The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, edited by Christopher Childers,
afterword by Glenn W. Most (Penguin, 2023)

Chris Childers’s Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, over a decade in the making, is a remarkable achievement by any standard. Its range, authority and ambition places it in an entirely different category from most popular anthologies. Aside from its sheer size – running to nearly 1,000 pages in my hardback edition – there are four distinctive features of the book. The first two go together: Childers has made every one of the English translations, of over eighty individual poets and many hundreds of poems, himself, and almost all his translations are into metrical, usually rhyming, English verse of a broadly traditional kind. The third feature explains the sheer heft of the thing: the volume also contains a massive 320 pages of detailed endnotes in addition to brief introductory essays to each section. The fourth feature is evaluative: the project amounts to an interpretation of the classical lyric tradition that often differs in shape and detail from existing accounts, whether scholarly or popular. Anyone with a serious interest in how classical poetry can be presented to the general reader will want to have a copy.

The last of these features – its element of critical originality – will be the least obvious to most of the book’s intended audience, but it is arguably the most important. Any fresh assembly of a canon is a critical intervention, and this is quite a striking one. Two aspects of this are worth flagging at the outset: the book is much more a collection of Greek poetry than it is of Latin (there is nearly twice as much from Greek); and the range of Greek poems presented here is especially generous and wide-ranging, with an unusually full selection of archaic Greek lyric (c. 800–479 B.C.) and a particular emphasis on what Childers calls the ‘post-Classical’ period (that is, Greek poems dating from after 323 B.C.). He has an excellent selection of anonymous lyrics, including hymns, folk songs and drinking songs, which will be new to many even well-informed readers. This is much more than a just a fresh translation of the usual suspects.

In this, Childers does a great service to the general reader. It is good to see the Greek Anthology in particular represented so generously (pp. 299–364). This collection of later Greek poetry, compiled in the tenth century but deriving largely from much earlier collections, contains many excellent poems, and it also had a profound influence on Western lyric. It was a highly fashionable text in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, with stylish translations produced by a host of big name early modern poets, in both Latin and various European vernaculars. Modern ignorance of the collection has led to some misleading conclusions: a lot of English poems routinely described as ‘Horatian’, from Herrick to Housman, are much more helpfully understood within the tradition of the Greek Anthology and its translation. Although Childers does not comment on the reception of the Greek Anthology as such, this is just one instance where his fresh take on the tradition offers readers more than just good poems they may not already know.

The most obvious possibly ‘controversial’ feature of the book is its use of the term lyric. Childers’s collection blends a strict classicist’s definition of ancient lyric – poems written in a particular subset of metres, in order to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre – and a personal selection based on the broader, contemporary English usage of the term, to mean something like short to medium-length poems which, as he neatly puts it ‘seem to speak personally (in the poet’s voice or in that of a mask) and/or to verge toward song’. By his own admission, Childers has also included a handful of poems that fit neither of these categories, on the basis that without them ‘the picture formed of key moments in the art form’s development would have been incomplete’ (these are portions of longer works in dactylic hexameter by Callimachus, Theocritus and Virgil). But a brief prefatory ‘Note on Lyric’ sets this all out very clearly, and it makes sense, in an anthology aimed at the general reader rather than the classicist, to include poems that seem like lyric to us, or which (like classical pastoral) have strongly shaped an element of our lyric tradition, whatever their ancient status. I’m not sure why the editor or publisher felt it necessary to include as an appendix an additional ten-page essay, ‘What is Lyric?’, by the Hellenist Glenn W. Most, which largely repeats the points Childers himself makes more nimbly and concisely elsewhere.

