Customer Reviews

The Nature of Things (Penguin Classics)

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Lucretius missed being translated in full by any of the classic English early modern translators: Chapman, Dryden, Pope. (Dryden did tantalizing selections) So it's fitting that Stallings goes back to those roots with a translation in rhymed fourteeners (think ballad form: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum/da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, in couplets). There are a number of reasonably good translations available, including Latham's reliable prose in the older Penguin Classics edition, but this is the most ambitious modern attempt at a full, poetic translation of what is both (in Latin) a marvelous, sonorous epic poem and a fascinating account of Epicurean philosophy (serious, scientific, respectful of the gods but the opposite of conventional piety, mordantly disrespectful of love and politics).

After reading the work in two other translations, I was very pleased to find this one. In my opinion, it's the best. The artistry is still there, but the meaning isn't being sacrificed for the sake of poetry. For me, that's important.

Lucretius' poem DE RERUM NATURA is still revolutionary, fundamental to a view of the world that is materialist, atheist and humanist at the same time. The text's influence on civilized thought has been immense and yet, somehow clandestine, not unlike a samizdat.
Ms. Stallings has translated the Latin into English rhyme with admirable ease and fluency; reading, I find passages enrapturing me; it is amazing how elegantly the English language lends itself to this transformation of Latin, as compared to the stiffness of my native German.
Readers who do not know Lucretius might learn the trick from him to look at life with cold yet loving eyes, at the same time enjoying the unique presentation of his ideas in rhyme of the most sophisticated kind, thanks to a superb translation.

They had it nailed in 50BC. Just update for latest findings and they had it just right. Dicount what they thought was the way things were, Earth central universe and flat earth, and you marvel at what they did know.

Have not yet read the book; only thumbed thru it. But as somebody said, Human Nature (or Thought)
is one of the few constants in the Universe. The work maybe bears a distant resemblance to one
written about 1000 years later, in far off Persia...the much shorter, and more wryly amusing Rubaiyat,
by Omar himself.