The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse

[A]n inspired and enlightening lunacy … here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading … The risk of a single translator rendering many poets might be a homogenising flatness, but Childers retunes his instrument for different effects, adding a string, slapping on a capo, going electric or harmonic. Perhaps most originally, Childers aims to get us to perceive connections across not only centuries and poets but languages. Different metrical patterns are associated with different subgenres or ‘vibes’, and Childers is programmatic in his rendering of said patterns … Childers consistently, and sometimes brilliantly, turns out translations that also work as English poems … Childers’s elegant prose wears its learning lightly, and is often stealthily hilarious … The notes also point us to allusions to these poems or translations of them in the whole sweep of Anglophone poetry, and beyond, making this a relevant sourcebook for readers of Western poetry of any era … This book would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in classical literature: it practically amounts to a degree in classical literature in translation -- A. E. Stallings * Daily Telegraph *
For a long time the words ‘lyric’ and ‘poem’ have amounted to much the same thing ... Questions of origin ought to be important: so, where does the lyric begin? One answer – a capacious and generous one – is given by Christopher Childers’s anthology, in which translations of both Greek and Latin lyric poetry are offered in large servings, with extensive and ambitious commentary … This Penguin Book is both bold and worthwhile, as it puts on display such a wide range of ancient poems … Childers is a readable and learned guide to the very long story his anthology sets out to tell … Childers operates, of course, in a language to which Greek and Latin are as foreign as one another. It is a vast undertaking, with demands that go far beyond those presented by the familiar kinds of all-purpose classical translation into (more or less) free verse. Childers remains close to the Greek and Latin, and works in metrical, largely rhymed, English forms … He can certainly turn poems into new poems, not husks ... with his particular facility in rhyming couplets he can pull off the unlikely feat of making even Ovid’s Tristia (Sad Poems) compelling … Impressively often, Childers’s touch is sure and natural, and he is not defeated by either the tonal sophistication of Horace’s Odes or by Pindar’s combination of sonority and subtlety … his fundamental insight, which drives the entire anthology, is that poetic form matters ...he is not wrong -- Peter McDonald * TLS *
A monumental work of selection, translation and annotation, the astonishing accomplishment of Christopher Childers -- C. Luke Soucy * The Classical Outlook *
Impressive … Provides a roll-call of the greatest poetic voices to emerge in antiquity … Many unexpected delights [are] to be found in this striking volume * Australian Book Review *
Read cover to cover, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse offers the reader an unprecedented and shockingly complete grasp of the most influential lyric corpus in the Western world. This is not a book one should simply ‘check out’. This is a book to own and treasure all one’s life, shelved beside one’s preferred Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Collected Shakespeare. This book is one of the major literary events of this decade -- Elijah Perseus Blumov * Literary Matters *
A remarkable achievement by any standard. Its range, authority and ambition places it in an entirely different category from most popular anthologies … Anyone with a serious interest in how classical poetry can be presented to the general reader will want to have a copy … Childers has managed to produce notes and commentary on the poems which provide both a treasure-house of detail and a rich store of memorable, teachable and above all useful takeaways. Few people have the combination of depth, range and plain speaking that Childers pulls off time and again -- Victoria Moul * PN Review *
An extraordinary achievement, in scope, scale and skill -- Professor Richard Jenkyns