But if the book is less controversial than it thinks it is for its inclusions, it seems to me to be more so for what it leaves out, this time without discussion. The first obvious omission is choral lyric (the ‘choruses’) from Greek tragedy, of which Childers includes no examples, and more oddly, does not discuss why he has not done so. Like the odes of Pindar and Bacchylides (examples of which he does include), tragic odes were written to be performed by a group (a chorus), to a musical accompaniment. They are excerpts from larger works, of course, but they are much more straightforwardly ‘lyric’ than the extracts from Callimachus’ Aetia or Theocritus’ Idylls (both of which are included). Many of them had a lengthy afterlife as poems in their own right, in some cases – we might think of Seamus Heaney’s much-anthologised version of a chorus from Sophocles Philoctetes – right down to our own day. I can think of some good arguments for leaving them out in order to include, as Childers has done, such a rich selection of much less well-known poems, many of which are not otherwise available in accessible translations, but this could have been spelt out, and I think it would be helpful for the non-expert reader to be aware, at least, of the contiguity between the forms of Pindar’s odes and those of the tragic chorus.

The second omission is a much larger one. The vast majority of extant Latin lyric is post-classical, dating from late antiquity to early modernity, but despite his welcome emphasis on post-classical Greek Childers includes no Latin poetry after Martial, who died in the early second century C.E. If you limit yourself in this way, you have by the strict (classical) definition only one major lyric author (Horace), plus a handful of poems in lyric metres by Catullus and Statius. The bulk of the Latin part of the anthology – all the Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius, Sulpicia, Martial and Ovid – are included, therefore, on the basis of the broader definition, or (for Virgil) even despite it. So there is much more translation from Greek in this anthology than Latin (364 pages are devoted to Greek authors, 190 to Latin), and a lot more of the Latin is, as it were, of the ‘lyric B’ type – poems a modern reader might reasonably interpret as lyric, rather than lyric in the ancient sense. If we look beyond Martial, though, we find a host of lyric authors even by the strictest metrical definitions, including poems by Claudian, Boethius, Prudentius, Ambrose and other late antique poets, as well as the choruses of Senecan drama, which are mostly in lyric metres. This is not even to broach medieval and later Latin, not least the extraordinary rediscovery of Latin lyric metres in the sixteenth century, which heralded a period of remarkable formal and metrical innovation.

The Latin third of the book is also less varied and more traditional, dominated more by individual ‘big’ authors. Horace has the longest section of all – the only single-author Greek portions of similar length are those of Pindar and Callimachus – and as a result the book offers us a very decent introduction to Horace’s lyric, while barely hinting at the enormous tradition of wider ‘Horatian’ lyric to which it gave rise. If you are interested, for instance, in what Ronsard or Jonson or even Coleridge meant by an ‘Horatian’ ode, you can only get so far by reading Horace alone.

The Latin portion of this book is still very rewarding, but it is undoubtedly less original than the Greek. There is an implied rationale for its relative conservatism, which is clear if you read Childers’s notes and prefaces carefully. The Alexandrian poet Callimachus is really the ‘hinge’ of the anthology, and time and again Childers (following a critical emphasis among Latin literary scholarship of the last few decades) emphasises the links between Callimachean style and the Latin poets he has included. He sees Callimachus as crucial both technically and stylistically, the lynchpin between classical and later Greek, and also between Greek and Roman poetry. This makes sense of, for instance, the inclusion of a surprisingly large amount of Propertius (sixteen poems of medium length). Propertius’ poetry is not lyric in the strict sense, nor has it ever had the same kind of influence on Western poetry as Ovid, Virgil, Horace or even Martial, but he was the most pointedly and determinedly Callimachean of the Augustan poets. You could make the same point to an even greater degree about Callimachus himself, who has almost never been imitated directly in Western poetry. This is part of what I mean by saying that the book has a ‘take’, a critical agenda of its own, which makes it much more interesting for the informed reader than most anthologies, but isn’t perhaps entirely what a reader expects of The Penguin Book of...

The most resoundingly successful element of the book is undoubtedly its critical apparatus. Childers is a very gifted writer of accessible critical prose. A huge amount of learning has gone into this book, and occasionally the notes are weighed down with the sort of detail that it’s hard to imagine a general reader being able to follow. For the most part, though, he 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. (My only quibble here is that there is no bibliography or list of further reading. Childers’s commentary is so enticing that it’s a shame he doesn’t make it easier for a reader to follow up his references.)

