Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Ancient & Classical

The earliest known author of written literature was a woman named Enheduanna, who lived in ancient Mesopotamia around 2300 BCE. High Priestess to the moon god Nanna, Enheduanna came to venerate the goddess Inanna above all gods in the Sumerian pantheon. The hymns she wrote to Inanna constitute the earliest written portrayal of an ancient goddess. In their celebration of Enheduanna's relationship with Inanna, they also represent the first existing account of an individual's consciousness of her inner life.

This book provides the complete texts of Enheduanna's hymns to Inanna,...

Catullus life was akin to pulp fiction. In Julius Caesar s Rome, he engages in a stormy affair with a consul s wife. He writes her passionate poems of love, hate, and jealousy. The consul, a vehement opponent of Caesar, dies under suspicious circumstances. The merry widow romances numerous young men. Catullus is drawn into politics and becomes a cocky critic of Caesar, writing poems that dub Julius a low-life pig and a pervert. Not surprisingly, soon after, no more is heard of Catullus.
David Mulroy brings to life the witty, poignant, and brutally direct voice of a flesh-and-blood man,...

The Odyssey is the original journey tale, a genre that has lasted three thousand years, and has had a lasting influence on on literature and art. The trials of Odysseus were first told by the great bard Homer. For ten long years the Greeks and Trojans have fought on the plains of Troy, and now Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, and the other victorious Greeks are ready to sail home. But after offending the sea god, Poseidon, Odysseus is hurled into years of wandering the seas, encountering monsters and sirens, raging storms and seductive idylls, before he is able to return to his wife,...

The classic translation of The Odyssey, now in paperback.

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's Odyssey is the best and best-loved modern translation of the greatest of all epic poems. Since 1961, this Odyssey has sold more than two million copies, and it is the standard translation for three generations of students and poets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux is delighted to publish a new edition of this classic work. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love,...

Virgil's great lyrics, rendered by the acclaimed translator of The Odes of Horace and Gilgamesh

The Eclogues of Virgil gave definitive form to the pastoral mode, and these magically beautiful poems, which were influential in so much subsequent literature, perhaps best exemplify what pastoral can do. "Song replying to song replying to song," touchingly comic, poignantly sad, sublimely joyful, the various music that these shepherds make echoes in scenes of repose and harmony, and of hardship and trouble in work and love.

A bilingual edition, The Eclogues...

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men-carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
-Lines 1-6

Since it was first published more than twenty-five years ago, Robert Fitzgerald's prizewinning translation of Homer's battle epic has become a classic in its own right: a standard against which all other versions of The Iliad are compared. Fitzgerald's work is accessible, ironic, faithful, written in...

John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature.

The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the...

Sherod Santos's new translation of classical poems answers Rosetti's mandate that "the only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation with one more possession of beauty." Arranged into four periods Classical, Hellenic, Roman, and Early Byzantine Greek Lyric Poetry features works by such ancient masters as Xenophanes, Callimachus, Sappho, and Simonides. For the general reader as well as for poets and lovers of poetry, the translations celebrate the marvelous slips and illuminating reconfigurations that occur when a poet in the present communes with...