Event

Speaker: Christopher Childers, Poet and Translator, Harvard-Westlake

Abstract: This talk will discuss the Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, published by Penguin Classics in 2024, which begins with Archilochus and ends with Martial, and surveys four periods of ancient lyric verse: the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman. I will address three crucial, interrelated issues in the selection and translation of poems for the book: the book's broad understanding of ‘lyric’, and its approach to rendering poetic form and voice in the translations, which are the work of a single hand (my own), unus in plurimos, not an anthology of translations by many hands, e pluribus plures. I contend that traditional employment of meter, stanza and even rhyme remains the best way of transposing into English the feeling or experience or excitement of poetry, especially from such highly formal and stylized literatures as the Greco-Roman, and that careful attention to rhythm, syntax, diction and rhyme can allow even a single translator to mimic tolerably a wide variety of poetic styles and personalities.