Seneca: The Madness of Hercules

by Seneca, Dana Gioia (Translator), Dana Gioia (Introduction)

Overview

Gioia offers a vivid poetic translation of Seneca's powerful tragedy, The Madness of Hercules. This violent and visionary play explores the utmost extremes of human suffering expressed in passionate language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951319663
Publisher:	Wiseblood Books
Publication date:	01/26/2023
Pages:	162
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poet Laureate of California, Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed award-winning poet and Critic. Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees.

​Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. His most recent collection of poetry, Meet Me at the Lighthouse, was released in February.

Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poet Laureate of California, Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed award-winning poet and Critic. Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees.

​Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. His most recent collection of poetry, Meet Me at the Lighthouse, was released in February.

Editorial Reviews

"Dana Gioia's Hercules Furens is a poetic and critical tour de force. By giving us a translation as graceful, vivid, and natural as the original must have been, he paradoxically brings out its essential strangeness to our sensibility. His poetry makes it a sort of dark existentialist Bunraku theater, an allegory of the horrors of Nero's Rome and perhaps a warning to us today. His coinage of the term 'lyric tragedy, ' connecting the play with the birth of opera fifteen hundred years later, aptly notes that strangeness."

-Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, author of the epic poems Genesis and The New World

"Gioia is . . . probably the most exquisite poet writing in English today."

-William Oxley, author of A Map of Time and many others

From the Publisher