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Informationen zum Autor PAUL QUARRIE, author of Winchester College and the King James Bible , is a well-known curator and lecturer on antiquated books. He lives in the UK. Klappentext A beautiful Pocket Poet selection of short poems, odes, and epigrams from ancient Greece, translated into English by a wide array of distinguished translators and poets Poems from Greek Antiquity presents a gloriously compact treasury of the enduring and influential poems of the ancient Greeks. Greek literature abounds in masterpieces, the most famous of which are lengthy epics, but it is also rich in poems of much smaller compass than The Iliad or The Odyssey. The short poems, odes, and epigrams included in this volume span a vast period of more than a thousand years. Included here are selections from the early lyric and elegiac poets, the Alexandrian poets, Alcaeus, Sappho, Pindar, and many more. Here, too, are poems drawn from the celebrated Greek Anthology, and from the Anacreontea, the collection of odes on the pleasures of drink, love, and beauty that have been popular for centuries both in the original Greek and in English. Excerpts from somewhat longer poems include Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Homeric Hymn to Mercury" and the hugely entertaining Homeric pastiche "The Battle of the Frogs and Mice." The English translations in this volume are works of art in their own right and come from a wide range of remarkable poets and translators, ranging from George Chapman in the seventeenth century to Robert Fagles in the twentieth. Leseprobe PREFACE The intention of this book is to offer a selection, in English translations from many periods, of a wide range of ancient Greek poets from around 500 BC to the sixth century CE. It draws upon the anonymous Homeric Hymns, the early lyric and elegiac poets, the Alexandrian poets, the poets of the Greek Anthology, and poems from the Anacreontea which for centuries have been well known and popular both in the original Greek and in English. It contains amongst the translators some famous names, from George Chapman in the seventeenth century to Robert Fagles in the twentieth, but also many which are not well known, and of all brief biographies are appended. Some details of the poets and poems and of how their texts were known, circulated in print and made available to the translators are also given. Greek literature abounds in masterpieces, two of them epics of great length, but it is rich also in poems of much smaller compass than the Iliad or Odyssey , although it is these two poems from which Greek literature takes its origins and inspiration. In terms of stories told and of folk memory the great epics, by whomsoever written and whenever they received their form, are paramount. (There is also, of course, the drama, but that does not form part of this anthology.) Like the epics, plays and prose works, the shorter works have not lacked for translators into English; indeed, the abundance of versions from which to choose is testimony to their popularity. English versions of poems of moderate length by Pindar and Bacchylides; Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, the so-called Bucolic poets; Alceus and Sappho - to name but a few - are included in this volume, as well as many short epigrams. Translations of rather longer poems by a variety of hands are for reasons of space printed in substantial excerpts. Shelley's Homeric Hymn to Mercury is amongst these, as is the hugely entertaining Homeric pastiche Battle of the Frogs and Mice , or Batrachomyomachia in a version by an eighteenth-century Irish poet. The English translations are for the most part in iambic verse couplets. The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods belonged to a great age of translation, of which the King James Bible forms, as it were, the coping stone, but no age has lacked skill in the discipline of translating prose and poetry. George Chapman's transl...
