Customer Reviews

Greek Lyrics (Phoenix Books)

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Greek Lyrics
anthology
trans. and ed. Richmond Lattimore
University of Chicago Press, 1960

I'll admit to not being the best critic of poetry, but I did enjoy the works anthologized by Lattimore. It includes what I'm slowly learning to be the big name classic Greek lyric poets Pindar and Sappho, as well as twenty-four others. Most are represented by fragments, but these fragments are enough to give a sense of what I felt were the three most common themes of the poets: the state, desirable qualities of the individual (often in relationship to war), and personal stories.

There was quite a range of the type of poetry. Many of the poets like Archilochus, have a very journaling feel to their poetry. They were using verse to chronicle the major events, their thoughts and feelings. Solon and others focused on poetry that criticized or praised the city-state they lived in, or compared their own state to others. There was also a number of epigrams, some that were quite invective toward individuals.

Classic Greek poetry has a style quite different from modern verse. While it often compares or makes referrence to gods and mythology, the language itself doesn't soar to impossible limits of imagination. There is prodigious use of metaphor and simile, but it seems rooted and grounded. So birds may fly with the speed of Hermes, but they don't soar across the heavens blazing like a comet trailing the tears of heaven . . . or whatever.

While I'm still processing, overall I enjoyed the Greek verse. It has a different flavor than what I'm used to, but its economy of language and blatant honesty as poetry makes for a flavor that is quite palatable.

Culled together from the extant works of dozens of Greek lyricists, the late Richmond Lattimore's anthologized translations show simply and elegantly the beauty--and hilarity--of Greek poetry. This is great reading for those familiar only with Homer or the tragedians. Lattimore's selections show the broad range of the verses' subject matter. Here we have not only lofty religious texts, but tender love poems and goofy verse insults, too.

Lattimore's anthology, incidentally, makes a great companion piece to Burton Raffel's more loosely-translated collection, Pure Pagan, available from Modern Library.

Recommended.

This anthology serves as an excellent introduction to Greek poetry. It features samples from all of the major poetic precursors to the classical era. Lattimore, as usual, writes with great skill. Supposedly, he also works to keep the meter of the original lines.

This work has a few strings to hold it down. First, it is very old; some of the spellings seem odd. Second, it lacks footnotes (....or endnotes) giving information on the mythological references in Pindar, Bacchylides, etc.

Lattimore only tranlsated a small number of Greek lyric poetry and poets and are collected here.

They are in the same vein as his Homer translations to get an idea of how he renders the Greek into English.

The book is very small and very thin, so please know that when purchasing it.

The translations are on the dry and stiff side.