Pindar’s victory odes, for example, are one of the most difficult types of Greek lyric for a modern general reader to get a grip on: the style and form is alien, the occasion impossibly remote and deeply embedded in specific political and cultural circumstances, and the genre (of ‘victory ode’) essentially non-existent in contemporary literature. Here Childers has the authority and judgement to bypass most recent scholarship and go straight to the two points which are most genuinely useful for a new reader: ‘even when speaking to men, [Pindar’s] sensibility is deeply religious’ and ‘praise was for him a way of life and sustained the fabric of civilisation’. (These are actually quite useful points to bear in mind when approaching almost any pre-modern formal panegyric.) Childers’s two paragraphs on what differentiates Tibullus (not a poet most readers will know well) from Propertius and Ovid is similarly precise and down-to-earth (‘both Propertius and Ovid are far more ‘pro-kink’). In the (superbly useful) ‘Note on Meters’, he points us towards George Herbert, Thomas Hardy or Marianne Moore as parallels for the elaborate strophic structures of some Greek verse – this struck me, in miniature, as typical of his critical generosity and thoughtfulness throughout. Most general readers with a serious interest in English poetry will have a sense of the kind of verse that at least one of those three very different poets wrote, even if many fewer would know all three.

The brief introductory essays to each poet or set of poets are masterclasses in the genre and the range of reference and comparison in the notes is often fascinating. In his search for concision, Childers’s style is occasionally a little preachy and didactic, but this is outweighed by the sheer utility and interest of the content. Impressively, he always keeps his eye on two objects at once: what the reader needs to know to appreciate a given poem – glosses, explanations, parallels and so on – and also why this poem or extract is important – what is typical about it, or what is unusual; what you might want to compare it with; what you should read next if you are particularly taken by it. He regularly points to illuminating parallels, comparing for instance an epigram attributed to Marcus Argenarius to Edmund Waller’s ‘Go, lovely rose’ and the ‘playful bookishness’ of Callimachus to Cavafy, Borges and Eco. A wonderful note compares two lines from Horace, Odes 2.10 to Hardy’s poem on the sinking of the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. The notes are full of gems like this.

So what about the translations themselves? These, I imagine, are what the average reader of PN Review will be most interested in. Many of them are excellent and the best bits are really impressive. The care and thought that has gone into the choice of English metre for each classical form is one of the most remarkable features of the book. (The seventeen-page ‘Note on Meters’ is a treasure-trove in itself.) The only parallel I can think of for this kind of systematic endeavour is the conscious metrical variety of the best of the early modern psalm paraphrases (like those of Buchanan and de Bèze in Latin, Philip and Mary Sidney in English), or something like Richard Fanshawe’s mid-seventeenth-century versions of Horace, in which he carefully mapped each Horatian metre onto a selected English form.

Here’s the beginning of Olympian 7, for Diagoras of Rhodes, winner of the boxing competition in 464 B.C.:

As whose largesse with lavish hand should lift
a bowl bubbling with vintage, effervescent,
and toast – ‘My home to yours!’ – then hand it down,
          ungrudging gift
of solid gold, most precious he possessed,
to his young son-in-law to be, to crown
the drinking party and the gracious present
and honor their betrothal with his best
while all his friends at the symposium
envy them both the harmonies to come –

So I pour nectar out, gift of the Muses,
sweet fruit of thought, to win the blessing of
those Pytho and Olympia bestow
          with crowns and prizes.

Childers has really captured here something of the shape and movement of Pindar’s complex stanza form, as well as at least a sketch of its distinctive music. He is particularly good at shorter poems and epigrams (which constitute most of the Greek poems, but also most of the Latin verse of Catullus and Martial). Here’s Anacreontea 21:

The earth imbibes the rain,
and so do all the trees;
seas drink the streams that run;
the sun imbibes the seas;
the moon imbibes the sun.
Friend, spare the diatribe
if I also imbibe.

There are a few unrhymed poems – Childers uses a form of blank verse, for instance, for longer poems written originally in hexameters (like Virgil’s Eclogues) – but most of these translations use either full rhyme (like Anacreontea 21) or (like the extract from Olympian 7) a mixture of full and partial rhymes. In both cases the rhymes tend to be quite obtrusive: I mean that we almost always notice these effects, and the result can be heavy. At the end of Horace, Epodes 13, for instance, he has:

Drink then, and sing, and your destiny will gall less;
                for faced with ugly suffering
                        this is our sweetest solace.

