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A window onto the past, full of fire and life: two immortal traditions as the English language has never seen them before
The poets in this book are philosophers and statesmen; priestesses and warriors; teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; drunkards and brawlers; grumpy old men and chic young things. They speak of hopes, fears, loves, losses, triumphs and humiliations. Every one of them lived and died between 1,900 and 2,800 years ago.
The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literary book culture emerged out of a society structured by song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as practised by the greatest ancient poets - Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus - mingles and interacts with our expansive modern understanding of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare.
Anyone looking for pieces for the tragic or comic stage - when they were instead singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times - can find it here. It is a magisterial accomplishment, astonishing its ambition and thrilling in scope.
Author: Christopher Gilders
Paperback Published 24 June 2025 1,008 pages
My overall impression of this volume is that it is an extraordinary feat. The translations are very impressive for their technical accomplishment. I loved the liveliness of Childers' use of multiple different verse forms, and management of meter and rhyme ... Childers is particularly good with comic and semi-comic poets - Catullus, Anacreon, Martial etc. - but he also rises to the challenge of making the complex lyrical leaps of Pindar and Bacchylides feel sonically alive. Over and over, I was impressed both by Childers's technical abilities and his vivid way of evoking the multiple voices in this rich tradition. Dr. Emily Wilson
This is an extraordinary achievement, in scope, scale and skill. I hope that it will make a splash, as it deserves to. The translations are remarkably faithful to the originals, especially given the constraints of rhyme (the use of which I applaud). Professor Richard Jenkyns