Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Ancient & Classical

Poet, philosopher, and sensitive misanthrope, a spectacular fly in the ointment of the refined eleventh-century Andalusian-Jewish elite, Solomon Ibn Gabirol comes down to us as one of the most complicated intellectual figures in the history of post-biblical Judaism. Unlike his worldly predecessor Shmuel HaNagid, the first important poet of the period, Ibn Gabirol was a reclusive, mystically inclined figure whose modern-sounding medieval poems range from sublime descriptions of the heavenly spheres to poisonous jabs at court life and its pretenders. His verse, which demonstrates complete...

The Roman poet Propertius is best known as the writer who perfected the Latin love elegy, a technical as much as a psychological and cultural feat. Propertius has been admired for both his metrical genius and the modernity of his narrative flow.

Many of the poems here pay tribute to Cynthia, Propertius's romantic obsession, but the scope of these 107 elegies is broad. Propertius's poetry offers a fascinating look into life in the Augustan age, addressing social, political, and historical subjects. A contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Propertius has influenced scores of...

They have inspired poets and challenged translators through the centuries. The odes of Horace are the cornerstone of lyric poetry in the Western world. Their subtlety of tone and brilliance of technique have often proved elusive, especially when--as has usually been the case--a single translator ventures to maneuver through Horace's infinite variety. Now for the first time, leading poets from America, England, and Ireland have collaborated to bring all 103 odes into English in a series of new translations that dazzle as poems while also illuminating the imagination of one of literary...

Introducing the work of 20 of the ancient world's greatest authors, this work presents brief, readable essays, fully illustrated with quotations from modern (and some ancient) translations. The writers covered include Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, the Greek tragedians, the comic poets, sexy and subtle love poets such as Catullus, and vicious but witty satirists like Martial and Juvenal.

The Odyssey is one of the earliest works of European literature, second only to the Iliad. These two great epic poems, the astonishing first fruits of Greek civilization, have together determined much of the course of Western literary culture and imagination.

The poem tells of the long and painful return of Odysseus from the Trojan War to his homeland of Ithaka, his wife Penelope and his son Telemachos. Even after he finally returns, there are enemies to be fought in his house. The action of the poem covers a huge canvas, ranging widely over time and place, exploring...

Acclaimed by critics and scholars, Stephen Mitchell's version allows us to enter an ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is.

The story of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece is one of the oldest and most familiar tales in classical literature. Apollonius of Rhodes wrote the best-known version, in Greek, in the third century B.C.E. The Latin poet Gaius Valerius Flaccus began his own interpretation of the story in the first century of the Christian era, but he died before completing it.

With The Voyage of the -Argo, - the acclaimed poet and translator David Slavitt recovers for modern readers the only surviving work of this little-known writer. The result is an engaging...

Late in the eleventh century the First Crusade culminated in the conquest of Jerusalem by Christian armies. Five centuries later, when Torquato Tasso began to search for a subject worthy of an epic, Jerusalem was governed by a sultan, Europe was in the crisis of religious division, and the Crusades were a nostalgic memory. Tasso turned to the First Crusade both as a subject that would test his poetic ambition and as a reflection on the quandaries of his own time. He sought to create a masterpiece that would deserve comparison with the great epics of the past.

Gerusalemme...

Ovid is a poet to enjoy, declares William S. Anderson in his introduction to this textbook. And Anderson s skillful introduction and enlightening textual commentary will indeed make it a joy to use.

In these books Ovid begins to leave the conflict between men and the gods to concentrate on the relations among human beings. Subjects of the stories include Arachne and Niobe; Tereus, Procne, and Philomela; Medea and Jason; Orpheus and Eurydice; and many others, familiar and unfamiliar. For students of Latin-and teachers, too-they provide an interesting experience.

In his...

This fully annotated Latin edition, by Daniel H. Garrison, of Horace s "Epodes, Odes," and "Carmen Saeculare" is the first comprehensive English commentary on these works since 1903. The full text of the "Epodes" is included and placed before the "Odes," as it was originally written and published. Garrison offers help with meter, vocabulary, and difficult points of grammar. For advanced students, he place Horace against the background of archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry, demonstrates the poet s debt to Catullus, and illuminates Horace s relation to his contemporaries, particularly...

Accompanying each Latin passage is an introduction that provides background on the myths and their literary history, both in Ovid and in other classical authors. The detailed notes on each selection are designed to help students read and understand the...