Stone-Garland: Six Poets from the Greek Lyric Tradition

Sixth-century BCE Greek lyric poets Alcman, Theognis, Simonides, Anacreon/Anacreonata, Archilochus, and Callimachus are beautifully translated by Beachy-Quick (Arrows) in this memorable and edifying collection, which presents excavated fragments meant to be sung or recited to music. In a note on translation, Beachy-Quick remarks: “I imagine this book as a country graveyard overgrown by wildflowers and long grasses no mower could think to cull back... filled with broken stones, some legible and some not.” Each poet’s section begins with a biography, and, in the tradition of the Palatine Anthology, ends with a tribute by another poet. In a poem in which Simonides depicts Danae and her infant Perseus inside a sea-tossed trunk, Beachy-Quick uses hyphens to convey the dense poetry of the original: “But you sleep, your/ suckling heart slumbers/ on somber planks bronze-bolted/ in this no-star-shining night.” The style takes some getting used to, but by removing extraneous descriptors, he gets to the heart of things, as in his version of Archilochus’s famed aphorism: “Many tricks the fox knows,/ the hedgehog one,/but that one is great.” This skillfully achieved collection is a necessary contribution to ancient translation. (Sept.)