-Hellenic Review

"This anthology is proof that interest in the classical tradition has survived a period of radical scepticism...it is an anthology for the kind of people who normally despise anthologies."—Church Times

From the Publisher

It's often remarked that the twentieth century is a great era of English translation. This generous anthology constitutes an argument that ever since Chaucer, whose version of the "Aeneid"'s opening lines appears in it, no century (well, the fifteenth) has been without fine English versions of ancient Greek and Latin poems. The editors concede that work from the two great periods of translation--the mid-sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries is the other one--predominates, but they include plenty of nineteenth-century and even early-sixteenth-century specimens (the latter from Gavin Douglas' Scots translation of Virgil). As interesting as the poetic quality of the selections are the ways they suit the preoccupations of their times, as when versions dating from the Commonwealth period refer to Cromwell or twentieth-century takes on erotic verses from the "Greek Anthology" and Catullus blurt out the" f" word. Lovers of the classics and English poetry will happily lose themselves in this book for hours on end.

Ray Olson