Let me start by saying that I’m in love with this book. It is a treasure trove of verse translations, most amazingly delivered by a single translator.
More than ten years in the making, the Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse spans around nine hundred years and more than eighty poets, all translated by Christopher Childers. A stunning one-man show, with almost all the old favourites included (Sappho and Alcaeus, Stesichorus and Simonides, Pindar and Callimachus, Catullus and Vergil, Horace and Ovid), alongside lesser-known figures such as Timocreon, Hermolochus, and Tymnes, among many others. Because of the inherent difficulty of explaining what “lyric poetry” is, Childers says he basically included examples of every poetical genre with the exception of epic, versified manuals, and drama (p. xiv).
The volume is divided into two sections of unequal size: Greece and Rome. The Greek section is furthermore divided into three large periods: Archaic (20 poets, plus the Theognidea), Classical (12 poets, plus anonymous compositions), and post-Classical (39 poets, plus verses from the Anacreontea), comprising 364 pages. The Roman section presents nine poets in 191 pages. This adds up to 555 pages from a total of 1004, the rest being devoted to introductory material, end notes (323 pages!), indexes, and a ten-page essay on lyric poetry by Glenn Most.
Grumpy readers may find Childers’ rhymed translations old-fashioned, but real artistry is never obsolete. The translator skilfully mixes contemporary expressions with ancient terms and dialogues successfully with a long English vernacular tradition of verse translations going back to the Renaissance and reaching “the playful exuberance of James Michie, Aaron Poochigian and A. E. Stallings” (whose translation of The Battle of Frogs and Mice I had the pleasure to review in BMCR 2020.06.11), at the same time being as faithful as possible to the metrics of the originals, as the sample illustrations on pp. xix-xxii illustrate. Childers also writes a seventeen-page-long “note on meters” for good measure, perhaps a little bit out of place in an edition that does not print the original verses, but necessary to explain to modern readers, used to seeing all kinds of non-epic poetry referred to as “lyric,” how metrics informed ancient genres (elegiac, melic, iambic etc.).
Each poet or collection (like the Theognidea) is introduced by a short essay (one to three pages long) that neatly summarizes what is known. Even the many poets from the Greek Anthology receive their own informative paragraphs.
Here are four random examples of Childers’ translations of shorter poems (his translations of the longer poems are as good):
Some Thracian now enjoys the faultless shield
I tossed in bushes, fleeing the battlefield
to save my skin. To hell with it! Why curse?
Who cares? I’ll get another one no worse. (Archilochus, F5)I hate and I love. How can that be? you scoff.
Don’t know — I feel it. It’s breaking me in half. (Catullus, 85)Cerinthus, are you worried for me now,
thanks to my achy limbs and feverish brow?
I’d only wish to see this illness through
alive if I believed you wished me to.
What good can good health do if you can learn
that I’m near death with utter unconcern? (Sulpicia, 3.17)Millionaire seeks billionaire to die and leave him stuff.
Fortune gives many much, but nobody enough. (Martial, 12.10)[1]
And, as a matter of pure curiosity, compare his translation of Catullus’ carmen 70 —
My girl tells me there’s no one she’d prefer
to marry her – not even Jupiter.
Her words: but what a woman tells her lover
she ought to write in wind or running water.
— with Fernando Pessoa’s —
My sweet swears to love none but me,
that Jove should beg her grace in vain:
but what a woman tells her hungering Swain —
oh, write it on the winds that flee,
and on the swift waves of the sea!
A few criticisms: as shown in the account above, there are far fewer Romans than Greeks in Childers’ book, and it accordingly feels unbalanced. Strangely absent (since we are informed that the only poetic genres ignored are epic, versified manuals, and drama) are the satires by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Also, given the diverse time frames of the ancient Greek and Roman literatures, a small selection of lyric fragments by Ennius and Lucillius, including poems up to Ausonius, Prudentius, and Claudian, complemented by some epigrams from the Latin Anthology, would be most welcome. And among the Greeks there is no trace of Loukillios or Palladas, despite the generous sample of poets from the Greek Anthology and despite Childers’ translations of Martial and of Catullus’ salacious verses being among the wittiest I’ve ever read.
Once upon a time Penguin Books kept in print a series of titles that, put together, collected pretty much all the poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Volumes translating individual works and poets used to share shelf space with anthologies such as Trypanis’ Book of Greek Verse, A. J. Boyle and J. P. Sullivan’s Roman Poets of the Early Empire, Frederick Brittain’s Book of Latin Verse, and Harold Isbell’s The Last Poets of Imperial Rome. Colin Wells wasn’t being hyperbolic when he wrote over thirty years ago that “the Penguin series, readable, cheap and easy to find . . . have done more to keep the interest in the ancient world alive over the last few decades than all university classics departments put together.”[2] Sadly many titles, including the anthologies of different translations of individual Roman poets, are currently out of print, but the void left by them is at least partially filled with grace and panache by Christopher Childers’ massive endeavour.
Reading this Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse I was for some reason constantly reminded of Helen Waddell. During the bleak years preceding WW2, “when the face of Europe seemed changed” by the growing menace of the Third Reich, she produced an anthology of Latin lyric poems[3] that, preserved from destruction throughout the ages, waited for the time when (quoting Alcuin) the “road is closed to war”. In a way her work became her “sanity corner” (as my modest library is to me). Waddell’s times were sadly very much akin to ours in a great number of disturbing ways, only ours has the weapons to be exponentially more destructive. To survive this age of dehumanized technique powered by AI and apparent suicidal madness we need the respite of art, real art — like Childers’ translations.
“Yet by these things men live, and in them is the life of our spirit.”
Notes
[1] In a more radical vein, I would love to see Martial’s epigrams translated into bawdy limericks. If I’m allowed to try my hand on the same distich (and to steal Childers’ rhyme), something like:
Bezos has plenty of stuff
but says his life is rough:
many times Fortune
gives one a fortune,
but never what is enough.
[2] The Roman Empire, 2nd edition, Cambridge MA, 1992 (11984), p. 3.
[3] More Latin Lyrics: from Virgil to Milton, posthumously published, London, 1976.