Event Description
Chris Childers: Translating the Ancient Forest: The Penguin Book of Greek & Latin Lyric Verse
The old saw attributed to Robert Frost holds that "poetry is what is lost in translation." Among those things most often lost are the connections between poets and their predecessors, the way each new generation answers, adapts or antagonizes the ones that went before. In single-poet editions, such conversations are either omitted or confined to footnotes which rarely manage to capture the imagination of the general reader. By contrast, in The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, the extended symposium of the genus irritabile vatum (irritable race of bards) is held in full view over the course of its thousand pages, as poets call on and call out each other in meters and stanzas as pregnant with meaning as their words. Clifford Geertz might have called it an act of "thick description;" A.E. Stallings, writing in The Telegraph, calls it "inspired and enlightening lunacy." In this talk, Christopher Childers, the author and translator, will introduce the book in conversation with Jason Pedicone, read generously from it, and answer questions from the audience.
Read In Medias Res Editor Mark Buchan's review of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse here.
Selected Praise for The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse:
"Clearly this has been a labour of love – Christopher Childers spent over a decade on this tome – or maybe even a love of labour. That anyone would even attempt to sit down and translate a significant chunk of all Greek or Latin lyric poetry, and cram both the Greek and Latin poems into one volume is, let’s face it, a little daft. But it is an inspired and enlightening lunacy. It is rare to be able to say, as a reviewer, here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading, but here we are." - A. E. Stallings, Telegraph
"An extraordnary feat … I loved the liveliness of Childers’s use of multiple different verse forms, and management of meter and rhyme … Childers is particularly good with comic and semi-comic poes — 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." - Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad
Event Info
Apr 14, 2024 at 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM EDT
Online
Guest Speaker