Rhyming gall less and solace is bold, and to my ear it sounds ironic. The strain and weight of the rhyme is a kind of counterpoint to the message. Perhaps this is intentional, though in this case I don’t find the closing lines of the original obviously ironic. There may be a difference here between how such verse sounds to the well-trained British as opposed to American ear, but
I quite often felt that Childers’s use of rhyme added a sort of self-consciousness or implied irony to the poem that wasn’t in the original.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pieces that work best as English poems (rather than just competent verse) are often not very close translations. Childers’s translation of the beginning of Horace Odes 1.24, one of three odes by Horace addressed to Virgil, is rather lovely although not especially faithful:

What shame is there in weeping? What limit to desire
for one we loved so dearly?  Strike up the mourning strain,
Melpomene; your father gave you a voice like rain;
set, in your empty hands, the lyre.

I loved ‘a voice like rain’. It’s not what the Latin says (the Latin word is liquidam, a ‘liquid’ or ‘flowing’ voice), but classical Latin is much more restrained in its use of metaphor than English, so I found the extension of the image both justified and evocative.

Childers’s default style is the resounding couplet or quatrain: he favours strong, full rhymes and closed syntax. This is a powerful style and he’s very good at it, but it can also be rather overwhelming, and sometimes it is awkward. Here’s the opening of a very well-known bit of love elegy, Ovid Amores 1.5:

I tore the gown – and she looked good in shreds –
but still she fought to be clothed by the threads;
and while she fought, indifferent to success,
she let me triumph and take off her dress.
She stood there naked; I looked on in awe;
in all her body there was not a flaw.
What arms, what shoulders I saw and caressed!
How touchable I found each perfect breast!
          (translating Ovid, Amores 1.5.13-20)

Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century translation of this passage is better poetry, and also a better and in several instances more precisely accurate translation:

I snatched her gown, being thin, the harm was small,
Yet strived she to be covered therewithal.
And striving thus as one that would be cast,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me?

In the first line, the Latin adjective rara implies that the tunic was one or all of: skimpy, or of such a fine fabric as to be almost transparent, or very expensive. The point of the line is that her dress was so minimal (or transparent) in the first place, that ripping it (either off, or apart, the Latin word deripui could mean either) made little difference. Marlowe does not capture all the possible implications of rara, but his translation (‘being thin, the harm was small’) is considerably closer than Childers’s.

There’s a similar case in Childers’s translation of Callimachus’ Heracleitus epigram (no. 34 in this anthology), really the only part of Callimachus that has had an English ‘afterlife’ of its own:

When I heard, Heraclitus, you were dead,
I thought of all the suns we’d talked to bed
those nights, and the tears came. Dear guest,
    I know
that you were ashes long and long ago,
and yet your nightingales are singing still:
Death kills all things, but them he cannot kill.

In this case Childers’s version feels almost like a pastiche of the once (and perhaps still) very well-known translation of this poem by William Johnson Cory, mentioned in the note:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I 
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

Both the Childers and Cory versions are moving, but they are very similar and share similar shortcomings as translations: though Childers adds one enjambment compared to Cory, for instance, neither reflect the delicacy and refinement of Callimachus’ repeated use of them. (Ironically, both Childers and Cory sound rather old-fashioned in style compared to the original.) Childers’s poem is overall less memorable and less successful than Cory’s, which is the only bit of Callimachus an English reader might plausibly be familiar with. Why not just print Cory’s poem itself?

To have put such a vast range of Greek and Latin poets into readable English verse is a remarkable achievement, and I suspect that the great critical and expository strengths of the book arise in large part from the huge effort of this translation. Childers really knows these texts – much better in many cases, I’m sure, than most professional classicists – because he has translated each one of them. The translations themselves are a mighty feat, but it would be dishonest not to admit that they often feel like a feat, too: we sense the effort, sometimes the strain in them, and their music and movement can be clunky. As a reader, I felt that a judicious selection of existing translations, combined with a smaller number of his own and perhaps a handful of commissions might have made for an even better book.