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The Paths of Survival explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which, by each fresh miracle, it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus's lost tragedy, Myrmidons, which notoriously depicted the doomed love of the Greek hero Achilles for his fellow warrior Patroclus, the volume moves backwards in time across two and a half millennia; from a tiny scrap of papyrus in a present-day Oxford library to the dying Aeschylus revising his masterpiece in fifth-century BCE Sicily. Along the way, the poems' dramatic monologues introduce clerks and conquerors, pagans and popes, tyrants and tricksters, as well as translators, anthologists, editors, librarians - and, of course, readers - as each one responds to the text, transforming and perverting it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly, for better, for worse, but always with passion. Poignant and, in our own times of cultural conflict, pertinent, The Paths of Survival unravels the intricate serendipity of what time corrodes and what it spares'
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Josephine Balmer's previous collection, The Paths of Survival, was short-listed for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize. Other collections include Letting Go (2017), The Word for Sorrow (2009), Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (2004) and the translations Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate and Classical Women Poets (2004 & 1996). Her acclaimed volume, Sappho: Poems and Fragments, was short-listed in 1989 for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Award for Poetry and has recently been reissued in a revised and expanded edition to include newly-discovered fragments (2018). She has also published a study of classical translation and versioning, Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry (2013).
